I used to travel a lot for client meetings before the entire set of Internet tools existed for online meetings. One client meeting comes back to haunt me.

My client was having a terrible time meeting his revenue goals. When I arrived on the last day of the month for our meeting, he called an ad hoc sales meeting and invited me in to observe.

The disaster was what I smelled as he told his team they were X dollars off-budget and today was the last billing day of the month. They needed that revenue, he said.

End of meeting.

In his office later he was distracted. For the life of me I couldn’t figure why he had insisted we meet that day.

It became obvious fairly quickly that he, a newly promoted sales manager, was in way over his head. Why? One simple reason:

Any successful sales manager knows that the time to hit this month’s revenue goals was to start last month. If you are not 75% of the goal going into the month you’re way behind.

Sales hiring is the same way. If you want to make a great sales hire to fill a position opening up in two weeks you had better have started 12 weeks ago.

So how do you know you’re going to have an opening? You don’t.

If you’re not running an ongoing recruitment program, you are guaranteeing mediocrity in your sales hiring. No way around it.

If your sales hiring record is 1 good salesperson for every 4 hires, we have designed the AHS Sales Hiring System to fix your problem – that is, IF you use the system.

For more information click here and complete a 60 Seconds Survey. Our tool will help you identify what is really holding you back from hiring top sellers.

Can the Advanced Hiring System be used for a picking a spouse? Humbly, I’d like to suggest that the best strategy for wife selection comes from the heart.

In 1976 I’d never heard of personality profiling, and, frankly, I’d probably not have paid any attention to it. I saw her across the green of our apartment complex as a young 24 year old and it was “love at first sight.”

However, now that I’m older and savvier about selection strategies, I can offer a couple of pieces of “wisdom.”

1. Be sure that values are in alignment. The first step in the AHS sales selection is ValuesMatrix™. Without correct values selection you’ll find marriages and sales hires will be iffy at best.
2. Be sure that DISC personality style is congruent with roles. In marriage selection, like in sales departments, managers who are high-D need to use care in managing employees.
   As it turned out, our styles are quite compatible – we’re not both high-D. (It should be easy for you to guess who the high-D is. If you’re having trouble here’s my wife’s blog: www.missbirdseed.com)
3. Interview more than once and be sure to structure your interview. In my case it took my nearly 2 years to succeed at my interviews to be selected as husband. She kept cancelling my interviews and telling me I was not a candidate, however she didn’t realize the perfect sales personality doesn’t give up when they know their product solves the prospect’s needs.

By the way, I’m working on a 38^th Anniversary Sale. Stay tuned. For now, I’ve promised to come home early tonight and go out for sushi.