Our clients in industrial distribution tell us it’s difficult to hire the right people for the sales openings they have.
They find it’s typically easy to find a candidate who has the technical knowledge required to understand the products. But it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack to find a candidate with the technical knowledge and traits required to sell successfully in the highly competitive industrial environment.
To stay ahead of the competition and replace baby boomers nearing retirement, industrial sales leaders must embrace the shifts in the sales landscape and develop a strategic process for finding and keeping qualified sales talent. This means hiring technical experts who have the potential to become trusted advisors.
Key Takeaways
- Hire for the right selling profile. Match candidates to your growth strategy (hunter, farmer, or pioneer)—not just technical know-how.
- Assess candidates rigorously. Use validated assessments to identify sales skills and reduce hiring risk.
- Build your employer brand. Promote real growth opportunities to attract ambitious talent.
What Does “Selling Value” Mean?
“Selling value” means positioning what you’re selling based on the outcomes, benefits, and problems it solves for the customer rather than competing primarily on price or listing product features and specs.
For industrial sales specifically:
- It’s not about being the cheapest option. A salesperson selling value can justify a higher price by showing the customer what they gain (efficiency, reliability, reduced downtime, better ROI) rather than discounting to win the deal.
- It’s not about reciting technical specs. Someone with deep product knowledge might know every feature of an industrial part or system, but selling value means translating those features into what they actually mean for the customer’s business or bottom line.
- It’s consultative. Value-based selling usually involves understanding the customer’s specific challenges, asking the right questions, and tailoring the pitch to their situation as opposed to a one-size-fits-all product pitch.
Plenty of industrial candidates have the technical knowledge to explain a product, but far fewer have the sales acumen to connect that product to a customer’s real needs and defend its worth against a cheaper competitor.
How to Hire Sales Candidates With the Best Fit
Times have changed, and the experience and skills reps need to be successful in industrial sales have changed as well.
Relationships and product knowledge are no longer enough. Your reps need to have consultative sales skills that help them uncover customer needs and build long-term relationships.
Follow these four tips to find salespeople who can complement their technical knowledge with the sales skills and acumen needed to sell value, not just product features or a low price.
1. Decide What Type of Rep You Need to Reach Your Goals
Your hiring depends on your sales goals and company’s objectives. You’ve got to hire the right sales talent to achieve your growth strategy. Does your company want to acquire new logos? Expand current accounts? Do you need people who are proactive or reactive? Farmers, hunters, or a mix?
Take your goals into consideration and decide which selling style you need to take you into the future. Use this ideal sales hiring profile to build a position benchmark for the type of candidate you’re looking for.
2. Use Assessments to Find the Right People
Creating job descriptions, posting ads, conducting interviews, and onboarding take a lot of energy and resources. Most importantly, it takes away from valuable productivity time.
While there’s no way around that, you can use sales hiring assessments to dramatically reduce the risk of hiring the wrong person and to streamline the process so it’s one less headache for you.
Assessing sales candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, and natural selling styles reveals whether they are the hunters needed to break into new markets or the farmers required to grow existing accounts.
3. Build Your Employer Brand
A career in industrial sales can be both rewarding and lucrative, but it may not come off as attractive to the candidates you want. To attract intelligent and ambitious talent, you need to actively build your employer brand and make the benefits of working in industrial sales known to candidates.
The hard truth is that employer branding isn’t a quick fix. If you want your company to be perceived a certain way, you must live up to the claims you make. Highlight growth and advancement opportunities and make sure your selection process correctly matches candidates to the position requirements. If you do, your people will find fulfillment doing a job they’re truly wired for—turning them into evangelists for your brand.
4. Recruit Graduates From Sales Programs
More than 70 colleges and universities now offer programs to train students in sales skills. The graduates of these programs already have a base knowledge of how to sell value and handle objections.
These graduates will come into an industrial distribution company a step ahead of new salespeople who have only technical or engineering knowledge. Their knowledge of the fundamentals will help them pick up your sales process with ease and contribute to results much faster.
Hiring Great Industrial Salespeople
Finding industrial salespeople who can sell value instead of just price isn’t about luck, it’s about strategy.
By clarifying the selling profile your business actually needs, investing in your employer brand, tapping into talent pools already trained to sell value, and backing your hiring decisions with validated assessments, you’ll build a sales team equipped to compete in today’s industrial landscape.
The result: fewer costly mis-hires, faster ramp-up time, and a sales force that can hold its own on value, not just price.
Find out how the Brooks Talent Index® can help you hire smarter and maximize sales team performance.
FAQ: Industrial Sales Hiring
Q: Why is it so hard to find good industrial salespeople?
A: Most candidates in this space have either strong technical/product knowledge or strong sales skills, rarely both. Industrial sales also competes with other industries for talent, and the field doesn’t always have the “sexy” reputation needed to attract ambitious young candidates, making the pool of qualified applicants smaller than in other sales sectors.
Q: Should I prioritize technical expertise or sales skills when hiring?
A: Sales skills should typically take priority, since technical knowledge can be trained on the job more easily than traits like consultative selling, objection handling, and value-based selling. The best approach is to define a hiring profile that reflects the selling personality your growth strategy requires, then use that as your primary filter.
Q: How can hiring assessments improve industrial sales hiring outcomes?
A: Hiring assessments help identify whether a candidate has the innate traits and skills to sell successfully, reducing reliance on gut instinct alone. Using them consistently as part of your hiring process lowers the risk of a costly mis-hire and speeds up decision-making, freeing up time otherwise spent on lengthy interviews and onboarding for the wrong person.
