2. Do not put the entire burden of the company on this hire

3. Do not clone yourself

4. Do not expect to hire perfection

5. Do not start the process unless you can hire the right candidate today

6. Do not run the process out of sequence

7. Do not miss opportunities to see the candidate in action

8. Do not change the compensation plan during the process

9. Trust the instruments more than your gut

10. Do not assume you are the candidates’ only option

Unfortunately, people not experienced in sales hiring often have the opposite view.  Their stereotypical belief is that the best salespeople are the ones who are perceived to be the best talkers.  This misguided view often leads to bad hires.

Here is where the mistake occurs – hiring managers assume that social skills are equivalent to sales skills.  Ok, maybe that is too strong, but the assumption is that the social skills are the key to successful selling.  Social skills are a component to selling, but they are not indicative of sales skills.

Social Skills

Social skills are important to sales and certainly are not to be ignored.  However, my experience has been that the truly terrible sales hires usually involved bad salespeople with good social skills.  These salespeople had excellent empathetic skills – they could read body language, adjust their tonality, find common ground with the hiring manager.  Again, all valuable skills.  However, they had next to no sales skills which became evident once they were on the payroll torpedoing good prospects.

The danger here is that these social skills are quite disarming.  They can be used to get the strongest of interviewers off their game.  I have seen many sales candidates who possessed remarkable social skills but little in the way of sales skills.

Sales Skills

These skills are the ones that lead to profitable revenue generation.  The main skill set involves qualifying.  If there was only one ability you could have in a salesperson, qualifying would be it.  This skill involves asking the right questions to learn about a potential customers’ budget, need, time frame, decision process and more.  This skill is where salespeople earn their keep.

Other sales skills areas are prospecting, influencing, closing and presenting.  These areas are also important to successful selling.  In terms of sales candidates, these skills are more difficult to discover.  The best approach is to assess for these skills and then follow up a face-to-face interview with the candidate to probe the information you have gathered through the assessment.

Objectivity is key and it is critical in making a hiring decision.  The strongest sales candidate isn’t necessarily the most talkative, humorous or outgoing.  Pay close attention to the questions they ask and the answers they provide to your probing questions about their sales skills.

And be sure to assess them.

Type A personalities wanted

My experience has been that most people focus on big personalities when it comes to selling.  If the person is a good talker, tells funny stories, lights up the room, etc., then they must be a good salesperson.  The bigger the personality, the more they will sell.  Ok, I grant you that is oversimplifying it, but you get my point.  I have encountered it for years when working with hiring managers.

The issue becomes more pronounced when these same hiring managers employ a personality assessment only.  Now they look for big personalities with highly extroverted assessment results to confirm their gut-level decision to pursue a boisterous candidate.  Sales is a listening profession – asking the right questions, gathering information and directing decisions are the core competencies of sales success.

I always tell prospects who are using personality assessments that it is good they are using assessments.  They do tell you something of the candidate’s style that hiring managers can use in interviewing.  But if you want to know how they will perform in the role, you have to measure their skills, aptitudes and motivations.  These items are predictive of success and provide a detailed view of a salesperson’s abilities.

Product Sales
-Quantity-focused – the approach is to close frequently and success is measured in total numbers
-Speed first – fast, frequent closing is their approach, 1-call closes are their ideal
-Off-the-shelf – typically they prefer to sell a pre-designed solution
-Discount – their drop-close is to discount

Service Sales
-Quality-focused – the approach is to find the bet fit solution and success is measured by customer retention
-Thoroughness first – details are the key to closing here as they have to qualify need in depth
-Custom – most sales involve crafting a solution from existing pieces, but few are truly off-the-shelf
-Include – their drop-close is to add pieces to the solution for same price

Ok, it is a quick list, but you get the idea.  My vision is that successful salespeople need to harbor abilities from both product and service sales.  However, there are salespeople who are engrained towards one side or the other.  This hardening of the categories becomes evident when they wander over to the other side of the sales tracks and try to succeed there (yes, I mix metaphors).

I know of one salesperson who is presently attempting to cross this divide and it is not pretty.  His entire approach is rooted in the other format which has led to bad decisions, poor strategies and limited sales.

When hiring salespeople, the first indication is the candidate’s experience.  The second indication is their sales approach.  Make certain these are two tools you use in your hiring process.