Sales Hiring with Gem

Sales teams are the growth engine and the lifeblood of every company, so it makes sense that sales positions are typically the #1 hiring priority for both talent acquisition leaders and their orgs’ executives. As a sales leader managing the team that most directly impacts company revenue, you know the importance of “the three Rs”—recruitment, retention, revenue—to the sales function.

Hiring well is imperative if you want to hit your goals and see your company thrive. In sales, you’re able to look at your revenue funnel, forecast targets, and learn how on-track you are to meeting those goals. At Gem, we believe you should be able to look at your hiring funnel and do exactly the same things. The costs of a sales mishire are steep: recruitment and training time, yes; but also severance costs, the lost business that new hire didn’t bring in, the team’s reduced productivity while in damage-control mode, and the opportunity cost of failing to hire a better candidate. All in all, hiring the wrong rep can cost as much as 6x that rep’s base salary. What’s more, the average annual turnover for sales teams is between 27% and 35%—and it takes, on average, 7 months for a new sales hire to become a quota-carrying member of the team. Until month 7, in other words, that new hire is losing you money. That’s all just to quantify the impact of a mishire on revenue. But you might also know from personal experience the negative impact of failing to hire quickly enough (it takes 4.5 months, on average, to replace a sales hire)—or of failing to hire at all.

Gem understands the importance of sourcing passive talent to sales. The best salespeople often aren’t actively looking for new roles. Proactive sourcing means you don’t have to wait for the right candidate to come along or settle for the best of your inbound applicants; so you’re filling roles more quickly—with the top talent that already fits your ideal profile.

Gem sits on top of LinkedIn because it’s the unparalleled database of sales talent. It automatically creates records for each prospect you want to save, serves up email addresses so you can contact them directly, and lets you one-click upload their profiles into your ATS. This automation means 4x faster sourcing. But once you’ve found your prospective candidates, there’s an enormous advantage to using email instead of InMail to reach out. That’s how Gem supports those very-top-of-funnel efforts which wholly impact your pipeline.

Why Gem + Email > InMail

• 90% of talent prefers to be contacted by email rather than InMail. This means that recruiters and sales leaders who reach out via InMail aren’t keeping candidates’ preferences (and the overall candidate experience) in mind.
• Your first message is statistically unlikely to succeed—but you can 2x response rates with follow-ups. A single email sees a 15% reply rate, while a 4-email sequence sees a 35% reply rate. Yet InMail follow-ups are manual and can’t be tracked without a spreadsheet, meaning recruiters and sales leaders who’ve taken on recruiting roles are much less likely to remember to follow up after that first attempt. Gem’s automated follow-ups, on the other hand, make you more than twice as likely to get to an initial phone screen. And because recruiters can set-it-and-forget-it, there’s no pressure for them to remember to send that second, third, or fourth email.
• You can’t track your outreach in InMail... but you can with Gem’s sequences. Gem tracks open rates, click-through rates, reply rates, interested rates, and content stats. This means sales recruiters and leaders can dig in, discover best practices, and optimize their outreach to capture the sales talent whose attention they most want to get.
• Gem + email allows you to send-on-behalf-of (SOBO), 4x-ing response rates. With Gem, you can even send on behalf of multiple teammates in the same sequence. Stages 1 and 2 might come from the recruiter, stage 3 from the Director of Sales, and stage 4 from the VP of Sales. Now you’ve got a very high-touch engagement strategy from multiple people, who might even reference a conversation they had about the prospective candidate in those messages to make it feel extra personal. Our customers have seen response rates quadruple with SOBO.

Gem automatically logs InMails, so you can take a multi-channel approach to engaging with talent and track your emails and InMails in one place.

Pipeline Analytics

Whereas Outreach Stats allows you to analyze top-of-funnel activities, Pipeline Analytics— Gem’s analytics platform that’s fully integrated with your ATS—allows you to view your full sales hiring funnel, from initial outreach to hire. Pipeline Analytics allows you to answer questions like:

• How many offers accepted did Sales Recruiter X get in Q4?
• What have our passthrough rates from phone screen to onsite for SDRs in the Austin office been since January?
• How many candidates in the Sales department have offers extended that haven’t been accepted yet?
• How many candidates will we need at each stage of the funnel in order to hire 7 AEs, based on historic conversion rates?

“Gem has unlocked the ability to forecast our talent pipeline, which is the primary driver of our revenue pipeline. Gem takes the guesswork out of hitting hiring targets.”

Patrick Blair
Executive Vice President, Global Commercial Business at YEXT

Sales leaders are accustomed to setting and tracking goals and forecasting future sales revenue based on historical business data. These are processes that are ingrained in the sales function. It only makes sense that you have the same data available to you when it comes to recruiting top sales talent.

Finally, we know that even when you’re hiring the “best right” talent, some degree of sales rep turnover is inevitable. Top performers are bound to leave your company eventually for a variety of reasons. Gem ensures that sales teams have a quality pipeline for replacing those valuable sellers. As with sales prospects, it can take many touchpoints to influence a career decision. So we’ve built talent reengagement features that allow sales recruiters to nurture candidates beyond the initial outreach sequence by searching their candidate database, mining them for candidates they’ve previously sequenced, and re-engaging with specific talent pools such as silver-medalists. Our Nurture feature allows recruiters to easily set up reengagement sequences to go out in the future as soon as an initial outreach sequence ends. This way you’re always already in touch with your next set of sales hires.

Our response rate drastically increased once our Sourcers started using Gem. The automated follow-up feature doubled our conversion rate from initial reach out to phone screen.

Mike Moriarty
Global Head of Talent Acquisition

To learn more about how Gem can help your team, contact us here.