Interviewing

Sales Recruitng: The Intelligent Interview Sequence

It amazes me that so many sales managers think they can wing it in a hiring interview and get a quality salesperson.

Will not happen.

If you’re not prepared with the right attitude and the right questions you will waste your time and waste the applicants’ and only if you get darn lucky will you hire a quality performer.

Just because the applicant passed our profiles and has years of experience in you industry does not mean you hire them.

Yeah they definitely have the heart in the blood of a salesperson if they passed both AHS profiles: CORE Values and CORE Styles, but heart and blood don’t mean much if they won’t take consistent directed action.

Your purpose in the interviews to find out about that.

You can screen them like crazy, spot the faker and sales wannabes and get rid of those people right off the bat, but if your interview is weak you’re still going to end up with a team full of duds.

Our Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence is where you find out whether your application has taken their powerful talents and actually achieved something.

Most people squander their natural Talent. This is the norm. Thoreau said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I say, the sales personality is more likely than others to squander their talents and skills.

Selling is hard work, good salespeople who work hard use their natural talents to put themselves in situations to find business.

Weak salespeople use their natural talents to sell you in the interview and after they are hired they’ll continue to do it –selling you on how hard they’re working.

You’ve seen in before dozens of times it you’ve been a sales manager for a while.

Our Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence requires 3 to 4 separate interviews. People say, 3-4 interviews that’s crazy. No it’s not crazy.

You’ve got to outlast them.

Interview 1 is a throw away. They’ve got their guard up. Interview 2 you still don’t get high quality information. But by the third and fourth interview the applicant tells you things they only share with people that they have a relationship with.

Your goal is to discover whether they have stick to it ness, follow through and the ability to overcome adversity.

Can handle setbacks? The good news is you can keep those three to four interviews to a total of 2 hours if you do all four.

Most interviewers waste time with stupid questions like “Tell me about yourself? or “It says on your resume you hit 200% of quota at XYZ Companny.”

Don’t waste your time. Ask questions that are in the Advanced Hiring System FST Intelligence Interview Sequence. Be friendly but don’t sell. You just want the facts.

And that’s how you hire quality salespeople who’ll pick up the phone and do they work.

We’ve put together a short quiz that helps Sales Managers figure out the best way to hire quality salespeople. Click the button and take the short survey. It will take you less than a minute to complete. And based on the average deal size we’ll give you our recommendations on the best way to hire salespeople who do the work. Go ahead and click the button now and see for yourself what we’d recommend you do to hire quality sellers,

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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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Talent Acquisition

Why Top-Performing Sales Managers Build a Bench

Building a sales team, filled with salespeople who do the work is the goal of all great sales managers.

It really does happen. I’ve seen many dozens of sales teams run by great sales managers. The majority of their salespeople are producers.

Years ago, I had a conversation with one of the smartest entrepreneurs I’ve ever met that sticks in my mind.

Tony Renda, Sr owned a group of 13 radio stations. Tony had started out in sales management, as so many great entrepreneurs do.

Every one of his 13 stations was a top billing station in their market.

He told me his secret for building great sales teams in his stations.

He said, “When I visit my stations I always ask the sales manager to show me his bench. Does he have a list of sales applicants he’s recently interviewed? Is he proactively looking for new sales talent and does he have a system for building a team? If not, he’d better shape up.”

It’s sad but true that too many sales managers look at sales hiring with dread. It’s the thing you do when you HAVE TO, not as an ongoing strategy for improving.

Tony said, “If there had been a system like yours when I was a sales manager it would have made it so much easier. Your system does all the work. All the sales manager has to do is write a good ad and run it and your Advanced Hiring System does the rest for them.

Today there is no excuse for lack of continuous improvement in sales departments.

Remember the definition of the job of sales manager. “Recruit, train and motivate a sales team.”

Recruit comes first. It is the most leverageable of the functions of sales manager.

Training and motivating are important. But if you don’t have the right salespeople on your team, you are “Brick Polishing.” And in case you don’t know, you can polish a brick from now until doomsday, but it will never get shiny. A weak sales hire will never get strong.

The Advanced Hiring System AAPS Profiler Sequence is in use in more than 2000 companies. We’ve put together a short survey to help you decide the quickest way to improve the quality of your sales team. Take the survey to find the best way to build a great sales team for your company.

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