Paying Top Salesmen Well is Not Only Fair, It’s Good Business Sense

If you’ve recruited real salesmen (and not a faker), paying them well is not optional.

A compensation plan for real salesmen, needs to be designed so that salespeople who “kill it”, make a ton.

Advanced Hiring System clients understand this, but it bears repeating: top sales performers are what are called by Abraham Maslow “High Practical Personality styles.”

In short, top salespeople do not wake up in the morning, open their eyes and ask themselves “How can I serve humanity” — not gonna happen.

Top sales performers are money or power motivated. They are driven by wanting to gain a greater sense of control over their lives. In a free market economy (and we still have one, despite the efforts of our politicians), salespeople want more money in order to feel in control.

If you try to chisel a salesperson, if they are a real top performer, you might increase your profits short-term. Long term, they’re going to be looking for a new home where they can achieve their goals.

Weak salespeople, those who know deep down inside they are fake salespeople will accept lower pay. But those kinds of salespeople are a dime a dozen – and they are not real salespeople. In the old days we called them “cheeks in the seat”.” In the beginning when I did some work for Sprint, that’s all they wanted – people to “make dials”. But that’s not selling.

Selling is having the intuitive ability to help others to reach a favorable decision for our proposition. It is a rare skill to be able to really sell.  And yet, it is a skill that can be identified in a highly predictable way using the tools we’ve developed for our clients.

We heard recently one of our clients held members of his trade association’s annual meeting spellbound. He was talking about “the amazingly simple system they use to identify to hire “hunters” time after time. Thanks, Chris!

We’re always looking for new clients who realize that the only way out of the mess created by Washington or London is to hire top salesmen. Click here to take a free profile and find out more. Sales Managers or decision-makers, please.

Why Some Salesmen Top Out Below Where You Think They Can?

If this isn’t the oldest question in sales management, it’s the second oldest for sure.

How is it that some sales hires are so perfect in every way – they are persuasive and present themselves well – yet they never seem to make the big monthly numbers?

These are the ones we Sales Managers dedicate ourselves to – training them and cajoling, challenging and mentoring them.

Look back over your results with salespeople like this over your career as a Sales Manager

Tell me what you see? Did you get them to break out and really go for it? Or did they stay so average or slightly below average that you don’t really want to look that closely?

I bet the later because those kinds of salespeople are exhibiting values that people with low money or power scores in the AHS ValuesMatrix™ are likely to show.

Mr. and Ms Sales Manager, it is not your job (nor is it possible in most cases) to change another person’s values.

When Auburn’s line coach Tracy Roker recruited lineman Nick Fairly he was recruiting top talent. He invested time and energy in his recruiting strategy to get the kind of result that gets him a Vince Lombarbi Trophy Ourstanding Lineman.

There is no excuse for a bad sales hire.

So, in answer to the question “Why Some Salespeople Top Out Below Where You Think They Can?” the answer is because the Sales Manager hired the wrong person.

How to fix it? Spend more time mastering your sales recruiting system and you’ll get the salespeople who constantly meet and exceed your expectations. Anything less simply won’t get you want you really want as a Sales Manager.

As a student of sales hiring and sales management, I follow the work of quite a few trainers. One of the best is Jim Cecil.

I first met Jim Cecil when he was one of the key presenters at a week-long marketing event in Los Angeles. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said, “that was 20 years ago.” Seems like yesterday…

Jim is the “real deal”. Having lead hundreds of sessions for Vistage throughout his career, you don’t get to be a regular presenter for Vistage without being a true achiever in business.

Yet, despite his business mastery, Jim Cecil, is one of the most genuinely giving men you’ll ever have a conversation with. There’s not a sense in talking with him (as is so often the case of achievers of his caliber) of haughtiness. He gets a kick out of sharing his ideas on what makes sense in marketing and management.

This week as Jim and I were talking, he touched on two of his favorite topics: how to select top sales performers and how to get and keep customers.

On selecting top sales performers, Jim said, “We introduced the concept of using profiles nearly thirty years ago. And, yet, it’s incredible that the majority of small businesses still hire salespeople without profiling. It’s no wonder that so many sales departments have so many weak salespeople.”

True story: when I first heard Jim talk about the concept of user-profiles as a selection process in Los Angeles 20 years ago, it changed my view of hiring salespeople. As a result, I went on to build a team of 200 salespeople. The statistics on our team was unheard of at the time. We destroyed the 80/20 rule and had a much lower turnover rate than anyone else was achieving – I owe it all to the ideas Jim shared.

In my next post, I’ll publish some of Jim’s thoughts on one of his favorite topics next, “Drip Marketing – Or How to Get a Meeting With Anyone (And Why They’ll Be Looking Forward to the Meeting and Hearing Your Ideas.)”

If you have questions for Jim, post them here.