A security systems business had a new sales director in post and a plan he couldn't get moving.

They'd put real money into cloud-based technology and the product was good. The trouble was that not enough of the right people knew what it could do for them.

That's a selling problem, and it needed a seller.

They'd been trying to hire one for two months by the time they rang us, and what they kept getting were people who could talk about the technology but couldn't win business with it.

Which is an easy trap on a technical product.

The candidates who understand it best are often the ones who've spent their careers supporting it rather than selling it, and they interview well because they know the answers to all the product questions.

The bit nobody had said out loud

We looked at the role and the first thing that stood out had nothing to do with the person spec. It was the money.

Not mean, exactly.

In a lot of the country it would have been perfectly reasonable.

But for that particular patch it sat below what a decent salesperson there would move for, and that gap was quietly doing all the damage.

You can run a role like that for six months and the people you want never apply, because they never get as far as reading it properly.

So we said so.

The client moved the number up a bit, which helped, though not enough on its own to close the gap.

Which meant selling the job, not the salary

That left two options. Go back and tell them the budget was unrealistic, or find the other reasons somebody would want this job.

Salespeople don't only move for money.

They move for a product they can get behind, a market with room in it, and the chance to be early in something that's about to grow.

This job had all three, and none of it was in the advert.

So we wrote it all down. What the technology actually did, where the division was heading, what getting in at the start of it was worth over a few years.

Then we sent that, not just an advert, to everyone in the area with the right background.

What came back

Three candidates, and all three were good.

The client saw all of them and hired two, because the standard was high enough that stopping at one felt like leaving something behind.

That was never the plan when we started. It's what happens when the people applying actually want the job rather than merely qualifying for it.

Start to finish it took about a month. Both of them started in January. Both are still there and both are doing well, which matters a great deal more than how quickly they arrived.

Why a specialist mattered

Two things a generalist would have walked straight past.

The first is knowing what sales pay actually looks like in a given area rather than nationally.

We'd recruited salespeople in that part of the country before and knew the going rate, which is why the problem showed up in week one instead of month three.

A national salary survey would have said the figure was fine.

The second is knowing what else moves a salesperson. If money is the only lever you understand, an under-market salary is a dead end and all you can do is go back and ask the client for more. Understand the rest of it and you've got something to work with, which is the difference between a role that fills and a role that gets re-advertised.

If you've got a sales role that isn't attracting the right people, it's worth checking the money against the area before you rewrite the advert again.

Not sure whether yours stacks up? Have a word with us and we'll give you an honest read.