Sales Managers: Watch This Video of a 737 Landing For a Sales Hiring Lesson

If the statistics are accurate, as a profession, sales managers hire 1 great salesperson for every 3 or 4 hires. Contrast this to commercial airline pilots who successfully land 50,000 to 70,000 planes a day.

Sales Managers: We “bat” anywhere from .250 to .300. Pretty bad. This “sales hiring failure” rate hurts:

• your reputation as a manager and leader
• sales as a profession
• your company
  • lost revenue
  • lost salary to the bad hires
  • lost reputation in your markets
  • poor morale in your sales department
• our clients miss a chance to take advantage of our company’s products and have to settle for our competitor’s inferior offering
• the poor shlub you hire
  • is wasting his or her time
  • hates their job
  • doesn’t make any real money
  • in truth should never have gone into sales

Here’s why pilots succeed:

Because they know their decision is a life or death situation. Pilots have developed a system with a series of benchmarks. They check those benchmarks off every single time.

Haven’t you suffered enough hiring salespeople the old fashion way?

Check out this amazing video

Writing Ads to Hire Sales people — Do You Make This Mistake in Writing Ads to Hire Salespeople?

When I first started hiring salespeople I didn’t pay very much attention to writing the ad for hiring salespeople. Back then I took the attitude that if they weren’t motivated enough to seek me out to heck with them.

Today I realize that was a big mistake. 

Why? Because top salespeople don’t grow on trees. Top salespeople are a rare and precious commodity – and they are essential to my success in my business.

My thinking — that top salespeople were going to figure out that I was the kind of company they should want to work — for was foolish.

As a result of this mistake, I was required to have to sift through way too many duds. But even more deadly to my effort to find those super salespeople is that they never even considered me.

Let me explain:

We all have a certain image of ourselves – ways we describe ourselves to ourselves, if you will.

What makes top salespeople different is first of all what happens inside themselves. And how they communicate to themselves about themselves is different from what the average salespersons does.

If I think of myself as a unique, special top-performer type salesperson, then the standard ad is simply not going to get me interested enough to apply.

Don’t kid yourself, most ads for salespeople are simply horrible. I joke in seminars that most ads for salespeople look like they were written by people who hate salespeople. Unfortunately, it’s not really a joke.

Check it out yourself, as a sales manager when you see someone who’s a great salesperson what do you think? Something like “Wow, he or she is really effective, they’re so in control of their communication.”

But people who are not salespeople’s reaction is, “they are such salespeople, so superficial.”

So the next time you decide it’s time to take steps to grow your sales by improving your sales team, be sure that someone who respects sales as a profession writes the ad for salespeople.

The hardest thing for me when learning something new is admitting how little I know about the new subject.

It’s my ego that gets in my way.

After all, “I am an accomplished guy”, I say to myself.

And then I start to tick off all the things I’ve accomplished to myself. “I created and then managed blah, blah blah.” (The list I recite to myself is long. I’ll spare you the list.)

Sales Hiring Failures and Learning Social Media

Recently I have become a client of Blogging and Social Media expert, Chris Garrett.

In working at the material I have had to accept that “I am going to rely on the expertise of someone else to guide me. And even though I have a lot of competencies, in this area I am a beginner.”

My experience at learning to become an “Authority Blogger”, as Chris calls his strategy, has lead me to learn something about my clients too.

Why Can’t Some Clients Learn How to Hire Better?

This question has bothered me for more than 16 years now. I mean we have great raving fans who say things like:

“Its working great. We feel like you’ve turned us on to a gold mine. We can really tell with the last few people that we’ve hired how well the System works.”

Jamie Futrell
GENERAL SALES MANAGER
Bristol Broadcasting

“We hired 11 people in our Dayton Center using the System. It is without a doubt the most productive group of new hires we’ve made. Ever.”

Jeff Sullivan
MetLife Group Auto & Home

And then there are some who simply don’t follow the System the way it was designed and get lousy hires. Then they drop out.

Yet I see it’s the same at Authority Blogger. Some clients, through studying and implementing his method of social media, have created tremendously successful online reputations. Others have tried to do it their way and have failed.

Admitting “What I Know” is Not Relevant

I realize that the hardest thing for me learning something new is admitting how little I know about the new subject.

It’s my ego that gets in my way.

But, I am making real progress and starting to see the power and possibilities of mastering this new skill. And I am doing it by relying on an experienced coach.

If you are not getting great sales hires check out the resources and articles here. Suspend your judgment and just follow the steps.

You’ll surprise yourself with your brilliance for doing it that way.

Trust the System. It works.