Interviewing

How to Stop Getting Tricked Hiring Salespeople Who Can’t Sell

Most companies have one thing in common when they hire salespeople.

The Number One tool they use to screen sales applicants is…

The résumé or LinkedIn profile

Have you been burned enough times yet by the Perfect Résumé or LinkedIn profile?

You’ve probably realized that most sales applicants are a COMPLETE waste of time.

They all have the same problem. They cannot sell. No matter what their LinkedIn profle says.

A few years ago, the CEO of Yahoo! was forced to resign… After it was discovered that his résumé was full of… A bunch of jobs he never did… And a bunch of schooling he never had.

THE CEO!!!

You've almost certainly seen stories about famous résumé cheats.

It’s pretty standard for job-seekers to fake… Their education, their experience, their skills, and their references.

So choosing who you interview based on their résumé means…You are probably using a couple pages of BS as your first step in hiring… the one person who is MOST responsible for creating your company income.

Not long ago, we were called in to help a large publicly traded religious broadcaster. This stations had good listener ratings. Very popular stations. But their sales were weak.

We analyzed their sales hiring practices. They hired salespeople 100% based on résumés, LinkedIn profiles and interviews. They ONLY interviewed and hired salespeople… whose résumé showed they were fired up with the station's religious mission.

But we know that the BEST salespeople are MOST motivated… By MONEY and/or POWER.

Religious views are not a significant factor in sales success.

Sales is about making sales. It's hard work. If your applicant is not motivated by the right things for sales… Then when the hard part comes (and it will)…

… They fade and stop doing the hard work. They have to deal with rejection time after time after time. To keep making calls, they have to REALLY want that money!

When their highest values don't match those of proven top sales performers… That is a BIG problem for you.

Solution?

Start using a values-based assessment to screen applicants. Stop wasting your time on applicants with beautiful résumés…Who are not money-motivated and who cannot sell.

If you're not getting the right kinds of salespeople on your team we've created a quick survey that will help you get it right.

The quiz will take you less than a minute to complete. It will help you laser in on what's keeping you from hiring the best salespeople.

Its our gift to sales managers who want a simple easy formula for hiring quality salespeople. Just click the link and you'll be taken to the short survey.

It'll give you the results instantly. Go ahead click the link and complete the survey now.

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Uncategorized

Why DISC Scores Consistenly Lead Sales Managers to Ruin

When I first came across DISC in 1989, I was skeptical about DISC. How could the 20-30 set of words in a DISC test help me recruit quality salespeople?

I had signed up for a marketing conference in L.A together with 200 other attendees. One of the presenters Jim Cecil, a Vistage coach, distrtibuted my first exposure to DISC .

It was pre-Internet so administering the test was quite different. in the end, 200 attendees to a $25,000 a seat conference were“ooing” and “ahing.”

Jim explained that DISC alone, is not enough to identify best sales candidate. Without an test to elicit Values, you won’t find top performers.

That said, I took that tool back to Virginia and we began running 100’s of profiles every month. And what I discovered very quickly was the version of DISC we were using was too difficult to use in sales hiring.

Today, sales hiring done right, means getting lasrge numbers of applicants.

We tell our clients 50 applicants per postion minmum. (We used to say 20-30 but applicants have become more clever at faking a track record of success.)

Using the version we had been using with its 20-30 pages of dialogue was too confusing. Plus the verbiage was open to interpretation in any number of different ways.

SInce 1989 I tested 14 different versions but never got closer to a tool that gave us “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

In 2003 I decided to create my own proprietary DISC. What I needed was a sales test that told me, “Should I call this applicant in for an interview or not?”

Most DISC tests have one fatal flaw: They are too vague because they are for many positions. That’s why the Advanced Hiring CORE Style Filtration Extractor(tm) is a sales-only.

We’re happy to share it with any sales manager who is sick and tired of being disappointed with their sales hires. Click the button below and we’re happy to show you an easier, more accurate way to use DISC.

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Talent Acquisition

Outsourcing Your Sales Department?

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

Outsourcing your sales department
Another bad idea

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

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