I’ve spent May traveling the East Coast of the US from New York to Virginia. I have a lot of friends and relatives I hadn’t seen for years, so decided to take a month and visit.

I’ve had some very good meetings in NY that will result in some real opportunities to expand our AHS service to you, our valued clients, as well.  More to follow on that later…

My 32 year old daughter joined me for a full week of the trip. She and I have not had that kind of time together in more than 14 years.

Being on the road, I’ve been looking at the newspapers along the way. Some of the targeted ones – those that are specific to a group, are full of ads.

I am shocked at how empty most general newspapers are of ads. Most newspapers who are not clients of ours are totally sleeping. I turned page after page without one single ad!

My friend, Scott Wolf told me that newspapers spend 20x what it costs Google to deliver an impression. This is somehow supposed to be an explanation.

I think the sales departments are asleep all across the newspaper industry.

Google would think they’d died and gone to heaven if they could do what a newspaper does: drop a physical ad on a prospect’s doorstep.

Jeff Bezos is no dope. Many say it’s some sort of hobby to have bought the Washington Post. Ha. He can now put a physical ad on a doorstep and if you don’t realize the value that brings, you are missing the point.

In a virtual world, physicality is still preeminent. If you doubt that, imagine kissing your lover virtually compared to the real thing – lip to lip.

When I was in Franklin, Virginia my friend Jim Ellenson said Union Camp shut down the paper mill which killed the town. He said, “no one uses paper anymore.”

Ha. Maybe the little kiddies in college have something against paper but paper production is at 80% of what it was and that is still a huge number. (And don’t worry about the trees — they grow back.).

So what is the problem in the Newspaper business? In radio, we had a rate card based on demand. As more advertisers buy ads the price goes up due to increased volume.

Newspapers need to do the same thing. Drop the price until advertisers buy.

I would love to make a sales call on the local Italian Restaurant in any city saying “we see how over the past few years Subway has been ‘eating your lunch’ so we want you to put a printed ad in our newspaper that says “Bring this coupon in Wednesday from 1:30-3:30 for a business lunch special 79 cents with the purchase of a drink. If it works we want an over the top testimonial.”

Or go to a bar and offer a coupon “Bring your wife in for a Free Drink on Thursday night. Buy one get one free for the less expensive drink. When you pack your bar, I need a testimonial.”

You get the idea. Unless newspaper closes their doors this week, their sales team needs to get some ads in the paper – and newspaper better than any other media delivers a physical ad to the doorstep.

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.

My friend John is the salesman’s salesman. He started out his sales career as an advance man for Ringling Brothers. He’s built a half a dozen Madison Avenue marketing firms and parleyed his ability to “help people make favorable decisions” into an amazing business career. His clients are the biggest companies in entertainment in the world. He flies 150,000 miles a year.

For all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never been able to get him to take 15 minutes to take both Advanced Hiring profiles. Until yesterday.  I was talking with John on Skype and who knows how I did it, but he agreed to take the profiles.

How did he do? How about John “aced” both profiles. I mean nailed them!

I guarantee you that if you ever were to get John on your sales team he’d bring in more business than you would know what do with.  He is literally the “ice to Eskimos sales guy.” When I had my first sales job right out of college, I used to call John and ask him what to do.

I told John if he failed the Advanced Hiring System profiles I would close Advanced Hiring and tell everyone to go home — last check  coming in two weeks. Fortunately I don’t have to do that now. Thanks John.

If you’re an Advanced Hiring System client, I’ve posted John’s graphs in the Member Area. If you’re not an Advanced Hiring System client and you’re still hiring salespeople the old way, good luck to you in this up and down economic world we live in.