The AHS Sales Hiring Interview Module

Client Jay Siff at MovingTargets offered a comment the other day in a regular client service that caught me by surprise. Jay’s a smart guy, runs a couple of successful businesses and has been a client for over six years now.

We were reviewing some profiles together on his sales candidates. I reminded him to use the 4-Part AHS Interview Module. Jay asked “What’s that?”

I was a bit shocked that after six years he didn’t know about the Interview Module. Its one of the most important pieces of the Advanced Hiring System. Its also one of the most valuable parts of the AHS System. It is free to clients.

Maybe that’s the problem. We should charge for it. Ten years ago the CEO of an executive search firm told me the 4 Part AHS Interview Module would be a $10,000 consulting project if they did it. True.

So what is this valuable Interview Module?

The Interview Module is a step by step interview strategy. It contains four separate interview scripts together with the answers and rationale behind what you are looking for.

Using the AHS system profiles, you have filtered your applicants down to the three best candidates. If you have less than three good candidates before you start interviewing you should go back to the Recruiting stage.

In the Interview stage you want to be comparing applicants. That’s one of the keys to hiring a top sales performer – you want be interviewing more than one “Money Motivated Persuader” applicant.

The Interview Module gives you a way to compare and grade the quality of your applicants You want to interview each applicant according to the script contained in the module. Don’t ad lib your sales hiring interview. Deliver the script so you can get past the deadly “they handled themselves well” or “they got past our screener well.”

The point of the interview is to find whether your applicant has demonstrated the qualities of:

• Stick-to-it-iveness
• Follow through
• Ability to overcome adversity
• Ability to manage their internal state
• Entrepreneurialism

Applicants who can give you examples in their life experience where they have demonstrated these personality characteristics are who you are looking for. The best salespeople have these qualities in spades. And you need them – especially now after the morons in Washington have gotten done wrecking the economy.

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.

Why A System to Hire Sales People Slowly Makes Sense

A series of messages with client Stuart Prentice of First European Ltd in Scotland prompted me this message. I had asked him for his impression of business conditions in the UK. He responded:

“Alan the business and general environment are poor and in my opinion will get worse. Property values still need to fall into line with incomes and when that happens properly there will be far more pain. The stock market is pumped up by low interest rates and governments printing money. Ireland. Portugal and Spain will almost certainly default on their obligations at some point and I would think and then the Euro comes into question.

How these things will play out who knows but they all add to a lack of confidence and well being that we used to have in our professional lives. We have scaled our business down, are taking less risks and lowered our costs. I’ll take people on however I haven’t employed anyone for 6 months despite the fact I run ads and go through testing. I have 4 people in my bank who I would employ if I was more confident but I am doing as you suggest and making recruitment an ongoing programme rather than a reaction to a problem.

I have been enjoying your blogs about the run training. Everything you say is bang on. I do triathlon and much of my mental strength from the last few years has been taken from my sport. People talk to me about triathlon and ask how I can do it. They seem amazed that at man at 47 years old can compete in long distance triathlon events. To be honest compared to running a business I find it incredibly easy. I wish business was as simple as getting up in the morning to do some training !!”

There’s an old sales manager’s adage “Hire Slowly, Fire Quickly.” In today’s rocky environment you don’t want to have to rush to a sales hiring decision. In fact, in any environment moving systematically is something that makes sense. Since the beginning we called it Advanced Hiring System for a reason.

But there’s a caution here – it’s “Hire Slowly” not “Never.”

We’re a bit perplexed and we think some sales managers have put sales hiring on indefinite hold. In fact, our surveys show that quite a few are making no effort to recruit new talent.

This is going to bite those sales managers who are not recruiting in the butt in a couple of ways.

1. Growth in a sales team encourages new ways of thinking. New sales blood finds new ways to sell the market. Stop looking for new sales talent and face “sales idea stagnation.”
2. If the economy starts to take off you want some momentum going in your sales department. (Believe me, if a $1.5 Trillion U.S. Government deficit doesn’t cause some growth in the near future we’re all royally screwed)  When the stimulus from the deficit hits all the other sales manager who’re sleeping is going to start to try to hire salespeople, they will all be fighting for the second rate salespeople.