Let’s face it: everything we do as sales managers revolves around one idea—ROI. Even our sales hiring methods impact our company’s bottom line. For that reason, we want to make certain that our process assures us of hiring the right person the first time, and that has to do with your hiring speed limit.

I know, you’ve got a high-performance company, and it’s important to you to keep it running at top speed and top efficiency. When something needs to be done, you want it done day before yesterday. That’s what better sales is all about.

The problem is, it’s not often possible to realize the greatest benefits of good sales hiring if you’re racing through the process at mach speed.

If you race through your sales hiring or skip some of the steps in the process, you can actually be incurring substantial expenses by ending up with the wrong people. They won’t contribute to better sales, they’ll be miserable, you’ll be miserable, and soon they’ll be gone. That’s practically a given. Then you’ll have to hire again, and if you don’t have proper sales hiring system in place, as well as the patience to follow the procedures, you’ll find yourself in a recurring loop of hiring failures.

Following the process outlined in the AHS Sales Hiring course materials may seem as though it will take up a lot of time in the beginning, but it actually evens out during the entire process since it significantly reduces the number of viable candidates you’ll end up having to interview. The DISC assessment, along with the values and styles matrices, will allow you to focus on the potential top performers as you eliminate candidates who don’t fit the salesperson profile .

Taking the time to give more than one interview per candidate is also an essential step in effective sales hiring. Remember, for every coaching system for sales hiring, there are probably five coaching systems for interviewing. A candidate can appear polished and perfect during one interview, but that could just be a well-coached façade. Making the time for additional interviews will give you an opportunity to identify inconsistencies and see below the surface.

Of course, no highway system runs smoothly without also having a minimum speed limit, and there is a need for one in sales hiring as well. You don’t want to wait around until there’s a huge need before you think about recruiting new blood. While there may be many top performers out there, chances are they’re not all standing in line until you’re ready to hire them. It’s important to keep yourself open for sales hiring opportunities when they present themselves, even if you weren’t necessarily considering hiring salespeople at the time. After all, an investment in quality will only bring in better returns.

If you’re a sales manager who also has the responsibility to hire salespeople, you probably know that completing the hire is not just the end of a process, but the beginning of a relationship. Now you have to deal with managing the new hires—and relating to them—and that’s not always easy. Oh sure, you know enough about them to be somewhat confident that they can do the job, but other aspects of their personalities are a mystery. Imagine the value of having all the information you need to understand, motivate, and manage your new salesmen. Something like, say, the comprehensive report generated after a DISC assessment.

As sales workers, we all know the importance of added value to our transactions with our customers. Wouldn’t it be just as important to add value to our sales hiring process? The traditional sales hiring methods may lead us to certain perceptions about our candidates, but will they be able to handle stressful situations? Will they be able to interact in a positive way with the rest of the team? You can’t just walk on eggshells until you know them well enough to know how to deal with them; who has the time? If only there were some way to understand the way they think and react—a crystal ball would be nice.

Well, the truth is, if you used the DISC assessment in your hiring process, you have the next best thing to a crystal ball. The DISC assessment provides a 22 page individual report for every person tested. The information on this report will provide insight to both the managers and the salesmen so that the most optimal professional relationship can be developed. If you’ve never used DISC assessment in your sales hiring process, here is a list of some of the sections that provide insights to your candidates/salesmen:

• Sales characteristics

This section highlights the natural sales style of salesmen—how they deal with preparation, presentation, handling objections, closing, and servicing.

• Value to the organization

In this section, you can identify specific talents and behavior, which will help you to develop a system to capitalize on the value brought by every individual and make each of your salesmen an indispensable part your team.

• Checklist for communicating

When you care about your sales team, you want to be able to create an environment for effective communication so that everyone can interconnect at the appropriate level. This section provides insight on how to accomplish that.

• Keys to motivating 

Obviously, salesmen are more motivated when something they want is the “prize.” By understanding the wants of salesmen, managers can be assured of having ways to keep them motivated, and therefore productive.

• Keys to managing

Although it would be nice if all salesmen could perform at an optimum level on autopilot, it’s essential to be an effective manager. This section provides keys to managing salesmen according to the information provided by their responses on the DISC assessment.

There is much more information you can learn from a DISC assessment such as the one included in the AHS sales hiring system. Maybe it’s not a crystal ball, but when DISC assessments are used in the sales hiring process, employees will be gratified in knowing that they are valued by the company and will perform at their highest level.