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.

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.

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.