‘When you’re recruiting, resist the urge to grant a face to face interview to applicants who aggressively get past your receptionist.

When you are running a Hiring “Module” and are really looking hard for new salespeople, resist granting face to face interviews before testing applicants. Even if the candidate effectively gets past your receptionist and gets you on the phone, politely resist the urge!

Send them through your hiring system first — have them complete a ValuesMatrix and a Styles profile in order to get a good salesperson profile.

There is an important principle of Scientific Hiring at work here:

Although it is true that skillfully getting past a blocker is important in sales, it is only one of many skills required of a salesperson. You are looking for “complete” salespeople, not just those that are good in certain areas.

If you need some reinforcement on this decision, remind yourself of all the salespeople who you’ve hired in the past who had gotten past your receptionist — and then failed.

Commit to a hiring system. A system is a series of actions that cause a desired result  When you do this you have committed to having the best sales team possible. Only through creating a system, setting up rules and following through on these rules will you get a great  sales team.

Shortcut your system and you’ll be back in the same boat with the rest of the Sales Managers who hire 1 good salesperson out of every 4 hires!