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.

Does the AHS System really work?

Here’s a story I love to tell about how a Tire Changer was selected by the Advanced Hiring System — and how he lead our client’s sales department in new business development.

Erica M is a sales manager in San Francisco at a radio station. She had been a client for a number of years. She knew the system and had used it successfully for over two years.

One day I got a message from her, “Call me immediately. I need to talk.” I returned her call (our clients get unlimited real time access to a real person) and she asked me to look at applicant Jose R.

He profiled well. He had good values. And a good personality style. In fact, he graphed perfectly according to Advanced Hiring System standards.

I asked her if she had interviewed the applicant.

“Yes, I’ve interviewed him using the AHS 4-Part Interview Module.” She said, “He interviews well. Highly motivated, articulate. He’s accomplished quite a lot, given his situation”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

It turns out that Jose R is a young man who married very young. And, given that he married young, he took the first job he could find to support his family…

Busting tires in the back of tire store. He had earned his GED in the evenings.

When Jose heard the ad on the radio station looking for salespeople he applied. Although he scored well on the profiles we use in the Advanced Hiring System, Jose wasn’t the kind of applicant a sales manager expects to hire.

Erica is located in California. Unemployment premimums are killer and she was extremely cautious. Too, Jose was rough he lacked grooming skills, which count in salesmanship.

In talking with her, since he had done so well in the Advanced Hiring System evaluation, I suggested she use some sort of trainee position for a period of 45 days.

At the end of the period if he had demonstrated ability, she would switch him to sales.

The story has a very happy ending. Six months later he led her sales department in new business development the following year he was overall top biller.

He was a natural salesperson who just needed to be discovered. There are people who have the ability to sell but they’ve never applied because their resume doesn’t have sales experience.

Stay turned to find out what makes Jose tick and how if you think “people don’t want to work today” you might be just going about it wrong.

Stay tuned in the next section I’m going to show you how to find applicants to apply for your sales position who are highly motivated.

Yesterday, right before the start of business, the Advanced Hiring System website went down.  I found out because a client emailed me. I immediately IM’ed our Manager of Web Technology. He’s in India and within 15 minutes the site was back and running.

Today I went to our Advanced Hiring System Youtube account https://www.youtube.com/user/afendrich to upload the latest edition of the How to Hire a Salesperson E-course. But our channel looked like this. Have you ever tried to get technical support from Google???