(At this time as we might be getting a blip up in the economy, I think it is critical that we review the basics. One key to being an excellent “sales hiring” sales manager is to always be recruiting.)

The Best Sales Teams Are Always Recruiting for Better Sales

I am mystified when I talk to managers who say they have a good team and are, therefore, not looking.

How can they predict what kind of turnover is going to come their way? And why do they deliberately recruit under pressure?

The easiest and most effective way to build a great team is to “always be recruiting.” Let the world know that your sales department can always make room for a salesperson with great potential.

Then, as applicants come in, run the tests and only talk to the great ones.

It is so simple and always works.

Switch Your Focus to Better Sales Hiring

I was on Dave Kahle’s site the other day reading all the wonderful things he can do for your sales team. Let Dave train your salesmen and they’re going to be able to sell ice to Eskimos.

I really don’t mean to pick on Dave. I don’t even know the guy, but having spent years managing sales teams, I think there is one thing missing in Dave’s site. He fails to point out that only 25% of your sales team will have any permanent benefit from sales training, even the exalted quality of his training.

It took me a long time to realize this. Most Sales Managers, though, never come to this awareness.

I have been a Sales Manager for a long time. I remember when we didn’t use email. I remember when getting appointments came from mailing letters and making cold telephone calls.

Like every Sales Manager, I always budgeted sales training, every year. It was a given. Everyone knew you needed sales training. However, few of us kept good enough records to track what results we got from it.

An Eye-Opener: Realizing How We Recruit Salespeople is More Important

Then in 1992 it all changed for me.  I started keeping track of results in a spreadsheet program. All of a sudden I began to realize that my team’s uneven performance was really due to the unevenness of my team’s quality.

However when I went out to LA for a week long marketing seminar it all came together for me. One of the presenters, Jim Cecil, talked about using sales assessment profiles. He showed how by “modeling” we can clone top performers’ styles and values. In other words we can know before hiring a salesperson whether they are likely to turn into top performers.

When I returned to the East Coast I was a man possessed. I developed an ongoing system to advertise for salesmen Using words developed from the profiles we wrote ads that focused in on top sales performers. Only those applicants who profiled right were interviewed.

The rest is history. We ended up creating a 200 person sales team with outstanding results on a per team member basis.

The key was in setting up a sales hiringt system. Hire better and the rest is easy!

For a free test worth $75 complete the form here. Sales Managers or CEO’s only. Thanks

How to Hire Sales People Under Pressure

(or How to Hire a Dud Salesperson)

One of the most common mistakes made in hiring salespeople is hiring under pressure.

I wish I could give you some tricks to improve the odds of hiring successfully under pressure. The fact is that, short of using lucky fairy dust, the odds of making a successful sales hire under pressure is less than 1 in 5.

  To understand why hiring top sales performers takes time, compare hiring under pressure to trying to make quota on the last day of the month.

There you are on the last day of the month, one big sale away from making goal and collecting your bonus. But anyone with an ounce of experience in sales knows the odds of succeeding are not good. Yes, it’s possible. (And we sales types are optimistic by nature.) But the odds are low of making quota on the last day of the month.

“Having studied the problem for years, I think it comes down to a question of too much pressure.”

Let’s try to imagine the problem with making the big sale on the last day of the month. First of all, you don’t have enough time to really prospect for the most likely buyers. And second, you will unconsciously be applying too much sales pressure. Pressure doesn’t work, but your bonus is at stake so you apply a bit too much urgency.

Same thing with trying to hire under pressure. Our research shows hiring a top performer means you need to filter through 25 applicants. Filtering means more than “I’m only talking to them if they have previous sales experience or not.”

From those 25 applicants, you then need to get down to 3 who you will interview intensively. And by interviewing intensively I mean conducting at least 3 – and preferably 4, well-planned interviews with each of those applicants.

Our research shows that it takes four interviews to really get to know whether the applicant really did all the things they claimed they did.

Hiring well is one the most profitable activities a sales manager does. Our research also shows, unfortunately it is the thing that tends to get left until last. Hence the average sales manager’s rather unspectacular record as a sales hirer.