Ask any sales manager what their worst job is and 3 out of 4 times they’ll say “hiring salespeople.” In fact, most sales managers, who’ve had some experience in the job, can tell you about some real disaster sales hires they’ve made.

Want to be a successful sales manager?  Realize, then, that you must stop doing what everyone else is doing – because most sales managers don’t know beans about how to hire salespeople.

Just to review and make sure we know how most sales managers approach sales hiring (and what does not work), they: 1) Run ads for salespeople.  2) They get a bunch of resumes in and flip through them looking for previous sales experience, no typos, or a good-looking resume. 3) Next, they call in the selected applicants from the resumes they picked for interviews. 4) Finally, they conduct a “non-scripted interview” and try to pick which applicant will most likely succeed for them.

This is a formula for sales hiring disaster!

 A Better Way to Hire Salespeople

Instead, take an entirely new approach at looking for salespeople. Changing your approach to sales hiring will at least double your sales hiring success.

Here are the secrets of sales hiring success:

1.  Use a systematic approach to sales hiring. Have a written procedure, step-by-step, of how your hiring system works. Doing this will help you overcome the urge to jump at hiring too quickly. Having a written system will also help you to see how all of the steps of your plan to hire a great salesperson. Just like you can’t run to “Home plate” before you touch “Third Base”, you can’t skip steps hiring salespeople.
2.  Make sure your recruitment ad uses the “right words”. Words are “symbols” in our brains. If I say “Mother” or “Patriotism” or “War”, you and I all feel a certain “tinge.” It is measurable and real. What this teaches us is that if you use the wrong words, you attract the wrong people. Be very careful that the words you use are right. And, since this is the beginning of the process, it is a very important step. The expression, “How you start is how you finish” applies here. Check your ad carefully. Make sure it attracts Money-motivated people who enjoy convincing other people to do what it is they want them to do.
3. Test applicants with scientifically validated profile tools before you meet them. There are certain values and personality characteristics that are found in the overwhelming majority of great salespeople. Profiles can accurately test for these characteristics. You need two: one for values and one for personality style. Use them before you talk to applicants. In this way, you’ll be focusing your energy on the applicants who are most likely to succeed. While it is true that some people who do not test well who can possibly succeed at sales, statistically the “odds” are against them. It is like playing cards and being dealt a good hand or a bad hand. Good cards make good players better.
4. Send rejection letters to applicants who do not pass the profiles. This is an important step in the process. It helps you keep the pipeline clear of applicants who don’t make the grade.
5.  Conduct a structured, tangential interview over at least 3, and preferably 4 meetings. What this means is, first, ask the same questions of all applicants in the same order. It gives you a better way to compare applicants. Secondly, rather than ask direct questions where it is easy to give the answer they know you are looking for, make them give you examples. Finally, four separate meetings in an ideal way to find out if the applicant really is as good as they looked at the first meeting.

Taking these five steps and putting them into action will help you to double the sales hiring results you are achieving. When you put pen to paper, this is one of the best investments of time you can possibly make.

Great salespeople are the key to your success as a sales manager. Increasing the strength of your sales team gives you much more leverage. You can do more with less. You can have more predictable results, from quarter to quarter. In other words, your most important job should be hiring great salespeople.

If you’d like to know what sales hiring method is right for you, so you don’t waste time and money on sales profiling tools or head hunters, click here to get your sales hiring Score Card. Your Score Card will gauge your company’s readiness to successfully hire a Quality Sales Person.

Good luck and great sales hiring!

Alan Fendrich

When you first hire salespeople for your company, you hope you’ve made good choices. If you’ve used the Advanced Hiring System, odds are 3 to 1 that you’ve made some excellent hires. They begin to show their promise right away, and there’s a spirit of friendly competitiveness that fills the workplace with electricity—and customer orders.

 Before you pat yourself on the back, however, you need to accept the challenge of keeping that momentum going. And it is a challenge. If the work environment becomes stagnant, your great sales force sometimes loses the energy that they started out with. After all, according to the system’s personality profile, you hire salespeople who are highly motivated, independent thinking, top performers, and they love a challenge. If they reach a point where the challenge is no longer there, they may lose some of the spark that has driven them to be top performers.

It’s called complacency, and it can lead to mediocre efforts if it’s not addressed. Of course it’s a worst-case scenario, but after you hire salespeople, if any of them get to the point where they have achieved all their goals, and they feel satisfied with the level of compensation they are receiving, they may begin to lose some of their drive to sell, letting someone else handle any extra leads. You may not see a drop in sales, but you won’t see the growth charts climb, either.

That’s one reason why it’s important for sales managers and employers to maintain a recruitment mentality and continue to hire salespeople—to infuse the sales team with new blood, new ideas, and new challenges. When there are more people competing for the money and the power, the true sales personality feels challenged to push on.

Many times, the need to hire salespeople on a regular basis stays consistent.  Some of your top performers retire, so you need to replace them. Some of them move or move on, and some of them burn out. (Those are the few who somehow managed to slip through the AHS cracks.) There may even have been some duds whom you had to let go. In these cases, your turnover rate remains consistent and you just naturally have to keep hiring new talent.

But what if none of that is occurring? If you crunch the numbers, wouldn’t it be a good idea to continue to hire salespeople on a regular basis? Since you’re more likely than not to end up with another top performer, it will boost your sales figures, and make you more money than it will cost you. Not just because the new hire is bringing in more sales, but because the rest of the sales force is suddenly magically revitalized—they don’t want the “new guy” to steal any of their thunder.

If you need another reason to hire salespeople on a regular basis, how about this one? If there are any top performers out there, you have a better chance of snagging them before your competition does.  That will leave the opposition team stuck with the B players. What a shame.

When faced with the prospect of sales hiring, the challenge that keeps managers up at night is whether or not they’re hiring the right people. Sales hiring is especially tricky, because there are so many people out there who believe they have what it takes, but once they’re put to the task, they fail miserably. If you’re getting too many of these types of applicants, and not enough of the superstars you’re looking for, maybe you’re not using the right bait.

As an example, let’s say you’re a lonely single guy, and your mother has this friend who has this niece, and they both think the two of you would be a great match. You’ve kind of been looking, so you ask, “What’s she like?”

The answer? “She has a nice personality.”

You run the other way.

Why? Because they used the wrong bait. Their answer really didn’t tell you anything about the girl, and now your imagination is filling in all the gaps with some very unattractive details. Now you won’t even give the poor girl a chance.  For all you know, this could be a wonderful person—your soul mate, even—but you’ll never know because the lack of specifics chased you away.

Now let’s take this analogy and use it in a sales hiring scenario. If you just place some kind of generic “help wanted” ad, and you say something like, “a great company to work for,” it’s very likely that your best prospects will run the other way and you’ll have no chance of hiring the right people. They don’t want to buy into the promise of a great place to work unless they have some idea of why it’s a great place to work—if that’s even the truth.

Concrete evidence. That’s what the best sales personality is looking for. He usually knows what he’s worth to a company, so he doesn’t have to apply for dozens of openings. He doesn’t want to waste time going through the process for a company that might or might not turn out to be a good fit. In sales hiring, if you want this type of applicant, it’s your responsibility to provide the concrete evidence he needs.

The best place for this evidence is in a galvanizing headline. Since most prospects won’t even read an ad unless it has a headline that grabs their attention, this is the most important part of your ad. Choosing a tantalizing detail about your company and highlighting it in a headline will provide the perfect “carrot” to attract job seekers into reading the rest of your ad. You’ll want to invest plenty of time and thought in this process, and you can use the examples in the ad writing module of the AHS sales hiring system to inspire you.

 Once your headline has lured the prospect into reading the rest of the ad, use the keywords that apply to what makes a good salesman. Pepper the ad with sales hiring words like Persuasive, Enthusiastic, Independent, Strong-willed, etc., and the applicant will think he’s reading a description of himself. Subsequently, he’ll try to be the first applicant through your door, whether it’s real or virtual.