In this issue:

Step 2 - Attracting the Right Candidates

In all of our years of writing sales employment ads, we have discovered two keys to follow every time.  The first key is to always write your ad with the ideal salesperson in mind.  This approach sounds simple but it is rarely followed.  The specific role accomplishments that lead to success will flow from the Profile of the Sale.  That information is then used to describe the ideal candidate through the aptitudes, skills and style that the job rewards.

Do you require them to prospect at the Vice President-level or at the end-user level?  Is your market filled with numerous competitors or are there a select few in every deal?  The point is stay focused on specific attributes that will lead to the desired successes in the role.  Do not get trapped by focusing on your top salesperson today.  Instead, focus on the salesperson description that flows out of profiling your ideal sale.  What will define success from this day forward?

If your ideal sale starts at the VP level, state in your ad that a needed skill is the ability to communicate at the VP level.  If your sale involves many competitors, state in your ad that the successful candidate is able to close deals in a competitively crowded market.  You get the idea – stay focused on the successes you desire from the salesperson in this role.  The primary goal of the ad should be to move the sales superstar to respond.  They should see themselves, or better yet their abilities, in the ad – the skills they possess today, their motivations to succeed and the parameters for success in the position.

The second key to writing an effective sales ad is to navigate the responses to a phone call.  This is old school, no doubt, but it is mission critical to hiring a sales superstar.

Email, ecommerce, e-anything is changing business everyday.  However, sales still comes down to one person convincing another person to change behavior.  The backbone of this behavior change occurs during conversation, usually on the phone first and in person later.  Granted, some companies sell their wares exclusively over the Internet.  That model means they must be the low-priced option therefore they do not require a sales force.  However, high value players cannot survive exclusively on the Internet model so they must leverage a highly skilled sales force.

The best way to see these skills on display is to require the applicants to respond to your ad via the phone.  We provide an email address in our ad and we accept responses via that medium.  Email is an important sales tool today and we value the opportunity to assess the applicants’ writing abilities.  Yet, we move all respondents (both email and phone) into a structured phone screen.  You would be surprised how many salespeople have a difficult time picking up the phone and calling a stranger.  Secondly, you will be surprised how much you can learn in one 10 minute phone screen.  That topic will be explored in next month’s issue.

Summary

We took great lengths to set up our approach to authoring an effective sales ad since it requires an open mind to break long-standing traditions.  Specific strategies and examples can be found in our Application in Action article in this month’s newsletter.  Our approach has been refined through numerous sales ads placed in different mediums.  Focusing the ad on the specific characteristics of the ideal salesperson will increase the quality of your applicants and lead you to the sales superstar.  What to do with those strong applicant responses is step 3 in our process.

Next edition – The Phone Screen

Click here for the next article - Writing the Ad

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