In today’s Twitter brained world, people need a good kick in the head. If not, they don’t pay you the slightest bit of attention.

If you’re hiring for salespeople you’ve got a triple challenge:

1. Great salespeople are rare. Mediocrity abounds in sales departments — you need to attract the best talent.
2. Help Wanted for Sales is the most popular job posting out there.
3. Salespeople are likely to have ADHD. (It might have come from being in sales or from birth, but in my experience it’s a fact.)

“The Headline is the Ad for the Ad.”

The great Jay Abraham taught me “The Headline is the Ad for the Ad.” Great copywriters spend 75% of their time writing the headline. After writing a great headline the ad writes itself.

Worry not, though. The greatest headlines have already been written. Here are some great resources for great headlines you can rewrite to suit your Help Wanted Ad:

• 106 All Time Great Advertising Headlines
• 100 Headlines From Victor Schwab

And after you’re done “adapting” your version, go here:Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer. Plug in your ad to see if it’s powerful and emotional.

Doug Wick of Positioning Systems tells me that more and more of his clients are shifting to add a telemarketing effort to their sales teams.

Implementing a telemarketing program today is a lot easier from a technological standpoint. However technology doesn’t fix the problem that most companies are having implementing a successful telephone sales program.

When I first started in sales I was prejudiced against telephone sales.

I was a successful outside salesperson, had a college degree, dressing well, driving a nice car and making serious money in sales. My mental picture of a telephone salesperson was a part time housewife in a house dress calling me to subscribe to the local newspaper while I was eating dinner.

Then, one day, when I was at the local Wheat First Security office checking on my stocks, it hit me: Gordon Granger IV, my broker, was a telephone salesperson. He had a college degree, dressed well, drove a nice car and was making serious money.

Point #1: Telephone salespeople and outside salespeople are very similar.

Both inside and outside salespeople demand comparable incomes – that is if you want to hire a Gordon Granger not some housewife in a house dress.

Appearance is mostly irrelevant.  Telephone salespeople can potentially be more casually dressed, but it’s not a particularly useful criteria.

Values are also very similar between both types of salespeople. Top salespeople whether outside or telephone need to be High Practical’s. When you look at the ValuesMatrix™ that’s high Money or Power.

I’ll devote another post to the differences and similarities between the two types of salespeople because it requires a more complete explanation. For now, the short answer is most telephone salespeople are very much like outside salespeople. However, super cream-of-the-crop telephone salespeople are different in one key personality characteristic.  In an upcoming blog post I’ll spell this out more clearly.

Next post we’ll talk about the nuances that can really give you an advantage and save you time in turnover.

To our Jewish friends, here’s the famous Adam Sandler Hanukah song: