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

I hate cancellations, yet my experience is that clients who cancel have never worked the system. They always cut corners on the system.

So, first let’s review the System so there’s no mistaking how you get top 9 sales performers for every 10 hires:

1. Design your ad based on the templates in the Ad Writing Module
2. Place your ad based on the Ad Placement Module (also included here is Social Media marketing and Key Community Leader Notification of your opening.)
3. Screen all applicants using the ValuesMatrix
4. For all applicants who “pass” in Step 3 run a StylesMatrix on them
5. Interview using the AHS 4-Part Interview Module at least three applicants who passed in Step 4 and hire the applicant who scored the best in the four separate interviews. Remember to check references here.

Another way of breaking down the applicant processing steps is:

1. For every position you are hiring for get 20 Applicants to take the ValuesMatrix
2. Statistically, 45% will pass. Let’s round that to 10 who will now take the StylesMatrix
3. Statistically 3 applicants will pass the StylesMatrix. They each get 4 separate interviews using the script contained in the AHS 4-Part Interview Module. You grade the quality of their answers. The applicant who scores the best is your choice.

It is disarmingly simple, yet clients who follow the system swear by it and clients who edit it to suit themselves say it doesn’t work.

The national statistics, across industries, say sales managers are hiring 1 top performer for every 4 hires. A top performer is a salesperson who hits high goal year after year, not some flash in the pan hire who shines for a year or less.

I got an email from a client who said the system didn’t work. “We hired 6 out of 6 duds following the system to the Tee. I just hired 2 out of 2 stars without the system”

I looked at her statistics. She ran a total of 28 ValuesMatrix and 12 StylesMatrix in one year. In other words she profiled enough applicants to make 1 good hire. Any wonder why she hired 6 out of 6 duds?

Here’s my public bet. $100 says a year from now neither of those two stars in hitting high goals. I hate to be egoistic here, but I have reviewed more that 38,000 sales applicants in the past 4 years. I simply have more data to evaluate.

Statistically, most sales managers have reviewed no more than 200 applicants in their entire career. The amount of data they have to work with is therefore limited. Too, most sales managers are too busy selling and managing to really become expert at hiring. ]

Our data tells us we have a system that dramatically increases sales hiring success rates to insanely high levels.

Those wondering how to hire employees and have taken any type of sales training has heard the acronym “ABC.” It means Always Be Closing.

So now you’ve “graduated” to Sales Manager. Your job description in a nutshell is “To recruit, train and motivate the sales department.”

The first part of your job description is to recruit. I would like to suggest, that just like in sales we need to always be closing (looking for how to help convert the prospect into a client), in Sales Management. we ought to always be looking for top sales talent for our teams. In other words Always Be Recruiting

“Even when you have a full staff always be recruiting for salespeople”

The time to start looking for your next salesperson is not when you’re down one or two salespeople. In fact, there couldn’t be a worse time to start looking.

Desperation when hiring a salesperson causes Sales Managers to say and do things in a shortsighted way. Worse, in most cases it will prevent you from building a great sales team.

Instead, the great Sales Managers set realistic recruitment goals for their team every year.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How many new sales positions will I add?
• How many applicants will I need to reach my goal? Where will I get these applicants?
• How can I put this on “remote control,” so I only spend time interviewing the best candidates?
• Now is the time to sit down and outline your Hiring System. Commit a plan to writing.

Always Be Recruiting means build yourself a “bench” of potential top performers. Or at the least, to have an ongoing recruitment process so that you’ve got a stack of resumes in your middle drawer ready to draw from.

The only way out of this economy is to sell your way out of it. Improve your sales team quality by Always Be Recruiting.