The slow but sure reopening of the economy is not only a relief, but is also an opportunity. You must reposition your business to meet customer’s needs in the business “new normal.” In order to capitalize on the opportunity, you must have a sales organization populated with real sales studs who can adapt to a very new sales reality. The talent pool of great sellers looking for their next opportunity has never been higher. Consequently, it’s a good time to make sure your sales hiring strategy includes some key elements used by the best sales recruiters.

1. First, you must have a solid compensation strategy to attract and keep top sales talent on your team. Real sellers want to know that they will be well paid for performance. They’ll have a goal to be at the top of your sales stack quickly. Any good outside sales recruiter should be ask about and guide you on compensation strategy before any recruitment ads are placed.
2. You need to have a recruitment ad that will attract the right type of person. Real sellers want to know specifically what the position you have will offer in income potential. Use specifics on current top earners’ income.
3. Use profiling to “check under the hood” of your applicants. There are personality profiles which are both scientifically measurable and associated with top sales performers. Resumes and previous sales experience are not going to reveal the truth about a candidate. Therefore, combining profiling with the next essential step become critical.
4. Finally, you must have a good interview strategy. It will put your in a position of being able to make decisions based on a process. Never, ever hire by “gut feel.” It is the most common error made in the sales recruitment process.

Making sure you’ve got these 4 essentials wrapped up before you start sales recruiting will increase your success rate.

Video Rant #7 You Are Doing Step #1 of Sales Hiring Absolutely WRONG!

If you’re over 45 and you started in sales management, you’ve hired salespeople. What are your initial thoughts when somebody you hired walks in and tells you they’re leaving?

First thought, for many, is to flash back to the good old days where we’d put sales help wanted ads in the local newspaper. Or maybe you’re a multinational global company. So you advertise in the Help Wanteds in the New York Sunday Times’ Business section. And you know for SURE that for most advertising options, the number of salesperson leads you’ll get is limited.

So, the Sunday New York Times business section help wanteds. That’s where I first applied for a job. Back then, you applied everywhere you could. You typed a cover letter, mailed your resume to everybody.

I think that’s the model that managers still have in mind when they look to hire a salesperson. You KNOW you have limited leads. Maybe if you’re super clever, you can buy access to resumes…

Your plan is to spend YOUR precious time with the few leads you get to be sure you pick the right one. And is EXACTLY the wrong direction.

Very intelligent people don’t get our Advanced Hiring System. You know why? Because they’re thinking, “What do I need that for? I’ll just interview them.”

Most sales managers, especially older ones, just don’t really understand why or how publicizing your job opening has changed so radically. That ad you place these days has WAY more competition from a gazillion other companies trying to find people who can really sell, all because of that interwebby thing. The days of one ad in the New York Times Business section are gone forever.

Remember, selling is a unique set of mental strategies that 85% of the population cannot do AT ALL. And only 3% of the population do it really well. Whether you sell, cellphones, cable, water treatment, insurance, whatever – it doesn’t matter. You’re competing for a VERY limited pool of special applicants. If you don’t make your ad BETTER than everybody else’s ads, then you’ll just get a bunch of second-stringers to apply. And then you’ll wonder why your sales team is so mediocre.

Anybody who’s ever had a successful business, anybody who’s ever had great salespeople working with them KNOWS it’s those GREAT salespeople who really move the needle. Most of your sales team just stays in their comfort zone. They get mediocre results, and they accept it. GREAT salespeople look at selling like a Rubik’s Cube. They try every approach necessary, until they finally solve it.

But most of the people YOU hire never really try to figure out where the prospects are that could really benefit from your product or service. They don’t focus on finding GREAT prospects that nobody is really calling on. ONLY the 3-percenters do THAT. And those guys may not even be in sales right now. But THOSE are the guys who will boom your business.

They say there are 600 million people on Facebook at this moment. If that’s right, then 3% of 600 million is 18 million people. That’s 18 million people who would pass our testing, with the likelihood of becoming your #1 salesperson. Just one or two of those guys would TOTALLY turn your business around. So how do you get THOSE PEOPLE to pay attention to your offer?

It all comes down to … how do you articulate in your ad that THIS is the real deal? How do you describe your opportunity in the most favorable light? MOST ads, it’s like they try to limit the number of applicants, so they don’t have to process so many. They look at LinkedIn profiles or résumés to figure out who to invest their recruitment time with. They don’t want too many applicants, because THAT would be a real pain in the butt.

100% WRONG STRATEGY!!! You need a SYSTEM to screen applicants on the FRONT end, so you don’t have to do it manually. And #1 in your system is to write an ad that sells YOUR opportunity to the personality style YOU want to hire.

We’ve put together our Big Book of Job Ads. It’s dozens and dozens of actual ads our clients have used to find and hire super salespeople. What a copy? Give me a call. I’m Alan Fendrich.

Video Rant #8

We had a new client who was a one-man show. He had no salespeople and no revenue. We helped him advertise effectively, and he got some good sales applicants who all passed our testing. The client rejected every last one of them. I asked why? He said he only hired people with previous sales experience.

That is the basic criteria most sales managers look for in a sales applicant. I tell them, “No. Don’t do that.” And they say, “That’s what I’ve always done. This is what I’m going to continue to do.” The problem, of course, is if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

Einstein said creativity rules the world. Everybody thinks, “Well, Einstein was a great physicist and that’s why he figured out the Theory of Relativity.”

But in fact, it was because he was creative. He thought in a different way from everybody else. If I’m a good salesperson doing well in a team of mediocre salespeople, then I’m getting all the good leads. Why on earth would I be reading ads, looking for another job? It’s just low odds, I think.

Great thing about Facebook is, you can serve up YOUR ad on that guy’s stream. He wasn’t at all thinking about leaving. But your graphic on his stream catches his attention, and now he’s curious. So he clicks.

We’ve had hundreds of cases where we hired waiters or waitresses or blue collar workers or kids right out of college, first job out of college. We hired them for peanuts, and you couldn’t put the lid on them. They were innovating, thinking up news ways to do stuff. Fact is, the largest pool of people who can sell are NOT selling right now.

We had a client, Erica. First time I met her, she was sales manager for a public radio station in San Francisco. Then, sales manager for a Spanish radio station. She had been using our system, hired a bunch of people successfully. And she called one day, left a voicemail: “Call me immediately!”

I called. She had just interviewed a young applicant. I looked up his test results. He passed both our profiles with flying colors. Perfect sales prospect. I asked, “Did you interview him?” “Yeah.” “How’d he do?” There was a hesitancy in her voice. “Well, he’s a little rough.”

A lot of times, when you hire a salesperson who’s never sold before, they’re a little rough. But once they figure out where the money is, they smooth it down. I said, “Tell me more.” She says, “Well, it’s what he’s doing for a living. Works in a tire store.”

I said, “OK. Sells tires. That’s OK.”

She said, “No, no, no, he’s not selling them. He’s in the back, busting ‘em. Takes ‘em off, puts ‘em back on.”

I said, “Oh.”

So I kind of stepped back and said, “Tell me about this applicant, Erica.”

So he was young, fell in love, got this girlfriend pregnant. They got married and he took the first job he could to support his family – busting tires.

I said, “Look – it’s up to you. You’ll have to coach him, help him dress himself up a bit. But based on his testing and your interviews, he can do the job.”

Result was, this kid became #1 out of about a dozen salespeople she had.

Point is, there are a ton of real gems who just didn’t start in sales. Most of them never get a chance, because they have no sales experience.

But if you test them and interview them right, you’ll spot them. You’ll have a secret formula.

Meanwhile, your competitors are all looking for previous sales experience and previous industry sales experience. They’ll NEVER find these gems.

I’m Alan Fendrich. Give me a call.