Sales Managers: Watch This Video of a 737 Landing For a Sales Hiring Lesson

If the statistics are accurate, as a profession, sales managers hire 1 great salesperson for every 3 or 4 hires. Contrast this to commercial airline pilots who successfully land 50,000 to 70,000 planes a day.

Sales Managers: We “bat” anywhere from .250 to .300. Pretty bad. This “sales hiring failure” rate hurts:

• your reputation as a manager and leader
• sales as a profession
• your company
  • lost revenue
  • lost salary to the bad hires
  • lost reputation in your markets
  • poor morale in your sales department
• our clients miss a chance to take advantage of our company’s products and have to settle for our competitor’s inferior offering
• the poor shlub you hire
  • is wasting his or her time
  • hates their job
  • doesn’t make any real money
  • in truth should never have gone into sales

Here’s why pilots succeed:

Because they know their decision is a life or death situation. Pilots have developed a system with a series of benchmarks. They check those benchmarks off every single time.

Haven’t you suffered enough hiring salespeople the old fashion way?

Check out this amazing video

Writing Ads to Hire Sales people — Do You Make This Mistake in Writing Ads to Hire Salespeople?

When I first started hiring salespeople I didn’t pay very much attention to writing the ad for hiring salespeople. Back then I took the attitude that if they weren’t motivated enough to seek me out to heck with them.

Today I realize that was a big mistake. 

Why? Because top salespeople don’t grow on trees. Top salespeople are a rare and precious commodity – and they are essential to my success in my business.

My thinking — that top salespeople were going to figure out that I was the kind of company they should want to work — for was foolish.

As a result of this mistake, I was required to have to sift through way too many duds. But even more deadly to my effort to find those super salespeople is that they never even considered me.

Let me explain:

We all have a certain image of ourselves – ways we describe ourselves to ourselves, if you will.

What makes top salespeople different is first of all what happens inside themselves. And how they communicate to themselves about themselves is different from what the average salespersons does.

If I think of myself as a unique, special top-performer type salesperson, then the standard ad is simply not going to get me interested enough to apply.

Don’t kid yourself, most ads for salespeople are simply horrible. I joke in seminars that most ads for salespeople look like they were written by people who hate salespeople. Unfortunately, it’s not really a joke.

Check it out yourself, as a sales manager when you see someone who’s a great salesperson what do you think? Something like “Wow, he or she is really effective, they’re so in control of their communication.”

But people who are not salespeople’s reaction is, “they are such salespeople, so superficial.”

So the next time you decide it’s time to take steps to grow your sales by improving your sales team, be sure that someone who respects sales as a profession writes the ad for salespeople.

Those wondering how to hire employees and have taken any type of sales training has heard the acronym “ABC.” It means Always Be Closing.

So now you’ve “graduated” to Sales Manager. Your job description in a nutshell is “To recruit, train and motivate the sales department.”

The first part of your job description is to recruit. I would like to suggest, that just like in sales we need to always be closing (looking for how to help convert the prospect into a client), in Sales Management. we ought to always be looking for top sales talent for our teams. In other words Always Be Recruiting

“Even when you have a full staff always be recruiting for salespeople”

The time to start looking for your next salesperson is not when you’re down one or two salespeople. In fact, there couldn’t be a worse time to start looking.

Desperation when hiring a salesperson causes Sales Managers to say and do things in a shortsighted way. Worse, in most cases it will prevent you from building a great sales team.

Instead, the great Sales Managers set realistic recruitment goals for their team every year.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How many new sales positions will I add?
• How many applicants will I need to reach my goal? Where will I get these applicants?
• How can I put this on “remote control,” so I only spend time interviewing the best candidates?
• Now is the time to sit down and outline your Hiring System. Commit a plan to writing.

Always Be Recruiting means build yourself a “bench” of potential top performers. Or at the least, to have an ongoing recruitment process so that you’ve got a stack of resumes in your middle drawer ready to draw from.

The only way out of this economy is to sell your way out of it. Improve your sales team quality by Always Be Recruiting.