Sales candidates blow sunshine.  Few have ever missed quota, most state their primary weakness is being a workaholic and all have earned everything they have accomplished.  Right.  In reality, most have missed their sales quota at some point, many have real weaknesses discussing money and handling rejection and most have benefited from somewhere be it marketing, territory, company market share, etc.

Sales hiring is the most difficult hiring in which to succeed in that the candidates have interpersonal skills that disarm hiring managers.  In a way, this is a good thing since you want your salespeople to have this ability when qualifying prospects.  However, the hiring manager needs to focus like a detective during the hiring process.

I’m an old Hill Street Blues fan.  I watched almost every episode of NYPD Blue (it got weird at the end).  Even Magnum PI had some interesting tips.  Here are a few tips based on techniques incorporated by these detectives:

-Drill down – do not accept the candidate’s first answer as the complete answer.  Too often I see hiring managers accept theoretical answers to direct questions.  Ask for specific examples and then ask follow-up questions that require more detail from the candidate.  This approach will be most enlightening in regards to understanding if the candidate is being truthful or not.

-Interrupt – ok, don’t be a jerk, but interrupt the candidate gently.  The goal here is to shake them out of a canned, memorized response.  Prospects do this in sales calls.  I always do this in an interview.  Interviews should not be easy for sales candidates because selling isn’t easy.  This approach will show you how quick the candidate is on their feet.

-Wait – there is nothing quite like an awkward, pregnant pause to add some pressure to a discussion.  Silence is fine as it forces the candidate to work.  Their job is to impress you enough to continue in the hiring process.  Your job is not to make them completely comfortable.  At ease, yes; comfortable, no.  Use silence at times to force the candidate into a longer answer.  This approach will reveal how disciplined they are at controlling a conversation.

These are just a few techniques I incorporate.  Of course, one great tool for guiding you through an interview is a sales assessment.  If you aren’t using any such tool today, please contact us at your earliest convenience.  We’ll show you just what you are missing in making your hiring decision.

Without going into specifics, I can tell you where we start in these situations – motivations.  The first place to look when there is interpersonal conflict within an office team is the motivation pattern for each individual.  In the instance with our customer, we have two people with almost polar opposite motivational patterns.

Here is why this matters – neither person can understand where the other is coming from, especially in terms of decision-making.  Each person finds the other one to be inconsistent, off-base and…well, wrong.  The relationship has deteriorated into acerbic communication.

Unfortunately, this customer did not assess this employee when they were in the hiring phase.  Instead, they made an emotional hire.  This employee has the skills to succeed in this role, but the hiring manager was never informed of the employee’s motivational pattern.  If he had been, he would have known the differences between the two of them and he could have managed through them.

I’m not sure the relationship is salvageable.  I am certain it was avoidable.

I just met with a company yesterday who was paying almost twice as much to our competitor for the same service.  They were getting ripped off and it isn’t right.

I don’t deny the nobility of his position, but the reality is that very few services are exactly the same (despite prospect’s claims).  A strong salesperson will define their value to the prospect who will make a decision about that value.  It may be that the prospect simply sees something in that company’s product/service that they require/need/value.

My concern for the salesperson on the radio is that he is unconsciously removing any differentiating value from his service.  He is turning the decision into one based solely on price.  That is a prospect move!

Here is where the Social motivation undermines salespeople.  Their natural desire to help others without expecting anything in return undermines their selling ability.  Again, it is a noble motivation and I personally wouldn’t want to live in a world without many Social motivations.  However, sales is not for the feint of heart.  Strong salespeople are consistently assessing the return on their investment of time, resources, money, effort, etc.  Salespeople need to determine if they have a strong prospect…and the faster they can make that determination, the more they can sell.

To be fair, there are a few sales positions where a Social motivation can thrive.  We once assessed a flourishing sales team at a company that provided a product for young mothers.  The team was successful and almost every salesperson was a Social.

But if you are hiring for sales, your best avenue is to hire strong Utilitarians.  If you are uncertain of your candidates’ motivations, we can help.

Shane and his fellow researchers compared the entrepreneurial activity of 870 pairs of identical twins — who share 100% of their genes — and 857 pairs of same-sex fraternal twins — who share 50% — to see how much of entrepreneurial behavior is genetic and how much is environmental.

The mathematics behind quantitative genetic modeling are rather complicated, but the upshot was fairly straightforward: Entrepreneurs, the researchers concluded, are about 40% born and 60% made.

The 40% is a significant number; one that ties into salespeople also.  The article contains an excellent example as to where it derives its significance:

But he doesn’t totally dismiss nature’s role. “For someone without aptitude, I don’t think those things can be taught,” he says. “I can’t make a librarian into a Broadway performer.”

I believe strong salespeople are nurtured and developed within the right sales environment.  Yet, there is a nature/born component to strong salespeople also – the 40% born and 60% made split seems accurate to me.  The critical factor in the “40% born” side is their aptitudes.  We describe aptitudes as intrinsic talents. These are talents that salespeople possess – they are not learned.  They can be refined, but they cannot be created.  Salespeople either have these intrinsic talents or they do not.

For instance, it is difficult, almost impossible, to make a successful salesperson out of someone who lacks the aptitude Handling Rejection.  Few territory reps are successful without having a strong Personal Accountability aptitude.  Hire a remote salesperson with low Initiative and you will have trouble.

One facet of our assessments is to measure a salesperson’s aptitudes in comparison to their present sales skills.  This comparison reveals areas where they may have underdeveloped sales skills today, but they possess the aptitude…it simply needs to be refined into a skill.

… talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force — a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking… Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.