At least a couple times a week clients ask “What makes a good salesman, a good Natural or Adapted Style score?”

Before answering that question, let’s review the definitions of what the two styles mean.

Natural Style is the applicant’s “deep down” personality style. It is who they are off the job and how they see themselves. Natural style is least changeable during the course of our lives.  (It can change, however as the result of dramatic life change like birth of a child, death of a loved one, etc.)

Adapted Style is how the applicant sees themselves needing to behave in order to do their job effectively. It is a more fluid style and will change when applicants see the need to behave differently for different jobs.

Research by Judy Suiter and Dr David Warburton indicates that if there is a strong difference between the two graphs stress, mental health problems and job dissatisfaction can occur.

Advanced Hiring System encourages clients to place most emphasis on the having similar Natural and Adapted Styles. The exception to that is where the applicant is a recent graduate and has little experience in the work world.

Is There Really a “Sales Mindset” (And If So, Can It Be Trained?)

I think it’s easier to hire an MD than it is to hire new salesmen.

Think about it. I don’t know the statistics, but I’ll bet the percentage of MD’s who fail, is nowhere near 60%.

In sales hiring, average failure rate is right around 60%. That means that 2 out of 3 of your sales hires are mediocre or worse. If you can afford to carry mediocre salespeople then, maybe it gets to 1 out of 2.

Hiring for MD’s is straightforward. You need an applicant with a degree and specific training in the specialty you’re hiring for.

In sales there’s no degree and the ones who really are kicking butt in sales already aren’t applying for a new job because they’re already making a great living.  So what do you do?

Look for Sales Mindset and Then Train Them on Your Product

So what is the Sales Mindset? First it’s based on the applicant’s value’s – what is the first they think of when they get out of bed in the morning.

Top sales performers don’t wake up, open their eyes and say to themselves, “How can I serve humanity today?” — that is not a part of the Sales Mindset. Top performers are what are called “Practical Personality Styles.” They wake up and ask themselves where the money is and where the power is.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBS0OWGUidc]

Top performers (the ones that possess this Sales Mindset) have in addition to their innate ability to sell, a positive world view, a sense of stick-to-it-iveness, and the internal discipline to follow through.

Fortunately, there are profiles you can use to determine whether your applicant has the Sales Mindset. To try one of the profiles yourself follow this link and fill out the form. Sales Manager and CEO’s only, please.

Steps for Sales Managers Who’ve Let Their Salesmen Get Fat

A client told me the other day that in an effort to cut turnover over the last 2 bad years, they have pared down the size of their team. As a result, they created greater stability in the sales team. The remaining members of the sales team are doing very well financially servicing their renewal business.

His team is fat, dumb and happy.

At a sales management seminar a number of years ago, Dr. Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, was discussing motivation strategies. Bandler said that how we see ourselves determines how we act.  This, he said, is why pep talks don’t work – either the ones given to us or the ones we give ourselves.

This explains why, by nature, we get into patterns of behavior and do everything we can to maintain the status quo.

If your sales team has become accustomed to making their nut by servicing existing business you can forget new business development from them. They will not do it and will do everything in their power to keep things the way they are.

Bandler described an experiment done among the housekeeping staff at a hotel. They set up hidden cameras to watch the staff making the beds and cleaning the rooms in the hotel rooms.

Questions to the staff members about their weight revealed that 83% of fat staff members said they wanted to get more exercise to lose weight. Yet, when they watched the videos, fat staff members moved slower and made less movements in cleaning the room and making the bed compared to the thin staff members.

Overweight people in the study said they wanted to lose weight, but acted to preserved their fat by moving more slowly.

Fat Salesmen Don’t Hunt

If you’ve allowed your team to live off renewal business during the past 2 tough years, don’t think you can change things with them. The only solution to getting new business is to hire new sales team members.

Fortunately, now is a great time to recruit new sales talent. Take a free profile to learn how we can easily predict whether your applicants have the heart and blood of a top performer. Sales Managers and CEO’s Only. Thanks