When you first hire salespeople for your company, you hope you’ve made good choices. If you’ve used the Advanced Hiring System, odds are 3 to 1 that you’ve made some excellent hires. They begin to show their promise right away, and there’s a spirit of friendly competitiveness that fills the workplace with electricity—and customer orders.

 Before you pat yourself on the back, however, you need to accept the challenge of keeping that momentum going. And it is a challenge. If the work environment becomes stagnant, your great sales force sometimes loses the energy that they started out with. After all, according to the system’s personality profile, you hire salespeople who are highly motivated, independent thinking, top performers, and they love a challenge. If they reach a point where the challenge is no longer there, they may lose some of the spark that has driven them to be top performers.

It’s called complacency, and it can lead to mediocre efforts if it’s not addressed. Of course it’s a worst-case scenario, but after you hire salespeople, if any of them get to the point where they have achieved all their goals, and they feel satisfied with the level of compensation they are receiving, they may begin to lose some of their drive to sell, letting someone else handle any extra leads. You may not see a drop in sales, but you won’t see the growth charts climb, either.

That’s one reason why it’s important for sales managers and employers to maintain a recruitment mentality and continue to hire salespeople—to infuse the sales team with new blood, new ideas, and new challenges. When there are more people competing for the money and the power, the true sales personality feels challenged to push on.

Many times, the need to hire salespeople on a regular basis stays consistent.  Some of your top performers retire, so you need to replace them. Some of them move or move on, and some of them burn out. (Those are the few who somehow managed to slip through the AHS cracks.) There may even have been some duds whom you had to let go. In these cases, your turnover rate remains consistent and you just naturally have to keep hiring new talent.

But what if none of that is occurring? If you crunch the numbers, wouldn’t it be a good idea to continue to hire salespeople on a regular basis? Since you’re more likely than not to end up with another top performer, it will boost your sales figures, and make you more money than it will cost you. Not just because the new hire is bringing in more sales, but because the rest of the sales force is suddenly magically revitalized—they don’t want the “new guy” to steal any of their thunder.

If you need another reason to hire salespeople on a regular basis, how about this one? If there are any top performers out there, you have a better chance of snagging them before your competition does.  That will leave the opposition team stuck with the B players. What a shame.

When faced with the prospect of sales hiring, the challenge that keeps managers up at night is whether or not they’re hiring the right people. Sales hiring is especially tricky, because there are so many people out there who believe they have what it takes, but once they’re put to the task, they fail miserably. If you’re getting too many of these types of applicants, and not enough of the superstars you’re looking for, maybe you’re not using the right bait.

As an example, let’s say you’re a lonely single guy, and your mother has this friend who has this niece, and they both think the two of you would be a great match. You’ve kind of been looking, so you ask, “What’s she like?”

The answer? “She has a nice personality.”

You run the other way.

Why? Because they used the wrong bait. Their answer really didn’t tell you anything about the girl, and now your imagination is filling in all the gaps with some very unattractive details. Now you won’t even give the poor girl a chance.  For all you know, this could be a wonderful person—your soul mate, even—but you’ll never know because the lack of specifics chased you away.

Now let’s take this analogy and use it in a sales hiring scenario. If you just place some kind of generic “help wanted” ad, and you say something like, “a great company to work for,” it’s very likely that your best prospects will run the other way and you’ll have no chance of hiring the right people. They don’t want to buy into the promise of a great place to work unless they have some idea of why it’s a great place to work—if that’s even the truth.

Concrete evidence. That’s what the best sales personality is looking for. He usually knows what he’s worth to a company, so he doesn’t have to apply for dozens of openings. He doesn’t want to waste time going through the process for a company that might or might not turn out to be a good fit. In sales hiring, if you want this type of applicant, it’s your responsibility to provide the concrete evidence he needs.

The best place for this evidence is in a galvanizing headline. Since most prospects won’t even read an ad unless it has a headline that grabs their attention, this is the most important part of your ad. Choosing a tantalizing detail about your company and highlighting it in a headline will provide the perfect “carrot” to attract job seekers into reading the rest of your ad. You’ll want to invest plenty of time and thought in this process, and you can use the examples in the ad writing module of the AHS sales hiring system to inspire you.

 Once your headline has lured the prospect into reading the rest of the ad, use the keywords that apply to what makes a good salesman. Pepper the ad with sales hiring words like Persuasive, Enthusiastic, Independent, Strong-willed, etc., and the applicant will think he’s reading a description of himself. Subsequently, he’ll try to be the first applicant through your door, whether it’s real or virtual.

Inviting sales applicants to take a pre employment assessment test online is an efficient way to begin the interview process. This sales test evaluates salesmen for common values and personality traits. When you know how to hire a salesperson with these online tools, you’ll have better hiring results.

It’s best to conduct the online pre employment assessment test in two phases. You invite them to take the “ValuesMatrix” sales test first. Then you invite them to complete the second and final phase called the “StylesMatrix” profile.

Create an efficient plan for sending testing invitations by using unique email addresses and implementing auto-responders. When applicants reply to your job postings via email, you will provide them with the information they need for testing access. How to hire a salesperson more efficiently begins here.

Phase One — Auto-Response Invitation to the First Sales Test

Salesmen and women who express interest in your job listing via email receive an auto-response from you with instructions. You’ll want to set up a unique email address where this specific auto-response can be attached.

In the body of the auto-response email, ask for the applicant’s name and contact information. You also want to explain briefly why and how the testing process needs to take place.

Here’s a quote from the AHS Sales Hiring Course, with specific wording you might use for this particular auto-response in phase one.

“Thank you for your response to our opportunity at YOUR COMPANY.

The first step in our hiring process is to complete a short

Personality Profile that gives us a better idea of your qualifications for sales.

Below is the link for you to complete the profile survey.

When you get to the site just complete the required fields.

When you finish the survey we will get the results.

After that your application will enter the next stage of

our interview process.” – AHS Sales Hiring Course Materials

With the above wording, you have explained to the applicant that a sales test is required for applying to your company. You have also prepared them for the fact that the sales test has two stages. You’ll learn pretty quickly that how to hire a salesperson serious about working for you means weeding out some of the weaker candidates early on.

Phase Two – Online Invitation to the Second Sales Test

Once the “ValuesMatrix” testing has been completed, you’ll send an additional email inviting the applicant to the final test. Let the applicants know that receiving the results of this second test will put them into the final stages of the hiring process.

How to hire a salesperson with this method is explained in more detail in the AHS Sales Hiring Course member links. You’ll want to assign specific test passwords to each applicant and apply other AHS tips to keep this sales test approach working smoothly.

Many job seekers apply for positions via email these days, so this is fast becoming an efficient way to conduct testing. When you want to know how to hire a salesperson more effectively, try this idea with your next job postings. The candidates without the desired values and traits can be sent a respectful rejection letter. The job candidates with satisfactory scores will graduate to the interview process.