Why use graduates to build a sales team? Hiring sales graduates 🎓

One of the great benefits of hiring sales graduates and AE teams is that their professional career is just starting. You have the opportunity to help shape the way graduates think about aspects of sales and business, which can be highly effective for the revenue of the business, as well as rewarding on a personal level.

Many companies have sales team training ideas that will differ to yours, so when hiring non-graduates who have held previous sales positions, you may have to invest time changing habits and teaching new sales team expectations.

Graduates are, professionally, often blank canvases. They can be taught from your preferred sales team training and unique SDR process from the get-go, saving you time and resources in the long term.

We’ve spent 3 years hiring sales teams for Australian businesses, so we know what makes a great sales team and how to quickly find the perfect sales candidates for you.

Whether you’re recruiting Account Managers, hiring Sales Agents or hiring Business Development Managers, get in touch and find out more about our expert sales recruitment services.

Having a drive to succeed is a highly important quality for any salesperson to possess. With many graduates having just finished their degrees, now looking to make their mark in an industry and prove themselves to an employer, they have drive in abundance.

When hiring for your SDR team, you need candidates who genuinely want the business to succeed and will be motivated to hit sales team kpis. One of the rewarding qualities of graduates is that many want to prove themselves from the start and show that they were the right candidate to hire.

Graduates have worked extremely hard for three + years, committing themselves to a field of study, and developing their drive and willingness to do well.

This competitive and determined nature can be easily translated into wider sales team motivation – invaluable to the growth of your company.

If you’re looking to hire graduates at your company, make sure to check out our video for some of the top points you should consider when hiring a graduate:

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Having spent years studying at university, graduates entering the world of work are primed and ready to learn new topics and ways of thinking.

Many graduates often crave and miss the learning aspects of university and are keen to spend time building their knowledge of a new industry and role.

In a recent survey we conducted on graduates, learning and development ranked first on their list of ‘what is most important in a job’, scoring higher than salary, benefits/perks, and company culture.

What’s more, while some of your current employers may deem some tasks beneath them, one of the many advantages of hiring graduates to build your SDR team is that they are willing to work on any task, even the slightly unglamorous ones as they are keen to gain new experiences and learn from any opportunity.

So, if you’re looking to hire candidates who will contribute to sales team development, graduates are a great option. In this way, your sales team growth strategy should be focused on building a sales team culture that prioritises professional progression and up-skilling.

To make sure you build the right team, make sure you interview strategy is fine-tuned. Read our tips on how to interview someone for a job.

With graduates raring and ready to learn and take on responsibility from day one, they can quickly become a valuable asset to your sales team. With a strategic onboarding plan and clear sales team exercises and training, you can guide graduates towards becoming senior sales team members within the company.

Having hired graduates from entry level sales development representative roles, they will have acquired great knowledge of the company and the SDR process, and ultimately know how to meet and succeed sales targets – making them great candidates for managerial roles.

If you provide decent sales team incentives, you have the potential to keep a graduate hire for the duration of their career and solidify them as a senior figure in your SDR team. This high return on investment makes graduates a great fit for startups that are building a sales team from the ground up.

If you’re looking at growing a sales team for your startup, check out our startup hiring services.

While it’s important to pay graduate sales roles fair entry-level salaries, another great advantage of hiring graduates is that they won’t be expecting a high starting salary.

For many graduates, entry level and junior sales positions will be their first annual salary, so their salary views are likely to be realistic.

What’s more, graduates value other aspects of a role such as career development and training just as much as they do salary. Hiring graduates on a lower starting salary means you can invest more money into training opportunities and onboarding for graduates, adding value to your business in the future and helping to create a high return of investment.

If you’re worried that hiring fresh graduates will impact sales team effectiveness, fear not! Many of the study skills graduates learn at university are transferable to junior sales positions. Throughout their degree, students will most likely have been tasked with giving presentations, writing coherent and compelling arguments, collaborating on group projects and working to deadlines.

These tasks will have developed their communication, persuasion and deadline management skills – all crucial skills to succeed in sales.

Many graduates also choose to get involved with a number of extra-curricular activities whilst at university, from being a committee member of a society to playing for a sport’s team and getting involved with charity work.

These activities will also have developed a range of valuable skills for future employment, as well as see graduates keen to get involved and run new projects within a company such as running socials and charity events, all helping to create a great company culture.

Graduate-heavy sales teams can still be high performance sales teams.

Graduates are great at adapting and dealing with difficult situations, from university strikes to the class of COVID-19 having to study for their degrees online, proving that they can work with less-than-ideal work environments and are highly resilient.

This resilience makes graduates a great fit if you’re looking to build a sales team, as they will take difficult situations in their stride and find solutions to work around challenging situations.

Make sure you’re hiring the right graduate that can adjust to the pace and attitude of your team.