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.

Doug Wick of Positioning Systems tells me that more and more of his clients are shifting to add a telemarketing effort to their sales teams.

Implementing a telemarketing program today is a lot easier from a technological standpoint. However technology doesn’t fix the problem that most companies are having implementing a successful telephone sales program.

When I first started in sales I was prejudiced against telephone sales.

I was a successful outside salesperson, had a college degree, dressing well, driving a nice car and making serious money in sales. My mental picture of a telephone salesperson was a part time housewife in a house dress calling me to subscribe to the local newspaper while I was eating dinner.

Then, one day, when I was at the local Wheat First Security office checking on my stocks, it hit me: Gordon Granger IV, my broker, was a telephone salesperson. He had a college degree, dressed well, drove a nice car and was making serious money.

Point #1: Telephone salespeople and outside salespeople are very similar.

Both inside and outside salespeople demand comparable incomes – that is if you want to hire a Gordon Granger not some housewife in a house dress.

Appearance is mostly irrelevant.  Telephone salespeople can potentially be more casually dressed, but it’s not a particularly useful criteria.

Values are also very similar between both types of salespeople. Top salespeople whether outside or telephone need to be High Practical’s. When you look at the ValuesMatrix™ that’s high Money or Power.

I’ll devote another post to the differences and similarities between the two types of salespeople because it requires a more complete explanation. For now, the short answer is most telephone salespeople are very much like outside salespeople. However, super cream-of-the-crop telephone salespeople are different in one key personality characteristic.  In an upcoming blog post I’ll spell this out more clearly.

Next post we’ll talk about the nuances that can really give you an advantage and save you time in turnover.