As a student of sales hiring and sales management, I follow the work of quite a few trainers. One of the best is Jim Cecil.

I first met Jim Cecil when he was one of the key presenters at a week-long marketing event in Los Angeles. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said, “that was 20 years ago.” Seems like yesterday…

Jim is the “real deal”. Having lead hundreds of sessions for Vistage throughout his career, you don’t get to be a regular presenter for Vistage without being a true achiever in business.

Yet, despite his business mastery, Jim Cecil, is one of the most genuinely giving men you’ll ever have a conversation with. There’s not a sense in talking with him (as is so often the case of achievers of his caliber) of haughtiness. He gets a kick out of sharing his ideas on what makes sense in marketing and management.

This week as Jim and I were talking, he touched on two of his favorite topics: how to select top sales performers and how to get and keep customers.

On selecting top sales performers, Jim said, “We introduced the concept of using profiles nearly thirty years ago. And, yet, it’s incredible that the majority of small businesses still hire salespeople without profiling. It’s no wonder that so many sales departments have so many weak salespeople.”

True story: when I first heard Jim talk about the concept of user-profiles as a selection process in Los Angeles 20 years ago, it changed my view of hiring salespeople. As a result, I went on to build a team of 200 salespeople. The statistics on our team was unheard of at the time. We destroyed the 80/20 rule and had a much lower turnover rate than anyone else was achieving – I owe it all to the ideas Jim shared.

In my next post, I’ll publish some of Jim’s thoughts on one of his favorite topics next, “Drip Marketing – Or How to Get a Meeting With Anyone (And Why They’ll Be Looking Forward to the Meeting and Hearing Your Ideas.)”

If you have questions for Jim, post them here.

Sale Personality Test and “The Art of Learning”

I just finished reading Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning. Josh was the young chess champion star of the movie “In Search of Bobby Fisher.”  If you haven’t seen the movie it’s a 2 Thumbs up from Advanced Hiring System in the human excellence category.

The Art of Learning is different from the movie in that Waitzkin discusses how he learned to first become a world chess champion and, then, a world champion martial artist.

Pretty amazing stuff to achieve that level of excellence — to be both a world champion chess and world champion martial artist.

The book  is about learning strategies he used. It’s applicable to Sales Managers who are charged with training top sales performers to achieve even more in their careers.

One criticism I had with the book is the author never mentions how to identify personality styles with the predisposition to achieve high levels of success. (Sales managers looking to hire salespeople would use sales tests.)

Having worked with Sales Managers for nearly 14 years who are responsible for hiring salespeople the question is “Is this applicant I am interviewing a master interviewee or a master salesperson?”

All too often managers make that mistake of believing the applicant who sells well in the interview is a good seller. We disagree.

Virtually no one hires an applicant who interviews poorly – yet only a small minority of sales hires are top performers.

Here we have found that sales managers who use Advanced Hiring System’s scientifically validated sales tests achieve much higher levels of sales hiring success. Because they are able to be sure that the applicants they are interviewing actually have the proven personality characteristics of top sales performers.

The AHS Sales Hiring Interview Module

Client Jay Siff at MovingTargets offered a comment the other day in a regular client service that caught me by surprise. Jay’s a smart guy, runs a couple of successful businesses and has been a client for over six years now.

We were reviewing some profiles together on his sales candidates. I reminded him to use the 4-Part AHS Interview Module. Jay asked “What’s that?”

I was a bit shocked that after six years he didn’t know about the Interview Module. Its one of the most important pieces of the Advanced Hiring System. Its also one of the most valuable parts of the AHS System. It is free to clients.

Maybe that’s the problem. We should charge for it. Ten years ago the CEO of an executive search firm told me the 4 Part AHS Interview Module would be a $10,000 consulting project if they did it. True.

So what is this valuable Interview Module?

The Interview Module is a step by step interview strategy. It contains four separate interview scripts together with the answers and rationale behind what you are looking for.

Using the AHS system profiles, you have filtered your applicants down to the three best candidates. If you have less than three good candidates before you start interviewing you should go back to the Recruiting stage.

In the Interview stage you want to be comparing applicants. That’s one of the keys to hiring a top sales performer – you want be interviewing more than one “Money Motivated Persuader” applicant.

The Interview Module gives you a way to compare and grade the quality of your applicants You want to interview each applicant according to the script contained in the module. Don’t ad lib your sales hiring interview. Deliver the script so you can get past the deadly “they handled themselves well” or “they got past our screener well.”

The point of the interview is to find whether your applicant has demonstrated the qualities of:

• Stick-to-it-iveness
• Follow through
• Ability to overcome adversity
• Ability to manage their internal state
• Entrepreneurialism

Applicants who can give you examples in their life experience where they have demonstrated these personality characteristics are who you are looking for. The best salespeople have these qualities in spades. And you need them – especially now after the morons in Washington have gotten done wrecking the economy.