…self made sales hiring problems and resources to FIX IT!
First of all, I’d like to just take a quick moment to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. It’s certainly one of my favorite holidays to share with family and friends.
In today’s blog we’ll do our best to over use the phase from the NFL “C’mon Man” and give you some important sales lessons about sales hiring with the cadence of a few of the latest Ford Truck commercials.
So your made the decision to stop making sales hiring mistakes, and you put someone who doesn’t have any sales experience in charge of getting information for you from three companies to help you stop the hiring mistakes. C’mon Man! How can someone who doesn’t have any sales experience weed out the imposters from the pros? This is not a decision that should be delegated.
Ok let’s suppose you go that route anyway and you get three reputable companies that sound like they have a sales hiring processes and sales candidate assessment tools. Now you meet with each one and then you find the one with the most credibility for sales is also the most expensive and you decide you can try one of the lower priced tools and see if it helps. C’mon man! You know you get what you pay for and you know hiring mistakes are costing you three to four times the annual pay for one sales person. Try our Sales Mistake Calculator is you want to know your exact cost of sales hiring mistakes.
Alright, (remember the cadence of the Ford Truck Commercial) lets say you complete you due diligence by taking a Free Trail of each of the three potential vendors but, you do it on yourself. C’mon Man! You don’t sell today. You are not in the game and the game today is not what it was last week. You find one made you feel good about yourself. One was like a horoscope. And the other challenged your selling skills, your Will to Sell, and the hidden and invisible weaknesses that neutralize your strengths and has a 92 % success rate. And this one, yeah that’s right this one suggested you weren’t right for the job. First you say to yourself, ‘Self this tells me I’m right for this job. But I did this job for a while and I did it successfully.” C’mon Man!
Isn’t that what you’d expect? You don’t sell anymore. You don’t prospect every day. You don’t have to over come objections. You don’t have to sell to make your monthly bills. You don’t have to compete with other sales people for internal resources. You don’t have to sell value and build trust anymore. You did, but you don’t now. That’s the key phase here, you did! Then you pick the one that has the longest running success in sales. The one that was built in sales, validated in sales and has over 1MM sales people in their data base.
Then you get things set up. You start testing candidates but you don’t follow the guidelines of the company you hired as the experts to help you. You want to do it your way. The way that didn’t work! C’mon Man!
Ok, you finally get through some positive change with your sales hiring process! You begin attracting, screening, interviewing and hiring candidates. You get an on-boarding report for your new hire with the package, but you don’t demand your sales managers use the report as a basis for the first 90 Day on-boarding plan. C’mon Man! You can’t take part of the prescription and expect to heal. Nobody is perfect and all sales people need consistent on-gong Coaching.
Ok, now lets move on. You’ve demanded your Sales Managers use the on-boarding and coaching report but they don’t know how to effectively coach. C’mon Man. You wouldn’t put a Nascar Driver in the pilot seat of a 747 for your executive team so why would you expect your Sales Manager to be able to Coach effectively unless they have been trained and it’s proven they can execute?
So let’s review: If you want to hire stronger sales staff and upgrade your team by hiring truly STRONGER sales, sales managers, and VP of sales follow these steps:
Define your ideal candidate – Stronger that your current team.
Attract the RIGHT Candidate with non-traditional adds and sources.
Screen them with a customized Candidate Assessment
Complete a five-minute phone screen to disqualify candidates.
Turn the first interview into an audition.
Make sure your comp. plan is competitive.
Perform your second interview and sell the opportunity.
Make the offer
On-board them with a strict 90 day On-Boarding Plan
Hold them Accountable
Never stop Coaching and raising the bar!
Or just email me some open times in your calendar and we’ll talk about how to help you.
#GoodSelling,
Rocky LaGrone
Head Coach & CEO
Sales Development Expert