Sales Trainer, speaker and all around super sales stud, Jill Konrath’s recent blog post “I Sell #Like a Girl – and I’m Proud of It!” ended up in my inbox yesterday.

Jill and I have had a couple of brief conversations over the years. I like her stuff.

She’s innovative, tenacious, consistent and committed — all the qualities that make for being a superstar salesperson.

Jill wants to claim in her article that women and men sell differently. I, respectfully, don’t buy it.

I’ve been studying salespeople for nearly 40 years now.

I started in radio.

Broadcasting is unique.

For 50 years the Federal Communications Commission has required stations demonstrate their hiring be race, creed, gender and orientation blind. There’s a special department in Washington of government bureaucrats who wreak havoc on any broadcaster that discriminates.

There are a lot very powerful women who’ve succeeded in radio. I’ve had quite a number of them as clients through the years.

When I ran my company Radio Profits Corporation I’d make a point to travel to visit with our client managers.

One thing I learned very quickly was that being a top performing woman had nothing to do with facial characteristics or body type.

These top performing women had stick-to-it-ive-ness, follow-through, and the ability to overcome adversity.

They have the values and personality characteristics of winning salespeople. Regardless of whether they’re boys or girls, they won’t succeed without these internal drivers.

Last week I made a regularly scheduled Advanced Hiring service call to a General Manager of a radio station client. He told me he had fired a candidate he had run through the System.

I wasn’t surprised in the least…

It had been three months ago, when the Business Manager of the station and I were talking. We were reviewing the results of the tests of candidates who had applied for an opening as Traffic Manager. (This is the position that handles all the details of making sure the ads are scheduled properly. It is very detail-oriented. It requires a Style Analysis profile that is nearly the OPPOSITE of a sales profile.)

We had already found some good applicants who were in the interview process. However, a new test had been run on a candidate who was particularly suited for the position of Traffic Manager.

When I asked what was being done about this applicant, the Business Manager said, “Oh the General Manager hired her for sales.”

I was flabbergasted. “What! Please tell me you’re joking,” I said.

“No. Our General Manager is really confident in his ability to train people.”

“Yes.” I said, “But she is the exact opposite of what she needs to be to succeed. Please, this is a joke right?”

She assured me the candidate had, in fact, been hired for sales.

I asked to be transfered.to the GM’s office and got his voice mail. I left a frantic message, “please call me before you waste your time and money.”

Last Friday the General Manager acknowledged that hiring the candidate had been a mistake. He had wasted his time, the hire’s time and of course, thousands of dollars in salary, benefits and training.

Scientific Hiring is not something you can take or leave.

The Validity Study shows when you hire the wrong personality type they will fail 95% of the time.

The Advanced Hiring System is not a nice theory — it is based on Scientifically validated research. As you use the system to hire salespeople, you’ll find your staff will improve. You’ll have less turnover and more productive team members.

We’re looking forward to working with your company to help you improve your sales hiring.

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.