Desperately Seeking Sales Stars is a long article from Sales & Marketing Management’s online edition. There is much in this article to dissect, but I will focus on some key points.
First, don’t do this:
“There are various [hiring and assessment] tools out there, but I still tend to be a seat-of-my-pants guy,” says Maher, now a speaker and sales consultant based in Helendale, Calif. “I’ve been hiring salespeople for over thirty-five years…and if they can sell me on their skills, that’s perhaps the most impressive thing.”
And that is perhaps the only thing they can sell. These dinosaurs are still amongst us and still believe their intuition is more precise than an objective tool. Typically, when we encounter this approach, the hiring manager has an unconscious bias towards candidate styles that match their own. That bias invariably leads to the question, How many good candidates did you lose due to their differing style? A question he cannot accurately answer.
Here is the epiphany of using a sales hiring process the right way:
“We had based our hiring on selling ourselves to them, instead of making them sell to us,” Budke says. “Now we see what they bring to the table.”
The key here is that the company didn’t have a box of gadgets that they asked the candidates to sell to them. They used the process to observe the candidates’ sales approach and ability. Often, we see companies that do not take advantage of the natural similarities between selling for a company and selling yourself for a position. It is possible to see a salesperson’s abilities in action during the hiring process. Is there any reason why a company wouldn’t want to see those abilities?
Here is some good interviewing advice:
“It’s more about drawing from the candidate’s personal experience,” Hudy says. “I try to stay away from hypotheticals to see what they actually did in the situation.”
Be wary of the sales candidate who speaks only in hypotheticals. We see this often and we also see some hiring managers who get drawn in by it. If you get a hypothetical response, dismiss it and restate your original question. If the candidate does not have an experiential answer, you have learned an important insight.
Lastly, a shocking statistic from the middle of the article:
A DDI survey last year revealed 53 percent of sales vice presidents believed two out of five of their representatives lacked the skills to do their jobs.
More than half of sales VPs believe that almost half of their sales team lacks the skills to do their job. Apparently, a warm body is better than no body. I have a real problem with this Jurassic approach. If half my team was lacking needed abilities, I would drop everything and focus on getting the right skills on the team. Is there anything more important in sales? You only get one shot with some prospects and think of the amount of work that goes in to securing that one shot. Do you want that opportunity to rest on the back of a salesperson who lacks the necessary skills? I will never understand this band-aid thinking.