There’s a common error that brokers make when it comes to taking on staff to grow their business. Do you know what it is?
There’s a common error that brokers make when it comes to taking on staff to grow their business.
As AMP Bank head of sales and marketing Glenn Gibson explains, when it comes to team building a good starting point is to think about your own strengths – and then recruit staff whose own abilities complement them. The trap that brokers can sometimes fall into is thinking that growing their business is all about sales – and therefore making another salesperson their first new hire.
However, if you’re already selling well by yourself, he suggests that an administrator might be a better addition to your team.
“If you’re fantastic at sales, if you’re fantastic at relationships, you should hire an operations admin person that, in essence, runs your operations backend. So that gives you the opportunity to bring more business in yourself,” he says, adding that brokers would do well to build a team around them that are similar in attitude, but different in skillset.
On the attitude front, he believes that it’s vital to bring people in who fit in to the company culture. For him, making that call often comes down to the “gut feeling” he gets when interviewing a candidate.
“I do a lot of my recruitment two ways: I will do phone interviews as well as face-to-face interviews. Because, especially in the broker world, a lot of the times that you’re talking to a customer are actually over the phone.”
What this two-step process allows you to do, he explains, is get a feel for how the candidate presents themselves both in person and on the phone – and whether that gels with your company ideals and culture.
“Sometimes face-to-face you can be swayed by somebody’s body language, and over the phone it’s just raw personality that you’re getting. So I think a combination of that kind of technique is very useful,” he says.
On the subject of experience versus personality, Gibson explains that one of his favourite sayings is that “you can’t train personality but you can train experience”.
He adds that sometimes you simply need someone with the right experience to slot into a role but, on the whole, he’s an advocate of looking for skills and enthusiasm before experience.
“One of my best staff members in the mortgage business actually came from fishing trawlers, but just had that spark and just had the hunger to want to learn and to grow. So I will always go with the spark before experience if I can afford to do that,” he explains.
For more advice from Gibson and numerous other industry experts, pick up a copy of MPA's Business Strategy supplement – on desks in late June.
As AMP Bank head of sales and marketing Glenn Gibson explains, when it comes to team building a good starting point is to think about your own strengths – and then recruit staff whose own abilities complement them. The trap that brokers can sometimes fall into is thinking that growing their business is all about sales – and therefore making another salesperson their first new hire.
However, if you’re already selling well by yourself, he suggests that an administrator might be a better addition to your team.
“If you’re fantastic at sales, if you’re fantastic at relationships, you should hire an operations admin person that, in essence, runs your operations backend. So that gives you the opportunity to bring more business in yourself,” he says, adding that brokers would do well to build a team around them that are similar in attitude, but different in skillset.
On the attitude front, he believes that it’s vital to bring people in who fit in to the company culture. For him, making that call often comes down to the “gut feeling” he gets when interviewing a candidate.
“I do a lot of my recruitment two ways: I will do phone interviews as well as face-to-face interviews. Because, especially in the broker world, a lot of the times that you’re talking to a customer are actually over the phone.”
What this two-step process allows you to do, he explains, is get a feel for how the candidate presents themselves both in person and on the phone – and whether that gels with your company ideals and culture.
“Sometimes face-to-face you can be swayed by somebody’s body language, and over the phone it’s just raw personality that you’re getting. So I think a combination of that kind of technique is very useful,” he says.
On the subject of experience versus personality, Gibson explains that one of his favourite sayings is that “you can’t train personality but you can train experience”.
He adds that sometimes you simply need someone with the right experience to slot into a role but, on the whole, he’s an advocate of looking for skills and enthusiasm before experience.
“One of my best staff members in the mortgage business actually came from fishing trawlers, but just had that spark and just had the hunger to want to learn and to grow. So I will always go with the spark before experience if I can afford to do that,” he explains.
For more advice from Gibson and numerous other industry experts, pick up a copy of MPA's Business Strategy supplement – on desks in late June.
