Why Electrical Distributors Struggle to Find Outside Sales Talent – And How to Fix It
Outside sales is the source of growth in electrical distribution, yet filling these roles has become increasingly difficult. Despite competitive pay and strong career potential, many companies are experiencing longer time-to-fill, higher turnover, and declining applicant quality.
What’s Causing the Shortage?
- Aging Workforce: Many experienced reps are retiring, and there’s not a strong pipeline of younger professionals replacing them.
- Industry Perception: Younger talent often overlooks distribution as a career path, unaware of the income potential and career growth available.
- Sales Evolution: Today’s sales environment requires technical knowledge, CRM fluency, and a consultative approach. This has raised the bar, narrowing the candidate pool.
At GRN Coastal, we are experiencing the need to help many more distributors with outside sales positions. We see firsthand that the biggest factors are retirements and moving tenured salespeople into leadership positions – this usually leaves distributors’ most important and valuable customer relationships in vulnerable positions. As a result, it has become increasingly important to start planning for these replacements earlier in the process than before.
How Distributors Can Adapt
- Recruit Outside the Industry: Look for sales professionals in construction, building materials, or industrial services who can be trained on products.
- Revamp Job Descriptions: Highlight the relationship-building aspect and income potential of the role.
- Invest in Sales Training: Create onboarding programs that teach product knowledge, sales tactics, and CRM systems.
- Offer Clear Advancement Paths: Show how reps can move into key account management, leadership, or product specialist roles.
- Partner with Recruiters: Executive search firms like GRN Coastal can identify and engage passive candidates who aren’t actively applying.
While most distributors look for an ideal “plug and play” outside salesperson that can bring in plenty of new business and relationships, the reality is with an aging workforce it becomes even more difficult to pull a strong salesperson directly from a competitor. A smaller pool of qualified, seasoned salespeople is resulting in significantly higher compensation expectations and added benefits to incentivize these individuals to even consider making any changes.
From our recent Outside Sales searches with clients, it has become more prevalent to look at strong salespeople from adjacent industries – these individuals are already familiar with running a territory, setting up new customer accounts, expanding sales in existing accounts, and tracking data with CRM tools. This alternative also typically requires less product training since we are talking about adjacent industry verticals.
An additional trend we have seen become more popular is creating hybrid Outside Salespeople. This is most successful for earlier career individuals that are ambitious to start running their own territory and looking for increased responsibilities. While it may seem difficult to let one of your team’s strong inside salespeople transition to the outside, it has proven to be very effective. This model incorporates gradually sending the inside salesperson outside to customer sites and picking up field sales skills until they are comfortable in a hybrid or full outside transition. It is much easier to internally create a great outside salesperson and backfill customer service or inside sales.
The Bottom Line Electrical distributors that modernize their approach to hiring and training will be better equipped to build high-performing sales teams in today’s tight labor market. Those who don’t will continue to struggle with talent gaps that limit growth and customer service.
If these are areas your team is struggling with – let’s talk! Our team at GRN Coastal works daily to help distributors and rep agencies build sales teams for the future.
Matt Trzesniewski
Recruiting Manager, Global Recruiters Network – Coastal
708-305-6852 Tel
www.grncoastalrecruiters.com
www.grncoastal.com
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