Video Rant #4 – 5 Secrets To a Successful Sales Hiring Interview

Most companies interview salespeople to find out if they are persuasive. And they come away from the interview saying, “They really handled themselves well in the interview.” In other words, the candidate was persuasive in the interview. The interviewer felt persuaded. So they come away from this interview basically saying, “Wow, this applicant was really persuasive.” But it turns out the candidate was ONLY persuasive for the interview. Once they got hired, they never persuaded anybody. And a fair number of them never even went out and made sales calls.

At Advanced Hiring System, we’ve been hiring salespeople for a long, long time. It’s WAY more effective to use a psychological instrument, a personality test, to screen your applicants, than to try to screen them by interview. Before you ever even schedule an interview, you’ve GOT to know for sure you are talking to someone who is motivated the right way.

You’ve GOT to know, do they really enjoy the process of persuading prospects to buy something? You MUST find this out BEFORE you ever bring them in for an interview. You want salespeople who are motivated by money and power. MOST of your applicants will NOT be in that group.

And if you don’t filter them BEFORE the interview to determine whether their values and personality styles are suitable for sales, then you are creating ONE BIG MESS for yourself. If your goal is to discover their personality and values in the actual interview, then you will NOT accomplish what a sales hiring interview MUST accomplish. So Secret #1 is, NEVER interview an applicant who has not already passed values and styles personality testing.

Your purpose in the interview is NOT to determine if they can persuade you. You need to find out if they have emotional maturity and stick-to-itiveness. Will they follow through? You’ve got to KNOW that, because most people you hire will NOT follow through. And how are they going to handle rejection? Selling is a great career with a ton of disappointment. The vast majority of people who try selling just get beat up by the rejection. If you’ve done ANY selling, you know that the vast majority of a salesperson’s time is dealing with rejection.
• You think they’re going to buy today, but they don’t buy today.
• You think you’ve got an appointment today, but they cancelled the appointment.
• You think you’ve agreed on a price. But when you come down to the final details, they won’t buy at the price you need to sell it for in order to make the deal.
A salesperson’s life is disappointment after disappointment after disappointment. It takes a special, special person to handle that.

What keeps the salesperson on track is to continue to work the prospect and work the prospect, and work the prospect. A successful salesperson MUST have the ability to stick in there and to keep moving forward. THAT is your number one goal in the interview. So Secret #2 is, your goal in the interview is to find out if they can take a licking and keep on ticking, as the old Timex commercial said.

In our experience, what works best is a MINIMUM of three separate interviews of each candidate who passed the styles and values profiling. You start the 3 interviews knowing that the first two are generally just a bunch of BS. Really, it’s only by the THIRD interview that they see YOU as someone they can trust. They can talk to you openly then. And THAT is Secret #3. You will not start getting actual high-quality, TRUTHFUL information until that THIRD interview. Yes, I wish it was not that way. But in real life, it IS that way, so you MUST do at least 3 interviews.

Also – interviewing best practices require that you DO NOT SELL in the interview. Just stay objective. Sit back. Pretend you’re not involved emotionally in the process. Just objectively analyze the quality of the answers.

Secret #4: Scripting is ESSENTIAL for an interview. Ask the SAME questions in the SAME order for every applicant. That’s the only way to accurately compare one applicant against another. You need a grading system to establish the quality of the answers, so you can objectively calculate who your best applicant is. The sad fact is, MOST sales managers get tricked into hiring the applicant who created the most rapport. Or the one with the prettiest smile. Or the guy in the Brooks Brothers suit. You’ve got to SCRIPT your interview, GRADE the answers, and compare accurately.

And Secret #5: At the end of Interview Number THREE, you should stress them out. Indicate to them that you are NOT going to hire them. See how they come back and sell themselves to you. Do they demonstrate the ability to keep going, despite rejection? If they don’t handle that rejection well, or if they just give up … then that is EXACTLY what they’ll do when they’re out there selling for you. You’ve got to eliminate those guys.

So those are the 5 interviewing xxx that most companies do not do. Try ‘em. You’ll like the results. This is Alan Fendrich with Advanced Hiring System. Give me a call. 1-703-229-4224.

Video Rant #5

The #1 Mistake Everybody Makes When
They Don’t Profile Sales Applicants

When you use a sales hiring system that profiles applicants before you meet with them, if the profiling is good, you figure out what their motivators are. That’s the point of our ValuesMatrix™ profile. And then you also determine whether an applicant is oriented towards persuasiveness.

People wonder how testing can tell anything about persuasiveness. With our StylesMatrix™ profile, we measure four aspects of the human personality drive:

1. D – Drive: That voice inside their heads that says “I can do. It’s all about me. I am the one who can make this happen.” — or whatever your internal voice says
2. I – Influence: Are they flexible communicators? Can they adjust their style to match the style of the person they’re talking to?
3. S – Steadiness: How comfortable are they with change in their physical environment and/or their emotional environment?
4. C – Compliance: Do they routinely, automatically comply with rules?

The underlying personality style evaluation was first described in the Hebrew Bible. Then 500 years later by Hippocrates in Greece. The testing technology to spot the different personalities has itself been in use for close to 100 years. We have a ton of data points. So we can reliably point out when an applicant’s personality style is similar to personality styles of people who are successful in sales roles. Or attorneys. Or other roles where persuasion or influencing others is critical to success.

So when I say somebody is persuasive, it generally means they have a higher D – Drive – and I – Influence – score. And they have a LOWER C – Compliance – score. They’re not obsessed with following the rules. The natural Low C thinking process is, “The rules are made to be written by me.” Think how critical that is. The nature of persuasion is, you have to stretch the rules in order to help others to make the right decision and to buy your product. Elegant persuaders are always low compliance.

Can you imagine people that go into a conversation thinking that there is a right way and a wrong way to persuade? It’s clumsy. That applicant is high C, high compliant. It’s almost an unbreakable rule. High C’s CANNOT sell. They just will not go against the rules. A natural high C may adapt over time, to a degree, but that’s going against their natural style. That takes psychic energy.

And you have to wonder, if this candidate is naturally high Compliant, that means their first natural response in ANY situation is to simply go along with the rules. But instead, they suppress that natural response and force themselves to be low C in order to be able to sell. So what’s the long-term effect on their stress level? Every day of their career, they have to hide who they REALLY are in order to be successful. That’s got to have some cumulative psychic effect.

So that’s how we use the StylesMatrix™ testing to understand an applicant’s persuasive ability. In my opinion, it is ALWAYS a mistake to ever interview a High C applicant. Why? Because they may impress you. You can easily wind up hiring them for a sales position. And THAT is the road to disaster for you, the applicant, and your company.

The chance of that applicant working out for you in a sales position is close to zero. Wouldn’t you like to know that BEFORE you waste your time interviewing them? BEFORE you maybe make a big mistake and hire them?

I’ll help you set up your sales hiring system to make sure you only interview the right people. This is Alan Fendrich. Give me a call.