How to Get a Flood of the Best Sales Applicants You’ve Ever Seen   

Before the Internet, if you wanted 100 applicants to apply for a sales job, your company needed to be in New York or LA. But today your business can be anywhere and you’ll still get a flood of applicants.

The key is to write an ad that welcomes the studs and chases away the slugs.

Most sales ads are too general.

They waver when describing what the applicant gets for applying to work at your company.

Most sound like an HR job description. They list everything the applicant has to do or have done. There is nothing about what the applicants get.

Help Wanted – Sales Ads in Monster  Just Plain Suck

Scan the Ads in Monster.  The ads all look alike and none talk to top sales performers.  (NOTE: We have found Monster to be a poor choice to advertise a sales job.)

To draw large numbers of the “right” applicants you’ve got to talk to your applicants. Tell them you believe sales talent is the rarest and most important talent in the business.

Talk about how you are looking to give them what they want most.

Top sales talent wants money and power. Tell them how your company is a money and power factory for top sales talent.

Prove the money part by giving specific numbers. Tell them what the highest-paid salesperson in your company earns. Or if you’re a new company, tell them what they’ll earn based on your compensation strategy.

And don’t buy the BS that Millenials don’t want money, that they’re looking to serve humanity. Top salespeople are High Practicals. Weak salespeople want to be loved. Strong salespeople want to close business and earn more money.

Want to see all the steps to hiring salespeople who can close deals — and make you a ton of money? We’ve prepared a video that gives you step by step instructions.

Start Hiring Great Salespeople
Download our Sales Hiring Roadmap & 3-Video Series To See How You Can Start Now

In the sales hiring process, the biggest challenge is managing your time investment. Anybody who has experienced sitting in an interview with a candidate who’s a total dud knows what that feels like.

The challenge is figuring out who you want to speak with and who to ignore from your applicants.

Top performers have similar beliefs and values.

We know this from having profiled nearly 200,000 applicants. When we’ve gone through and asked clients to profile their top performers, we’ve seen a 90% positive correlation. Not a misprint.

According to Abraham Maslow, the Father of American Psychology, salespeople are high practicals.

Great salespeople don’t wake up, open their eyes and say, “How can I serve humanity?”

Top salespeople wake up, open their eyes and ask themselves, “Where’s the Money” or “Where’s the Power?”

Money and power are two things that motivate genuine salespeople. They breathe a unique air from ordinary people. Every encounter with another human being is considered an opportunity to strike a deal or make a sale.

Power – Top performers are looking for a greater sense of control of their environment. Saving the whales is very low on their list. Yet sales hirers consistently choose salespeople who are not high practicals – and then wonder why their new hires can’t sell anything.

Money – People who are great at sales are always looking for the money. If they can’t find it, they create opportunities where they can get it. Money is a great motivation because it compels salespeople to be resourceful and ingenious in their methods. They don’t listen to a NO answer. All they hear is a YES.

Stop talking to applicants who don’t have money and power as their top values — if there ever was a secret in sales that’s worth revealing, it is this. You want to hire brilliant salespeople? Pay attention to what motivates them and show them the money.

There’s a total piece of nonsense floating around that somehow, we no longer want money-motivated salespeople. Nothing is more ridiculous than this statement, but we have heard it batted around like it is gospel.

Here’s the truth: Yes, it’s true that millennials are very cause-oriented and they need to feel as if they are a part of the bigger picture. If you’re looking to hire designers, programmers or customer service representatives from millennials, you better help them see the job from the bigger perspective of how it serves society.

Nonetheless, salespeople who are primarily focused on bettering society will be mediocre performers. Everyone who buys from them (and there won’t be many who do) will love them. But it will take two of them (and double the draw, the expenses, the taxes) to get the production of one money-motivated seller.

You see, sales is tough work. There’s a ton of drudgery in sales and you’ve got to keep on even when things aren’t closing the way you expect them to. That’s just sales. You need to toughen up to get results.

If your salespeople are money-motivated, they have set an earning goal to make them feel fulfilled. Until they hit that goal, they’re going to keep dialing or knocking on doors – or however your sales process works.

They don’t give up easily unlike someone who could no longer find meaning in what he/she is doing. Saving the world is not in a salesperson’s agenda. Salespeople belong to the highly practical group – they mean business, always.

Salespeople who are not money-motivated sell less. We’ve been proving it to our more than 2000 clients for nearly 16 years. And on the surface, it may look like things have changed especially with the culture of millenials in the picture but fortunately; we can sleep easy thinking that some things remain the same. Money-motivated salespeople are, and will always be, wanted.