Hi there

Quick thoughts…

Most people who hire salespeople have not become aware of the way things have changed over the last 10 years with sales applicants

FACT: Just ten years ago (and maybe even less) for an applicant to apply for a sales job  they had to DO something.

They had to either mail you or fax you a resume. This meant actually getting up from their computer and performing some sort of action.

Not today

Today the typical sales applicant tweaks their LinkedIn profile, writes a resume, sends it to a resume tweaking service, then gets online and starts clicking on their computer.

No action required.

20 years ago applicants had to write a resume AND hand-type a cover letter AND insert it into an envelope AND mail it at 25 cents apiece.

All of that has changed for the applicant, at the click of a button they apply to hundreds of sales managers who are looking for a sales star.

But what about the sales manager who receives those applications?

What has changed for you since 2005?

Oh, maybe you now have some way to keep track of all your applicants online, but short of  that not a whole heck of a lot.

And that is the essence of the sales hiring problem that 99% of sales managers face.

So you stare at a bunch of glitzy resumes, all tweaked by professional resume tweakers.

Do you really think you can match your job to a resume and make a great sales hire?

It ain’t gonna happen. NO WAY. We both know it. YET everyday sales managers across the world select the 3 or 4 applicants whose resumes look the best:

No typos
Previous sales experience
Previous industry experience
Good looking resume

And bring in those 3 applicants for an interview or two… and hire the one who “handled themselves the best”.

Wonder why only 1 out of 4 or 5 sales hires are worth the price of a pair of shoes?

For more than 16 years now, Advanced Hiring System has been teaching our clients how to turn the tables on this trend by creating a sales hiring system.

For more information on what hiring method you should be using or if sales hiring is right for you, click here. So you don’t waste your time and resources on strategies or profiling tools that do not work.

Put yourself back in control of the hiring process.

Yanik Silver, the Internet Marketing Guru was interviewed in Forbes this month.

Yanik talks about hiring Millennials. He says Millennials, “are going to take jobs that may or may not pay them as much. They want “a mission or a cause, because they want to make a difference.”

Yanik is right for most positions in an organization…

With one HUGE exception: sales positions.

Salespeople who are successful are still motivated by the same practical values. Think about it, do your best salespeople want to save the whales or make a lot of money? Top salespeople wake up asking themselves how they can have greater control of their environment.

Our data shows sales hires who are not money or power motivated will stall and top out early.  Salespeople must be High Practicals we base this on data from our 2000 clients and 16 years of experience successfully picking salespeople.

We’re happy to share our data with you. Hook up with me on LinkedIn and I’ll show you what we’re looking at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanfendrich

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.