If the data is correct, more duds are hired for sales than studs.

Most sales managers when given the task of hiring salespeople couldn’t pick a sales stud out of a stack of resumes if he or she bit them in the butt.

We go on daily, thinking that nobody wants to work these days.  We hire hoping that it will work out, but it is pure guesswork using resumes and gut feel interviewing.

Here are the facts:

Most people don’t want to work — However this is nothing new. Its always been this way. Long before our current numb nuts politicians screwed things up… previous generations of politicians screwed things up… Get over it.

The economy has made selling harder than ever — This might be somewhat true for our lifetimes, but things have been a heck of a lot worse. In the 1930’s there was a killer Depression. Worldwide economies were stagnant. Guess what? IBM was founded during the Depression.

There is no test to really prove whether a sales hire will work out — Actually there is… well, actually there are two tests that we use to get inside an applicant’s head. Here’s what Matt McCallum of Great American Publishing said to me the other day.

“The Advanced Hiring System tests are amazing. And whenever I have violated the rules of the test, I ended up sooner or later (usually sooner) finding out I hired a fake.”

Now is the time to start looking for those studs. The economy is not going to give you a better time to hire (just look at what Big Blue IBM became from their start during the Depression.)

Most sales training books are same old crap, different day. Sad but true.

But every so often there is something that puts a whole new spin on what works and what doesn’t.

Just recently the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff was recommended to me by my business coach who I meet with weekly. (Yes even I need a coach.) I thought this was going to be a waste of time. (And made a mental note to check our contract to make sure I could cancel the coaching with no penalty.)

But I’ve learned in the years I’ve been in business that it doesn’t hurt to look. So I downloaded the book, stuck it on my phone and went about my business.

That afternoon as I was sitting in the waiting room to see the Orthopedist (and hoping he’d agree to take off this damned cast so that I could go for a run) I started reading Pitch Anything.

Holy crap, this guy is the real thing. Totally new perspective on what happens in a sale – and how in today’s Twitter environment you’d better get to the point quickly and make that point dramatically.

If you read no other business book this month, pick up a copy of Pitch Anything.

Business is tougher than ever. More competition is coming every day.

It requires a special type to succeed in sales in today’s environment.

If your sales team isn’t made up of smart, innovative, outside-the-box types, you’re living on borrowed time.

So how do you start to pick these smart people?

Picking your best applicants from resumes or LinkedIn profiles has never worked in the past and for sure it doesn’t work now.

Matching experience to your job is an illusion that has caused more dud sales hires than any other fantasy.

A smart sales manager knows that more than half of top performers have zero industry experience…

So why do most sales managers continue to search for applicants with “previous industry sales experience?” Beats the hell out of me – most likely it’s because they’ve never bothered to track their sales hiring results.

If you want to stop hiring sales duds and get some real insight into how you should be hiring or if you’re even ready to hire salespeople, take our 60 Sec Survey to get your sales hiring scorecard. Take the Survey and get your scorecard.