Traditional Model for Hiring Sales Is Broken

For the past 15 years we have helped companies hire stronger sales staff. Inside, outside, techies, specialist, marketing coordinators, professional, low tech, B2B, in home, financial experts, channel directors, vertical liaisons, and just about every thing else you might think of. What we’ve learned is that most companies (most means more than half) seem to believe the sales department is the same animal as the rest of the departments that make up a company. Therefore they use the same paradigms, processes and systems to hire sales as they do the rest of the company.

Let’s look at the big picture and first define the ‘Traditional Hiring Model”. Step 1 - Place an ad. Step 2 – Wade through piles of resumes. Step 3 – Interview the top candidates. Step 4 – Sell the offer to the top candidate, and Step 5 – Hope and pray.

As you can guess there are many many challenges with this process and that is why the average tenure of a sales pro is 18 months at one company. Sure the numbers are skewed a bit because that stat includes all the knuckle-heads that should never be in sales to begin with. However, this doesn’t change the fact that hiring mistakes in your sales department cost 3 times the annual average compensation of your average sales person.

Here are a couple of trade secrets to assist in improving your hiring process. Step 1 – First decide what exactly you are looking for. Skill sets, what markets the salesperson will be calling on, the position of the company in which the sales person will be calling on, the length of your average sales cycle, the pressure and accountability you will put on the sales person, the dollar amount of your average sale, just to name a few of the categories that can help to define your criteria. Additionally, it would be good to know is this a pure hunter role, a farmer, an ambassador, or a fisherman. Which means how much time is the salesperson required to spend developing new business verses growing and maintaining accounts. And are they required to go find the business or are potential customer knocking down your door. In short – Define the attributes of your successful candidate.

Resumes are a problem. They point is I review hundreds every week and I’ve never seen a bad one. They are usually written by a third party who has had very little real world experience with the candidate. Resumes tell you two things; A) the work history and industries the candidate should be familiar with. Which if read into a little further can give you insight to the parallels they may share with your markets. And B) A pattern to determine the natural up and down cycle of your potential candidate. If you see the person has changed jobs in the past typically in the first quarter then you should expect that every year about that time they will be a bit antsy. Therefore, you can head off the problem at the pass and spend ‘motivation’ time in the previous quarter.

The interview; Salespeople are typically pretty good at first impressions. That is what they do remember. Don’t judge your interview by this. Stop trying to sell your company and start making the sales person sell you. I don’t mean, ‘Here, sell me this pencil’. I mean turn the interview into an audition! Provide the same hardnosed environment that your prospects will give your new salesperson. It’s a busy world out there. Give the a few stalls and put offs! Tell them you not sure they can make it. Listen for questions, watch for uneasiness, see how early you can get them to start talking about themselves and see how they perform. This will give you great insight to their secret selling styles and you will find out what excuses you will expect to hear 90 days later if you hire them.

After the offer: So you have a new hire now what? Do you send them out to the field with your ‘best people’? Is it your sales manager’s job to do OTJ training? Have a prepared training program. If they need specific product knowledge give them time lines and test. Don’t send them into the field with any other sales person. One, it’s distracting to the current salesperson. Two they will pick up the bad habits of the good salespeople. And three they will not ramp up as fast. Do measure their activity and hold them accountable to every goal you set and they agreed to when they accepted the job. DO NOT accept any excesses!

Here’s what we do; Identify, Attract, Interview, Screen, Interview, Test the Test, Interview, Screen, Test, Interview and then we provide Success Conditioning with tracking tools for accountability. If you don’t have time to do all of this please contact us.

For more information about sales development goto www.thetrainingroup.com