Wanted to work for your desired sports brand? Wake up. They are hiring.

How do you feel when you visit a store and find out that their salesman is an expert and knows all about the product he was selling? Feels great right? Now get ready for many such experiences as leading sports brands – Nike, Puma, Adidas and Reebok—are planning to hire athletes as sales executives.

The information was revealed in a recent Economic Times report, which mentions that the trend is prevailing in Indian market and firms are planning to give it a boost. Reason why sports brands are following this trend is because they feel athletes would be more capable in identifying customer needs and explaining functionality of different products after thriving on basic and multi-purpose shoes for years.

Puma’s retail director for India, Jerome Rouch says, "We even give badges to our athlete sales staff which says 'I am a 10k runner, are you?'." As per Rouch, in India, half of the sales employees are athletes in Puma stores- from college to state level players.

The marketers in the sports category believe that only sales-focused team is not enough to push the business as high performance products and understanding of them has increased. And experts are looked-for for better trade.

"This heightened awareness has made it imperative for us to scale up the levels of knowledge of the sales staff in Adidas and Reebok stores," said Dhruv Bogra, senior director of retail at Adidas Group India.

The report also mentioned that Adidas and Reebok collectively has hired over 200 runners as footwear specialists and are planning to increase the count to 500 by next year. It also says that six months ago, after they changed their hiring process, a hike of 20% was observed in sales.

Sanjay Gangopadhyay, managing director and general manager at Nike India, said, "This is a global trend that is now picking up in India and we are trying to change the state of the market."

The companies have also started visiting colleges and gyms to find-out skilled individuals. Not just this, but they are also organizing special programs like Zumba dance fitness program, marathon and much more such events to find out the right talent for the job.

Image source