For nearly twenty years, I’ve been involved with hiring sales people. I had an interesting chat the other day with a well know and respected sales trainer. I was a bit surprised when he indicated that most of the sales coaches, sales trainers, and sales consultants typically focused on improving the quality and performance of an organizations existing sales team. Makes sense. What if the existing sales team has very few if any people who will ever be able to be top performers. There are certainly people who just aren’t cut out for sales on many sales teams around the world.

He really didn’t have an answer for my question. In all fairness, sales trainers or sales coaches are usually put in the position of working with the people their clients have on board. But it seems to me that it would benefit not only the sales organization to have better quality sellers but also would enhance a trainers ability to deliver good results to their clients. He’d be working with better “raw materials.” Consequently, our discussion moved to how his clients recruit sellers. And this revealed another issue for sales management.

Most sales managers do not have a systematic process to recruit good sales reps. The typical method of resume review to figure out who to call is usually a huge waste of time and results in poor results from the the new hires.

It is essential for those charged with sales recruitment for their organizations use a process consistently to get better results.