When you’re a sales manager, you generally wear a lot of different hats, but you wish you could leave your sales hiring hat it the closet. You have to develop and implement marketing strategies, prepare action plans, oversee sales tactics, keep an eye on expenses, monitor goals and profitability, and provide feedback to your salesmen. And that’s just the short list!
Your job keeps you running hither and yon, doing this and that, with barely enough time to catch your breath. That’s why many sales managers consider sales hiring to be an intrusion on their routine. And, if the new sales hire doesn’t work out for some reason, you end up with more work than if you had never made the hire in the first place.
Granted, using the Advanced Hiring System to hire sales people takes some time if you do it right, but consider this: the success rate of old-fashioned methods of sales hiring is only 1 successful hire out of 4. Isn’t it worth it to invest a little more time in a process that will bring you 3 successful hires out of 4? When you have that kind of success rate you can concentrate on getting your job done, instead of running around putting out the fires started by a bad hire.
Of course, no hiring system is perfect; if it were, the success rate for sales hiring would be 4 out of 4! When you make the effort to follow the path laid out by AHS and do the right kind of targeted recruiting, use a sales personality test to screen the applicants for candidates that fit the salesperson profile, and conduct a scripted interview using your “engineer persona,” you will be rewarded with salesmen who are energetic, focused, and creative. Moreover, they will be quick thinkers who can solve problems for themselves, instead of running to the sales manager. . . you . . . at every little bump in the road.
The truth is, a bad hire costs more than your time and effort. If someone is not pulling his weight, it seems that the salary, training expenses, and benefits package he receives are just money tossed out the window. That amounts to tens of thousands of dollars. Factor in lost customers and sales opportunities, and the figure can soar upward to the triple digits. If you decide to un-hire a bad hire, there is the problem of an increase in your company’s unemployment rate to make this misstep even more expensive. PLUS, you have to begin the sales hiring process all over again. There’s just no way that anyone can win with a bad hire.
