Can Using a Sales Hiring System Really Help You to Hire Sales People Who Really Can Sell?

Since 2000, I’ve been asking clients the question, “What is your Sales Hiring Success Rate?”

I’ve come to believe that the dirty dark secret in sales management is Sales Managers are struggling when it comes to recruiting and hiring salespeople. When pressed on their strategy for sales hiring, most will point to their training strategies, their account management strategies, their leadership ability and all the things that happen after bringing a new team member on board.

It’s a case of the cart before the horse, yet as an industry we can’t see it for the life of us.

Hire better salespeople and you can count on better sales results

Let’s talk about sports teams.

Bear with me, because this is going to be an important lesson. First of all sports teams are something we are all familiar with. They are extremely public organizations. Newspapers, websites and sports radio blab on 24/7 about them. They are easy to follow.

Sports and sales are related, but did you ever think about what is the real similarity?

Sales teams and sports teams are evaluated based on immediate results. What you did yesterday on the field has no bearing on today’s game. Sports teams live in the Now of immediate results. And so do sales teams.

The kind of individual who can deal with the constant pressure of immediately measurable results is the kind of person who can thrive in a sports team. And this is a rare individual. Leave aside the physical characteristics because there are many who have those characteristics but still fail as athletes.

Now consider that sports teams spend considerable resources constantly recruiting for that rare individual who can be an athlete. They realize that without constant recruiting they are dead. Because they are looking for a rare type of person.

Did you ever stop to realize that sales is the same way? Great salespeople have a rare personality style.

Personality is not something we can train. You either is or you isn’t. And if you don’t believe that, think of all the duds you’ve hired who started out great but six months later are dog meat in your company. They didn’t have the personality and over time they had to fail. We can’t fake who we are deep down inside.

Bottom Line:  who you put on your sales team is so much more important than anything else you can do.

Hiring Salespeople is Like Training for a Marathon

Anyone who has ever crossed the finish line of a 26.3 mile marathon knows how it is a life changing event. Less than 50% of those who begin a marathon achieve their goal

Son: What does running a marathon and hiring a sales team have to do with each other?
Dad: Everything, son. Everything

Running a marathon requires daily attention to daily mileage goals. You can skip a day every once in a while. Skip two and your odds of success fall dramatically.

Successful sales hiring is also built from the ground up. Step by step we build. First placing ads, then profiling all applicants and finally only interviewing those applicants that have passed the profiles. We exercise discipline in our interview, as we interview each of the three applicants who pass both profiles.

Some managers tire of the process and try to skip steps. They often try to select applicants by scanning resumes. They think they are saving time, but in the end their team is made up of mediocre players. They try to patch that by giving rah-rah motivation.

Just like training for a marathon, half steps always lead to failure. Skip steps, try and train sporadically and you’ll be lucky to cross the finish line running. In all likelihood you’ll be out of the race.

Note: Alan ran The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Marathon, his first marathon, in 2001 at age 48. This year he’s training for the Tel Aviv Marathon at age 58.

How to Conduct an Interview by Understanding They Lie

Screening applicants (deciding who to talk with) and interviewing well are critical to hiring well. Yet most sales managers charged with conducting sales hiring interviews commit some fundamental errors.

The result is they don’t get to find out enough about who the applicant really is — only who they are appearing to be.

Screening sales applicants – a quick overview:

You can conduct the best sales interview in the world, but if you dropped your best applicant because of a weak screening process your interview won’t matter that much.

Screening comes first. Unfortunately most average managers think screening means looking for the following from a stack of resumes:

• good looking resume
• previous sales experience
• previous industry sales experience
• no typos.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Sorry. If this is how you screen applicant, all the interview tips in the world won’t make a difference. Why? Because you are probably interviewing the wrong applicants.

Enough about screening, on to interviewing…

Your Sales Hiring Success Ratio Will Go up By 50%!

You should be talking to three good applicants in the interview process. No less and probably no more.

There. That’s simple. How many managers pick one applicant and interview him or her and think they’re hiring right? Most. How many sales hires fail? Three out of four. Oops.

Script your sales hiring interview like a 777 pilot scripts his takeoff

An important sales interview tip to make here is when you invite each applicant in for a first interview have a script to follow.

Be sure not to ask the obvious (need we say stupid) questions. Google “Google “sales interview”.  There are tons of coaches out there who will easily prepare your applicant for the dumb questions.

Make sure your questions force the applicant to give you examples from their life experience. Some of their experience, particularly if they are young applicants might not be from their sales career. That’s OK.

As a green salesperson I didn’t see anything odd about making sales calls on Saturday when I sold radio advertising. My retail clients were there and none of the other salespeople in my industry were competing for their time. Being young and green in sales is not a bad thing.

Give your applicant time to get comfortable then hit them

Plan to conduct at least three and preferably four separate interviews on each applicant. Make sure you have a script, but they can be the same questions all along. Obviously, though, phrase them differently.

What is this about? The first two interviews are throwaways. They provide low-quality information. The applicant is on their guard. By the third and forth interview they are more comfortable and are telling the truth.

Now’s your chance to give a grade

Grade their answers for each question in your script. A to F, 100 to 0, doesn’t matter. Tally the scores. The best scoring should get the job.