A recent client email message said, “Alan, we’ve had 20 applicants apply and NONE have passed the second profile.”

We’ve been testing and tweaking the system for nearly 16 years now… We have a huge database of what works in sales hiring. Clients who’s results don’t match our model get my attention.

We know that out of 20 applicants, 10 should have passed ValuesMatrix™ and of those 10, 3 should have passed StylesMatrix™.

I responded in an email “XXXX, let’s talk. Something is not right. Let’s set up a meeting to go over those results.”

We recently had a health issue with my wife.  After 37 years of marriage I’ve got her “broken in” just the way I love her. So I went along to a series of doctor’s appointments.

Friends, MD’s and humble Sales Hiring Wizards follow the same procedure. MD’s have a series of diagnostic steps to arrive at the problem.

The AHS Sales Hiring System is, well… a System.

Here are the steps:

If something is not right then, somewhere along the line someone changed a step.

Like going to the MD who says, “Take the medicine 3 times a day for 10 days.” But you decide you can’t be bothered to do it that way. So you make up your own schedule.

Same thing in sales hiring… you must follow the system to get the expected results.

As it turns out the client skipped Step 1… They decided to use the ad they like, not the ad we recommend.

Each step in the AHS System is designed to get maximum results for minimum effort. Skip a step and you’re not going to feel very good about hiring 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

I am the worst comedy movie critic you’ll ever meet — ask my wife, Leah. These days most comedies are about high school sex or marital infidelity. I usually get up from the couch or walk out of the theater in the first 20 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prudish; I just think common culture is, well, so common and low class these days.

But as a sales guy, the movie, “The Internship” teaches us a valuable lesson about what makes the “Sales Personality Style” critical.  And, given that Google had a hand in the movie it shows even the great and mighty Google is fairly clueless about what makes salespeople critical in growing sales.

The plot of the movie is that two sales guys get blown out when their company closes down. In the course of figuring out their next move, the character played by Vince Vaughn has an insight that he wants to go work at Google. This is an important characteristic of the Sales Personality Style.

The Sales Personality Style has the ability to comfortably imagine far-fetched scenarios. This is not to be overlooked when you go about staffing your sales team — and is the first and foremost reason why you need to make sure you’re only bringing Sales Personality Styles in to be interviewed.

When they are interviewed it is by video. This is a concept we’ve encouraged our clients to implement.  Interviewing by video is simple these days. As a Founder and CEO I work with software developers. Given the size of our company — and since most developers are located remotely from my two offices in Norfolk or Nahariya, I use video interviews.

Video interviews are efficient and can give you 90% of what an in-person interview gives. Today with Google Hangouts or Skype you can get more done in less time. Perhaps for the last interview you’ll want to make it face to face.

In the movie, where the two 50 something sales guys are in way over their head in Google’s core business, which is coding and developing software, they shine when it comes to people. Salespeople, as it turns out, even at the great and mighty $48 Billion a year Google are invaluable when it comes down to what makes Google great — revenue generation.