Having spent 16 years helping highly sales driven organizations hire salespeople who can really sell, getting the right applicants to apply is critical. We’ve created this Sales Hiring E-course to help get your company hiring better salespeople.

In the previous section of this Advanced Hiring System E-course you’ve gotten your headline written.

We now want to tell the best sales applicants why your company is the kind of company that values sales superstars. Here’s where we want to talk about the unique benefits of working in your company…

And to tell applicants what makes your company a good place to apply

Make sure your claims are believable and include facts to support your claims

What are the special qualities to your company?

Here are some things top sales performers will want to see to consider your company:

Is your company a recognized industry leader? (Include “According to our J.D. Powers” or “The Wall Street Journal says…” )
Is this a salary position? (Very important to clearly articulate that in your ad.)
Is your company locally-based?
Does your company promote from within?
Does your company have a unique product that with the right sales talent is very hot?
Is your commission structure extremely generous?
Do top performers succeed quickly?

When I write copy I remind myself “Generalities roll off the mind of the prospect, like water off the back of a duck.” Get specific in your ad and give your prospective superstar salesperson reasons to consider your company…

“Last year, despite the economy Acme added clients.”
vs
“Last year, despite the economy Acme increased its client list by 13% including 2 of the Fortune 500.”

“Top compensation”
vs
“According to Salary.com our salespeople earn 20% more than others in our field”

“Highest rated company”
vs
“Recognized by Standard and Poors as #2 rated Insurance company”

Get the idea?

Be specific, it adds to the ad’s impact

Why are we running this ad? Answer: “Our company is a home for top sales performers.
We are committed to making sure your unique skills as a top sales performer are rewarded. We mean that — we pay higher commissions, a bigger base and give a more generous expense account than anyone else.

We believe that in a free market economy great salespeople make great things happen. We want the best salespeople in the world on our team. Sales skills are a talent in short supply and we are always willing to talk if you are a real top performer

Does that make sense?

A philosophy that says top sales talent is worth its weight in gold is what this course is all about.

Top sales talent does not come from training…
Training enhances it…But you either have it or you don’t.

We’ve covered a lot of ground on how to make your ad specific and why that is important.

Stay tuned

In the next section we’re going to get into a trick we’ve been teaching our clients that will amaze you.

Welcome back to the Advanced Hiring System E-course.

We call this section “How to Never Get Trick by Resumes (or LinkedIn profiles) Again.”

A long time ago in the 1950’s my father was National Sales Manager for Revlon. What did my father do to hire a salesperson?
Get a bunch of resumes
Look for previous sales experience
Even better, industry sales experience
Interview those applicants and hire the one who interviewed the best

This simply doesn’t work anymore. Things are a heck of a lot more competitive.
And applicants are bigger liars on their resumes.

You can’t start with resumes anymore. It’s hard to break that habit but resumes are nearly USELESS.

How do we know that resumes are useless as the selecton strategy for sales?
Online job search company Monster.com’s Chairman Jeff Taylor claimed an “executive MBA/OPM” from Harvard Business School… But the school does not have such a degree

Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson listed a computer science degree but he didn’t have one

Sandra Baldwin, the President of the U.S. Olympic Committee resigned after she lied about her education and admitted she never graduated.

Marilee Jones, Dean of Admissions at MIT, claimed to have degrees from Albany Medical College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Union College. She had received none of them.

George O’Leary resigned as Notre Dame Football coach just days after his hiring after he admitted to lying about a master’s degree in education and a claim that he had played college football for several years. An investigation revealed that O’Leary had made those things up.

Even if it’s not totally full of lies the truth-stretching on resumes is so ridiculous you can’t base decisions on them.

Stop selecting by resumes. It is a big step to realize that your best applicant probably doesn’t have the best resume.

And while we’re on the subject of how not to select… you can’t raid the competitors.
Why not raid your competitors?

Because you’re not going to get their top performers, you’re going to get their second stringers. Their second stringer is never going to become a top performer for you!
Are you ready to hear that?

Sales Hiring rules changed with the dawn of the Internet. It happened with the ease with which applicants could apply for jobs. Today things are dramatically different.

Applicants apply at the click of a button. They have their resumes tweaked to catch the attention of the poor sales managers who are still selecting applicants by resumes.

In the next section of the How to Hire Salespeople Who Can Really Sell E-course I will show you the best strategy to find applicants who can really sell.

Stay tuned. Your company can build a sales hiring system that gets you the best salespeople.

In a recent call with a prospect, the question of “outsourcing the sales function” came up.

Rather than answer the question directly, I asked him what he meant by that. He proceeded to tell me that he had read how some companies are outsourcing everything, including their sales effort. However, he said, from his perspective it was not a particularly good idea.

He’s right.

Rather than tell you why outsourcing sales won’t work for most companies, let me tell you where it does work.

One client has been successfully outsourcing their sales effort. They are in the Internet advertising business and are now placing their inventory with brokers. This  company sells  “clicks”. This is a totally generic product. Where one click might be better than another click, it is adjusted through tracking results. Their click and Google’s click are essentially the same thing. If their click is better than Google’s click, the results are all tracked and balanced out. There is no way that Google will get more than his click.

On the other hand, client David W. is moving from a rep strategy for his internationally marketed industrial products. Rep firms are outsourced sales teams. However David is reversing the “outsourcing” because he knows that having his own rep in a territory means better sales focus and better accountability.

Another example is when, ten years ago the radio advertising business got all excited about selling its inventory like Google sells clicks. A former partner created a company to do this and sold it to Google. It was a giant dud. He made millions. Google ended up shutting it down and writing off their investment. Why? Because local advertising is not a commodity. It responds to sales effort and it cannot be tracked the way clicks on the Internet can.

Where its true, in my view, that business has used the excuse of this Crash of 2008 to outsource and downsize, efforts to outsource the sales effort have been a failure. In fact, when the Government stops QE whatever number we’re on, companies who’ve been ramping up sales efforts will prosper. Nothing works better than a great sales team to improve the top and bottom line.

photo credit: markhillary via photopin cc