3 Metrics To Measure Sales Hiring Success
Do you know how to measure sales hiring success? Most sales teams do not take the time to measure how good they are at hiring sales reps. With no way to measure it, it’s impossible to optimize it for better results.
Below are 3 sales hiring metrics that you can use to see how successful your sales hiring process is at hiring quality sales reps, hiring top performers and avoiding hiring misses.
Tracking these metrics can go a long way in helping you understand how good your hiring process is and where it makes sense to make improvements.
1. Quality of Hire Rate
The first sales hiring metric you should track to measure your sales hiring success is the Quality of Hire rate. The point of this metric is to determine what % of the hires you make you would consider successful vs unsuccessful.
How you measure Quality of Hire rate depends heavily on what sales KPI matters most to you.
Some of our clients use quota attainment % in the first year and create a cutoff based on how much quota a sales rep hits. Others use a combination of revenue and quota attainment. Additionally, you can integrate if a sales reps turns over before 6 months as part of this calculation as well.
Ideally, you want your Quality of Hire rate for sales reps to correlate with revenue per/sales rep as much as possible.
2. High Performer Rate
The second sales hiring metric you should track is High Performer Rate. The point of this metric is to differentiate between what % of your sales team consists of high performers. Think of this metrics as determining what sales reps are MVPs vs. the ones that are just doing well.
The benefit of tracking this metric is it gives you a way to determine how effective your hiring process is at getting the best fits. On average, sales rep high performers produce 3x more revenue than good performers, so the more you can optimize your hiring process to generate those outcomes, the better.
We recommend that you calculate this metric by using either quota attainment % or amount of revenue generated to calculate this metric (i.e. any sales rep above 200% of quota). You should set the bar much higher than what you use to calculate your Quality of Hire rate.
High Performer Rate helps you understand how well your hiring process is at finding not just great sales reps, but sales reps who perform at the highest level.
3. Hiring Miss Rate
The last sales hiring metric you need to track is your Hiring Miss Rate.
This metric acts as the inverse of the high performer rate. Instead of focusing on high performers, it tells you what % of the hires you make that end up underperforming.
We recommend that you calculate your Hiring Miss Rate by understanding what % of sales reps turned over within 6 months or missed quota by a large in the past year. Most of our clients use 50% of quota within their first year as the cutoff, but this can depend heavily on your organization.
The benefit of this metric is it measures the health of your hiring success to see how well your process is at avoiding big hiring mistakes. On average, hiring misses product 9 times less revenue than a high performer.
Once you know your hiring miss rate, you can then see how much hiring misses impact your sales teams revenue.