Past behaviors are the best indicator of future success. This point is crucial when hiring salespeople for your team. The difficulty lies in deducing if the candidate has the right set of skills to be successful in your specific sale.
Here’s the ugly truth – “bad” salespeople can still have good interpersonal skills…skills good enough to get past your hiring process.
Every sales leader, and I mean every, has a sales hiring horror story. The sales leader thought they were hiring a superstar and they ended up with a dud. These fantastic flame-outs are memorable and disappointing for sure. But there is a more odious error that eats away at a sale team.
Creeping mediocrity.
This weakness slowly infects a sales team as mediocre salespeople are systematically added to the team. The team’s skills and effectiveness briskly deteriorate as the mediocre performance begins to lower the bar, for the entire team. The lower performance, albeit not desired, is a subtle erosion of revenue performance. The drop in revenue is not precipitous so panic rarely follows. The sales leader may even manage to these declining revenues with some form of unconscious acceptance.
How do you avoid creeping mediocrity? The solution starts with knowing who you are hiring for each sales role. The conventional wisdom is to hire based on resumes. Salespeople with industry experience, or better yet from a competitor, is the target. The flaw here is assumptive – since the candidate is from the industry, he or she will be successful in the role.
The issue is simple, talent always outperforms experience. If you have to choose between the two, always take talent. Experience is easier to ascertain based on their resume. Yet, talent can be measured, too, by using our sales assessments.