If you’re in the position where you do the sales hiring for your company, you probably have your own idea of what makes a good salesman. But if you find that your sales hires are unsuccessful more than one out of four times, maybe you should re-think your criteria. Different sales managers look for different things in their sales team, but the essential factor is that the new hire will be a good fit with the rest of the sales team and the company.

Successful selling is not a learned skill; it’s a natural talent. Many sales managers look within their own ranks to find someone with superior knowledge of the company and put them on the sales team. Sometimes this strategy works, if you’re lucky enough to have chosen someone who has the natural sales ability on top of product knowledge. But more often than not, the person can’t make the transition. Let’s face it: it’s easier to hire someone and teach them about your product than it is to try to teach someone how to sell.

Looking a little deeper into the question of what makes a good salesman, we find that there are many personality traits that can define success. I’d like to take a little time to explore each characteristic more in depth; then you can decide which elements are most important to you and your company.

Passion, not Pressure

I’m not talking about the kind of passion that focuses on one person, object, or pastime; I’m talking about an element that infuses every cell of a person so that they practically radiate energy. Passion is a quality that some people have and others don’t. No one can pretend to have it, but it can be developed under the right circumstances.

You can always spot a person with passion—she behaves as if every minute counts, every place has meaning, and every person is the most important person in the world. Once a person with passion enters into a sales relationship with a customer, she is virtually irresistible. Isn’t that what makes a good salesman? Really?

How does passion affect the selling process? Well, in the first place, it can be infectious. When a salesperson emanates passion in the product she’s selling, the customer gets the message that this is an extraordinary product. In short, the salesperson’s excitement about the product is communicated to the customer subliminally.

When you love your job, people respond to you in a positive way. A salesperson with passion loves her job. She’s enthusiastic about what she’s selling and what it can do for her customer.  There are too many duds out there who just go through the motions of making a customer happy. If they see the sale going south, they’re likely to resort to pressuring the customer. That customer may end up buying the product—or not—but in either case, you’ll end up with a customer who’s not happy.

If you’re building a sales team, remember that passion is a significant measure of what makes a good salesman.  It may not show up on the sales personality test, but you’ll be able to spot it during the interview process. These people have a vision of a successful future for themselves, which translates to a successful future for your company. And once you’ve added one or two people with passion to the sales team, who knows? Passion is contagious, after all!

No disrespect intended, but when it comes to sales hiring, the best use of an applicant’s résumé may be for taking notes during the interview. While a résumé may sometimes be a true representation of how well a candidate will fit into your company, more often it’s just a lot of words meant to dazzle you because someone wants a job. Here’s the sad fact: just because someone wants a job doesn’t mean they want to work.

I know, it seems like a sacrilege to take that document that the candidate put so much work into, and treat it like scratch paper, but that’s just the point. This candidate did put a lot of work into the résumé—or he paid someone else to put in a lot of work—all to present himself (or herself) in the best possible light. But, as anyone who understands the ins and outs of sales hiring knows, it takes more than good light to warrant a place among the ranks of good salesmen.

It’s a little like those gorgeous models in magazines. Sure, they seem absolutely perfect on those glossy pages, but if you happen to see them on the street without the makeup, the hair styling, the lighting, and the air-brushing, you probably won’t even recognize them. In other words, in real life, they’re a disappointment.

If you’re responsible for the sales hiring in your company, think of the résumé as the air-brushed version of a candidate’s qualifications. This person thinks he has a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for, so he may embellish his responsibilities a little, exaggerate about his skill set a little, and gloss over some details that might not make him look good to you. In many cases, some of the information is downright deception; we’ve all heard about those high-profile cases where “respectable” people have been exposed for lying on their résumés.

Considering the fact that most information on résumés can be easily verified (but who has the time to chase down every detail?), it’s surprising that so many people still bend the truth about things like their academic degrees, companies they have worked for, and sometimes even their own family background. One survey of hiring managers revealed that as many as 60% of the résumés they receive have at least one lie, and some of them are really whoppers. That means that only 40% were honest portrayals of the applicants—unless, of course they were more talented with their lying than the ones who got caught.

On the other hand, a candidate who’s a potential top performer may not have the creative skills to produce an impressive résumé. All the key attributes that good salesmen possess—the values, the motivation, the focus on top performance—are qualities that can’t really be put down on paper.  If, in your sales hiring, you rule out an applicant based solely on his lackluster résumé, you could be missing out on the opportunity to enrich the sales culture of your company, and you may end up instead with another disappointment. But he had a great résumé!

We live in an age where we get information in quick blurbs and sound bites. Print media sales are way down; quick data handheld electronics are king. We race and we rush in order to thrive and succeed. It may seem like the most successful business people wouldn’t dare waste time reading books anymore, but that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Successful business people – including salesmen and saleswomen — are almost always voracious readers. Not only do they read books, they read a great deal of them with themes essential to their success. If you want to hire top performing salesmen, one of your interview questions has got to be “What do you read?”

Why Are Readers More Successful?

Part of being top salesmen is having the right mindset. Sales success begins with thinking and believing you are successful, as well as learning from those who have reached success already. When salesmen spend time reading books about being successful, about making money, about gaining power in their sales careers — those are the thoughts in their minds when they come to work every day.

Successful business people are constantly reading about other successful business people. They apply what they learn to their own lives until they achieve their own goals. You want to hire sales people with these reading interests because they are constantly filling their minds with inspirational information directly applicable to the job they do for you. Building a sales team of readers is a very wise move for consistent business growth.

What Are Top Sales Performers Reading?

New motivational books about business and reaching goals are published every year, but there are some popular titles you should know. Below is a list of some of the most highly regarded books and authors that successful salesmen read. Some of these titles are specifically business related, while others are about attracting success and prosperity. Many of these authors have additional important titles, as well.

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
• Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

Top salesmen will probably tell you they also read a lot of memoirs of successful people and fiction featuring protagonists who overcome great challenges to conquer all.

During the job interview, ask each applicant what they’ve read in the past six months. Think twice about an applicant who isn’t consistently reading books that will keep their motivation high. Hire sales people who take pride in the motivational and informational books they read.

Consider assigning a reading list to each person you hire. Training sales people can be that much more rewarding with a book list as part of the program. When training sales people for specific types of sales roles or responsibilities, you could choose book topics with applicable themes. You might even start a sales team book club for inspired discussions and idea swapping. Building a sales team that reads together creates a sales team that excels together.