8 Reasons Why Hiring Elite Salespeople is Difficult:

1. It's hard to find qualified candidates - only 7% of salespeople fall into the “elite” category (What elite sales people do differently)
2. You have other responsibilities
3. If things are “okay”, you don’t look for someone… until you have an opening and then you feel desperate to fill the seat
4. Elite sales professionals – those with excellent sales skills – often are not actively looking for new jobs
5. The resumes all look the same
6. Personality and behavioral tests tell you how they like to be managed but don’t have any predictive validity for sales success
7. Your HR (talent-acquisition partners) really don’t understand why hiring salespeople is different than hiring anyone else for a company
8. It’s not your go-to skill set.

Step 1: Make sure you know and identify exactly what sales skills make your elite salespeople ELITE salespeople. 

We just completed a Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis (SEIA) for the private banking segment of a regional bank.  This is what we know separates the top performers from the bottom performers:

Distinguishing skills and sales traits of top performers

• Hunter
• Possess over 50% of required sales skills
• Strong at getting introductions
• Get past gate keepers
• Maintain a full pipeline (convert activity – prospecting – into opportunities)
• Reach decision makers
• Develop trust and confidence early in the relationship
• Present product proposal at the appropriate time
• Keep prospects from buying too early in the process
• Not reliant on ‘”educating” the prospect or presenting to get the business
• Love competing against others

We evaluate over 125 different data points when using a pre-hire sales skills inventory assessment and what we have found over the years is that there are usually between 20 and 30 variables that separate the best from the rest. THIS is the first step in making sure you are interviewing candidates with sales skills needed to succeed in your organization.

Step 2:  Interview for fundamental skills

Once you’ve received an application or some notice of interest in your available career opportunity, you send the candidate a notice letting them know you’ve received their information and that, in order to move forward in the process, two steps will take place:

1. They will be asked to complete the online sales skills inventory assessment.
2. If the assessment findings indicate that their sales skills match what you are looking for, then a 10-minute phone interview will take place.

Why The Phone Interview

At Hire Better Sales People (White Paper), this is the beginning of Step #2.  In the 23 years of our sales consulting practice, I cannot recall a single client where phone skills were NOT critical to the success of the salespeople being hired.  With that in mind, it stands to reason that the first thing you should look/screen for are their phone skills.  Most of the time, our clients outsource that to us. The reasons for that are:

• Consistency
• Lack of a bias towards any candidate

In the phone interview, you want to make sure that this person can conduct themselves on the phone like you would expect them to when talking to prospects.  In order to do that, you must create a similar environment that the candidate will have to react to: 

• No bonding and rapport done by the interviewer
• Create time pressure so that they have to react and attempt to take control of the phone call
• Challenge them on their answers to questions (certainly, prospects will ask them questions on the phone – wouldn’t you want to know how well they react as well as what they say?)
• Let them know that you will be making a decision about who will go on to the interview step and see if the candidate attempts to “close” for that opportunity. If they fail to close for the next step, they will probably fail to close a prospect for an appointment.

Step #3 – Use the data from the resume, the application and the pre-hire skills assessment.

Top salespeople hunt for opportunities, reach decision makers, quickly establish confidence and trust, love to compete against others, have strong desire and commitment to success in selling, take responsibility for outcomes, are highly motivated for success in sales and have a high figure-it-out factor.  Here’s some ideas for assessing these traits in potential candidates:

• Make the candidate bring their calendar for the next 30 days and make them count the number of new business appointments they have scheduled
• Make them establish the bonding and rapport. Tell them to take a seat, tell them that you’ve scheduled 60 minutes, but it may only take 30, and see what they do next.  If bonding, rapport, confidence and trust are important, see what your candidates do to make that happen.
• Ask about competitions they have won
• Tell them to describe in detail situations where they did everything possible to succeed at something especially when they had to change, overcome a difficult challenge and they overcame despite terrific odds.
• Ask them to tell you about a situation when they faced failure at accomplishing something personally or professionally. (Hint – they need to say “I failed…”)
• Give them a test of any kind and see how long it takes for them to figure it out or…
• Create a role-play scenario out of thin air, give them a couple of minutes to figure out how they want to go about the role -play and then role play.

There is certainly no guarantee for any new hire.  You still have to consider cultural and team fit.  Is there synergy between the new hire and the hiring manager?  How about their technical and professional credentials?  We’re just talking about sales skills here, but, to be clear, it’s rare that someone fails to succeed in selling because they lacked the required technical or professional expertise for the field they were in.  Nope… people normally fail because they fail to generate sales!

My pup, Rocky, loves to lay on top of pillows. ALL pillows. He doesn’t care if they are round, square, flat, cushy, or even sewn on and attached to the back of the couch- he will find a way to lay on them. And though it irritates me to no end to walk into a room to find all of my decorative pillows haphazardly thrown around, I must appreciate Rocky’s determination. He will do whatever he can to make sure he is on top. He fights, and sometimes literally claws, his way to the peak of that pillow mountain. He epitomizes the great sales candidates you should be looking for- except maybe the dog part.  

How important is it for your salespeople to have a pipeline of prospects? Probably pretty important. How crucial is it that your salespeople continue to feed into that pipeline? Just as crucial! We all know that, in order for your organization to succeed, it is vital that your salespeople build, grow and maintain a solid pipeline. But what happens if one of those great salespeople leaves? Do you have someone on the sidelines ready to take that spot?

The first thing that we teach our Hire Better Salespeople (HBSP) clients is that it is just as imperative for you to have a pipeline of potential candidates as it is for your salespeople to have a pipeline of prospects. Most companies find themselves reacting to the loss of an employee as opposed to being proactive about it. When companies don’t proactively recruit new sales talent, they typically find themselves with a vacancy for a much longer time. For example, last year, HBSP partnered with a financial institution out of Cheyenne, WY and it took over 8 months to find a qualified individual partly due to the absence of a sales candidate pipeline. When this happens, you now have the daunting task, and added pressure, of finding a replacement... and quickly! But what happens when we rush things? Usually a mistake is made, right? Your hiring decisions and processes are not something to be rushed or else large, costly mistakes will occur. It doesn’t matter if things are going great or going terribly- a candidate pipeline has to exist.

So, what is the best way to build a sales candidate pipeline? Be a candidate watch dog! Start with the people you know. Typically, great people know other great people and are happy to refer them. Ask your family, friends and employees if they know of anyone who may be a fit for your organization. Networking events are also a great place to receive names and meet potential sales candidates. Once you gain a few leads, reach out and see if they would be interested in getting together. In no way are these conversations interviews- they shouldn’t be! Interviews are for applicants who are actively looking when you have an active opening. At this point, you are just trying to gauge interest and add potential sales candidates to your network.

Creating a candidate pipeline won’t solve all your recruiting troubles, but it’s the first place to start. If you are interested in learning more about how to Hire Better Salespeople, sign up for our free webinar—Ruff Realities About Recruiting. During this webinar, you will learn how to hire your next “top dog” using our proven process for searching, evaluating skills using a sales assessment, interviewing, hiring and onboarding new hires.

Webinar Details:

Thursday, July 27th at 12 PM EST

A guest post by Mark Trinkle, President, Anthony Cole Training Group

An audible is a change in the offensive play called by the quarterback at the line of scrimmage.  Today, I thought of that in Chicago as my Uber driver made several deviations from her GPS directions in transporting me from Midway Airport into downtown.

As I rode along with the windows down on a beautiful and sunny day in the Windy City, my thoughts turned from sightseeing to salespeople…specifically, the need for salespeople to make changes on the fly, whether that be during the initial phone call, the first meeting or even at the time they present their solutions.

Anyone and everyone who has had any exposure to Anthony Cole Training Group knows we are completely sold on the importance of process.  We have table-pounding conviction (a tip of the hat to my good friend, Mike Iverson in Atlanta) around how important it is for a business driven around and by sales to have certain key processes in place in term of their sales infrastructure.  And, of course, we believe that sales training creates the most return on a client’s investment when the salespeople and sales managers are following a sales process where opportunities are moving through the funnel in a stage-based and milestone-centric manner.  We believe that firms who don’t have a consistent sales process (everyone following the same steps and using the same terms to describe stages in the sales process) but who implement such a process can often see a 15% to 20% increase in new business sales.

But, here is something worth remembering – life is complicated.  Ferris Bueller (can’t come to Chicago and not think of him) told us to slow down or we might miss something.  And the same is true with selling.  Sometimes you just need to slow down and do something unconventional.  Sometimes you need to do something that is even contrary to what your training has taught you to do.  Sometimes you just need to call an audible.

Let’s be clear – usually your training is going to be correct.  But, sometimes, you will need to remember that selling is both science and art…and the art part means you might need to listen to your heart and occasionally let that heart override your mind.  Of course, the best in the business know when to listen to their head and when to listen to their heart.  And if they get it wrong every so often, so what?  They get back up and keep going.

So, listen to your heart.  Sometimes you will need to call an audible.  Like now…forget the salad; there is a deep-dish pizza out there calling my name.