In the mid-1990’s an “Entrepreneurial Seizure” lead me to form a company called Radio Profits Corporation. Through luck, good fortune and a brilliant partner, we were able to turn that company within 7 years into a sales machine with 200 salespeople generating 40,000 individual business to business sales a year.

We made our share of mistakes in the beginning, and it seemed at times that our concept was doomed to fail. After all, in 1996 there was no Internet to speak of and, yet our business concept involved hiring a team of 200 salespeople located across the U.S., U.K and Germany. Each one sold into their local market, talking with businesses about local community involvement.

Its hard to imagine what it was like before the Internet. How did we stay in touch without email and Facebook and Skype? The answer is we did it purely by telephone and fax

One mistake, however, nearly sank us and it was something we created by ourselves — and took us a while to recognize. Since we had a remote team we figured that the more managers who “touched” our salespeople, the better. Two heads are better than one, right?

However we began to notice a certain paralysis of activity.

Organizational Chart — Don’t Neglect This Critical Step

We realized that the rule must be: One manager and one manager only — all direction must be filtered to the salesperson’s manager. Accounting was forbidden to make reporting demands, Operations was forbidden to make suggestions directly to the salespeople. Immediately we saw the productivity per salesperson increase. Paralysis ended.

You are running a business, not a commune. Businesses that succeed have a clear Organizational Strategy with no departmental crossover. If you are permitting anybody but your Sales Manager to talk with your salespeople you’re setting yourself up for sales hiring failure.

I’ve heard it so many times over the last 14 years. At this point I just chuckle…

In a monthly client service call, Angie, the GM of a client radio station told me she had hired applicants last month.

“Three”, she said, “Were based totally on the system. And the fourth one didn’t ‘pass’ but he got great references and was an experienced industry salesman.”

“How’re all four doing?” I asked.

She went down the list and told me about each hire. “The fourth one, the one who didn’t pass, I fired. He was so disruptive everybody was happy to see him go.”

No surprise he didn’t work out.

He was a natural High-S style. But to do his job well he had to go out and make sales calls. High-S’s don’t like to leave the nest. He was very unlikely to want to leave the building – hard to be an outside salesperson and a High-S.

I’m posting the 4 graphs below. If you can pick the applicant who was too High-S for outside sales, we’ll add 5 additional profiles to your bank of profiles. If you’re not an AHS client, we’ll create a Free Trial Account to put your 5 free profiles into. We’ll announce the answer and winners on next Friday February 7, 2014

Join the sales hiring conversation and Leave a comment below.

Pick the Sales Dud

New clients are great! They approach the system like enthusiastic young puppies. They want to know everything about — and especially how to interpret the graphs.

I got a series of emails from new client, Angie. She’s been a top performer as both Sales Manager and Salesperson. She’s worked for the biggest radio broadcaster and has recently been recruited by our client to run one of their properties.

Angie sent me an email:

 Explain why or direct me where I can learn more about what does it mean when someone has their natural and adapted in the same circle?

My response to her was to simply make sure the graphs plot in the “sweet spot”:

My suggestion is to just stick to the system for now “Outside three rings: Persuaders, Promoters or Conductors”

Next morning Angie had taken the profile herself. Here’s a copy of the graph pages:

My response: Proof of concept. Persuader Promoter or Conductor outside three rings.