What do we do about it?
If you are using the same hiring process for sales that you use for all he other positions you must be frustrated. Below is the typical broken sales hiring process.
- Place an add
- Review piles of resumes
- Interview for the top candidate
- Hope and Pray
Most ads are written to attract top sales staff, don’t get it done. The typical add describes the opportunity, the benefits and the company. They all look the same.
Resumes are really just third party brochures either written by an app or and advertisement for the candidate. What is NOT on the resume is more important than what is on the resume.
Sales candidates are good at first impressions and are often more comfortable in interviews than the interviewer. The look good, sound good, act good, then when you hire them they can’t sell a Hershey bar to a 3 year old.
Hope is not a strategy and prayer does not stop hiring mistakes.
So what can you do? Change the way you identify, attract, screen, interview, and on-board stronger sales hires.
Identify: What have you done to identify the qualities, characteristics and skills necessary to succeed selling to: your markets, in what positions of the organization, with your sales cycle, with your price points, with your management, in your products and services?
Attract: Stop talking about the opportunity and write creative adds that attract your ‘ideal’ sales person.
Screen: Are you using a third party Candidate Assessment that accurately predicts success based on your company? Click here for a Free Trial of the worlds best Candidate Assessment. Interviewing is only 14% accurate. Increase your odds by 92% with the most accurate and only Candidate Assessment Validated within Sales, not something borrowed into sales from other places.
Interview: You must covertly identify skills and turn the interview into an audition. Salespeople tell you what you they think you want to hear. Don’t ask if they are willing to prospect. Ask, this instead,. We have a territory that is now producing $X and we would expect this territory to produce $X+. If we make an offer and your accept, how will you go about growing this territory? Of course there are another 50 questions we’d recommend but there is not enough space here. If you want to know more about this just e-mail me.
On-boarding: Do you know what the new hire should be able to do at week five? How bout the end of week 2? What about week 11? There should be a very strong detailed 90 day on-boarding plan.
If you’d like to know more about how we successfully help companies hire stronger sales staff please contact me!
#GoodSelling