Using a Pre-Hire Sales Assessment is a Must

For consistent success, you must evaluate all candidates using a sales candidate pre-hire screen before the interview. Many companies pick and choose which candidates to evaluate. Sometimes, if the candidate has come highly recommended or has a great sales pedigree, or if a placement firm has recommended them, the company may choose not to evaluate. This is a mistake. Evaluating candidates before you interview has several benefits:

1. The sales evaluation we recommend is by Objective Management Group and tells you if the candidate is hirable or not (with 95% predictive validity). If they are not hirable, then there is no need for an interview.

2. Evaluating prior to interviewing helps you pinpoint your interview questions based on information that you won't find in the resume. This allows you to conduct a better, more informative interview.

How the Sales Interview Process Begins

As you begin your phone screening process, consider how much time your salespeople normally spend on the phone for either prospecting or selling. It’s important to have a clear idea of how important phone skills are to their success. If effective phone skills are critical, then evaluating a candidate’s ability on the phone must be part of your screening process.

When a candidate’s resume is received, the recruiting coordinator should contact the potential candidate, let them know that the first step is a phone interview, and schedule it. Keep this same process even if you meet a potential candidate in person. Give their information to the recruiting coordinator and let them follow the same, consistent process.

Conducting the Initial Phone Interview

Consider the challenges your salespeople regularly face when making phone calls. Recreate this same environment for your candidate. If your salespeople must get past gatekeepers to reach decision-makers, then make candidates do the same.

The best way to implement this is to email candidates after interviews are scheduled. Instruct them to contact you as if they are making a prospecting call. Their goal is to get past your gatekeeper and reach you. Instruct your gatekeeper to make this somewhat difficult but to eventually let them through if they are persistent. After each interview, ask how the candidate approached your gatekeeper.

Once you begin the phone interview, treat the candidate as if they are a typical salesperson trying to sell you something. Be brief. Be abrupt. Ask questions. Challenge each candidate. Make them sell you on why they should be considered for a face-to-face interview.

There are three factors that determine whether the candidate will progress to a face-to-face interview. Ask yourself if the candidate:

1. Attempted to control the interview

2. Asked questions

3. “Closed” for the face-to-face interview

Did the candidate take control of the interview by slowing it down and establishing rapport? Did they get flustered when answering your questions or intimidated by your demeanor? Look for a salesperson who can handle pressure and have a conversation—not one who simply answers questions.

Did the candidate ask good questions to uncover what you are looking for, what it takes to be successful, and what’s needed to move to the next step? Don’t get too hung up on the exact questions asked. This interview reflects how they will perform on actual sales calls.

As you finish the interview, instruct the candidate about the next step and let them know that, if they qualify, someone will follow up. This mirrors the common “think-it-over” response from a prospect. If the candidate doesn’t try to close you at this point, they probably won’t try to close a prospect either.

Conclusion

In this series on hiring and retaining top sales talent, we’ve looked at three steps that are key to building an exceptional sales force that will help drive consistent sales growth:

1. Prepare: Establish the right candidate profile for your specific situation. Use this standard to compare. Challenge candidates to meet your expectations.

2. Pipeline: Build a pipeline of potential candidates by using time-tested sales prospecting techniques instead of relying solely on internet job boards.

3. Screen: Use a properly constructed telephone pre-interview to identify the most qualified candidates for a face-to-face interview and improve your sales interview process.

Learn How to STOP Hiring Mistakes at our 30-Min Webinar on June 16th!

After you have established a profile, the next step is to build a sales candidate pipeline. Let’s first talk about online job boards. It’s fair to say that in today's environment, most of our communications are done online. At first glance, when it comes to recruiting, the Web seems to be a simple and relatively painless solution for finding new employees. Post a job profile on a myriad of available job search engines, and responses come flooding in:

• Monster

• Indeed

• Jobs - whatever city

• Ladder

• Snagajob

• LinkedIn

While this approach may work for some positions, I am unconvinced that it is wildly effective when attempting to hire good salespeople. In my experience, the best method for recruiting quality sales candidates is by introduction—the same method that works for the salespeople when prospecting for new business.

Finding sales talent candidates by introduction can be time-consuming and painful. However, it forces YOU to own the process, and that is the key. The mistake that many financial firms make is relying solely on the names and resumes they receive from recruiting services and online job posts. Finding new talent for your organization should not be left entirely up to the recruiters. They have a vested interest in placing people in positions and not necessarily in the success of the salesperson you hire. Remember: recruiters get paid when they place someone. That individual may not be (and often is not) the best fit for your organization.

Recently, I read that 75% of replacement hires are as bad as or worse than the employees that were replaced! If you have an open position for someone who is making $50,000 a year, you need to find the best $50,000-a-year person in your industry/marketplace to fill it. Don’t settle for a B or C player just because that’s what you had before.

So, what does taking ownership during the process of building a candidate pipeline look like? Here’s what needs to happen:

• Create your hiring profile (as discussed in Step 1)

• Create a process of getting introductions

• Build your team of candidate prospectors

• Identify candidate sourcing activities

• Identify monthly goals for the activities

• Build an inspection process – and consider using “huddles” to have prompt, productive, and painless meetings as you conduct that process (See Verne Harnish)

• Hold people accountable for reaching candidate sourcing goals

• Throughout the process – reward success, discipline failure

Once you start this process, you will begin to fill your candidate pipeline just like your salespeople fill their prospect pipelines! When you take ownership of this effort and you have a pipeline of potential hires that are better than your current underperformers, you will be more likely to:

• Replace under-performers

• Not be “held hostage” by prima donna salespeople

• Not settle for mediocrity

• See improvements in your current sales team

Finally, keep in mind that driving sales growth isn't always about more disciplined accountability, sales force automation, or sales training. Those things will help only if you have the talent on hand that will respond to these investments. Start with good talent, create an environment where people can succeed, and see what happens next.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of Hiring & Retaining Top Sales Talent!

Some of the factors that are limiting success in hiring & retaining top sales talent for many financial firms include:

• You are reactive in your recruiting – you only recruit when you need someone

• You transfer the entire responsibility of finding candidates to a search firm

• You don’t have a candidate pipeline

• You aren’t getting enough of the right candidates to interview

• The candidates that you interview and fall in love with fail to pass your evaluation process

• You interview quality candidates, but cannot attract them to join your company

• Candidates use you to improve their current position after you make an offer

• Your evaluation process is inconsistent

• You don't have a way to compare one hirable candidate against another

• You don’t have multiple candidates to choose from

• You pay “A” compensation to “B” hires

• Your new hires are failing to succeed quickly enough due to weak onboarding

There are three key steps to ensure that your bank or insurance firm recruits quality candidates that will maximize your organization’s revenue potential. Step 1 focuses on preparation. Step 2 will focus on building a candidate pipeline, and Step 3 will conclude with recommendations for screening those candidates.

Step 1: Define Your Sales Candidate Profile & Hiring Standard

The first step in your sales force recruiting process is to establish a profile of the ideal candidate for your specific position. Do not settle for a candidate who fails the criteria. And when you are evaluating resumes, pre-hire evaluations, and your interview notes, ensure that you are consistently comparing potential candidates to the hiring profile that you have established. This is the first step to help your organization refrain from hiring your next “average” salesperson.

Here are some questions to consider to avoid settling for average in the hiring process:

• Do you describe the job… or do you detail what it takes to be extraordinary in the sales role?

• Do you describe what your candidates will be selling… or do you detail what kind of competition they must be successful against?

• Do you make it clear that your organization puts high pressure on someone to perform? And do you find out if your candidate can survive in that kind of environment?

• Do you create the same environment when interviewing candidates that they will encounter when they are in the field? For example, do you challenge candidates by being difficult on the phone? Do you make them establish rapport with you in the initial interview? Do you make them try to close you in order to reach the next step of your hiring process?

Here is a sample outline for establishing your ideal hiring profile. Customize this to your objectives:

If you are committed to hiring & retaining top sales talent, your first step is to define your sales candidate profile & hiring standard by:

• establishing the right candidate profile for your specific situation,

• making sure that your screening process is consistent with identifying the right candidate profile, and

• preparing to challenge your prospects to meet exceptional standards rather than settling on “adequate.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 and 3 of Hiring & Retaining Top Sales Talent!

Hiring sales talent is often a costly, difficult, and time-consuming task. However, it's mandatory in order to grow an organization and sales team.

In this blog, we discuss how to identify top talent and minimize hiring mistakes by following a 4 step process.

Hiring mistakes are expensive. Before we dive further into this topic, let's consider the following:

• According to the Department of Labor, the cost of a bad hire can be as high as 30% of first-year earnings
• Additionally, the CEO of Link Humans estimated the average cost to be as high as $240,000 plus expenses
• A study of CFOs said that not only do bad hires cost them productivity, but managers spend 17% of their time supervising underperforming employees
• Lastly, CareerBuilder reports that 74% of employers state they hired the wrong person for the job

If you have a salesforce of 25 people and 20% of your new hires fail due to lack of performance, the cost can be $100,000.00+. In a conversation with Roy Riley, President of Peel and Holland Insurance Agency, he stated that hiring mistakes are a 2-comma problem.

Maybe you are part of the 26% that have not admitted to making hiring mistakes. Perhaps a better piece to read would be this article, What Elite Salespeople Do Better, by David Kurlan.

Otherwise, here are four steps that, if followed and executed effectively, will cause you great excitement, create a more positive impact on revenue from new hires and drive a more profitable margin for your business.

Step #1: Hire for Will to Sell rather than Can Sell  

Most personality evaluations will tell you if a candidate has the personality traits consistent with successful salespeople. This information will tell you about characteristics like building relationships, being solution orientation, etc. 

What you want to know is their:

• Desire and commitment to be successful specifically in selling
• Ownership of outcomes
• Motivation to succeed (specifically what motivates them)
• Outlook when things aren’t going well

Step #2: Hire those that are big, fast, and strong

In other words, hire for specific sales DNA such as:

• Ability to Recover from rejection
• Beliefs about selling that support success in sales
• Not inhibited by their own need for approval
• Comfort asking about and discussing money
• Can overcome their own buying beliefs so that they can execute a milestone centric sales approach

Step #3: Always be prospecting 

100% of the time, when I ask if a company is pro-active or re-active in their recruiting, they will tell me re-active. Yes, they go into the market and talk to candidates. But hiring people when they don't need them or hiring people that they can’t afford are not consistent traits. Here are my recommendations:

• Schedule at least 20% of your time to focus on prospecting new sales candidates
• Have a system in your organization where key people are responsible for setting prospecting activity goals and asking for introductions to other talented salespeople
• Report recruiting activity just like you ask your salespeople to report sales activity in huddles or sales meetings

Step #4: Eliminate variability in the performance of your recruiting process

Too often, companies with a large footprint allow market executives to sway from the recruiting processes established by Human Resources. Companies assume that the local executive needs to have the flexibility to maximize the recruiting opportunities specific to their area. Which is causing ineffective results. Instead:

• All job attraction posts must work from the same format
• The first step is always to evaluate the potential candidate using a sales-specific skills assessment
• The next step is to do a 5-10 phone interview (unless phone skills are not important)
• The initial interview must operate like an audition
• Use scorecards for the assessment, phone interview, and initial interview so that decisions to move forward are objective
• Provide the next person in the selection process an interview guide with key focus points
• Make offers to only those candidates that are committed to making a transformational career change
• Prepare candidates to decide at the time of the offer by eliminating think it overs after you present your offer
• Confirm with the candidate that they are prepared to go through your 3-to-6-month onboarding process in its entirety. No Exceptions.

In the next article, I will go through the steps and provide some more detail about each, and share with you how data can help you select candidates so that you can improve your success rate to 92% and grow your business!

Finding and hiring great sales talent is difficult. There are many characteristics you must ensure a candidate has in order to be successful with your organization. However, there are a few key attributes you need to look for during the interview process to increase you likelihood of hiring success.

My pup, Rocky, loved to lay on top of pillows. ALL pillows. He didn’t care if they were round, square, flat, cushy, or even sewn on and attached to the back of the couch- he would find a way to lay on them. And though it irritated me to no end, I appreciated his determination. He would do whatever he had to to be on top. He was the epitome of the great sales candidates you should be looking for- except maybe the dog part.  

Great sales candidates will think the same way Rocky did- they have to be on top. They will do whatever it takes to make sure that they are successful. They will find ways to differentiate themselves amongst their peers. The hardest part, however, is being able to spot those great salespeople without wasting a lot of your, or their, time.

A great salesperson should prove to you that they:

• Can handle themselves well on the phone and won’t get flustered when challenged by a prospect
• Have a strong will and determination to succeed in their role, with your company, in your selling environment
• Will ask robust follow-up questions to get the specifics required to properly qualify an opportunity
• Can close for the next step at the end of the call

The number one question I ask myself after any interview is this: “Would I like to compete with them in the marketplace?” If the answer is no, strongly consider this individual for a position within your organization. The interviewing process you put candidates through should work to identify these key traits.

What if they don’t have the specific experience you are looking for? Don’t worry! You can train someone on the technical parts of being a banker, relationship manager or insurance rep, but it’s a lot harder to train them to be a great salesperson. 

So, when you are interviewing sales talent, remember Rocky and his never-ending quest for higher, softer ground and his grit to get there. He was the kind of top dog you should look to add to your team.