Hiring top level sales talent that will consistently produce results is part art, part science, and part luck in most companies. Understanding the key attributes that determine success in a given organization is a great step towards limiting mistakes. This is particularly true if you are working with a predictive assessment from a company that specializes in validated assessments as a tool to screen your prospects. I have found that working with these types of assessments can have a major impact on who NOT to hire but certainly don’t guarantee the success of who you DO choose to hire based solely upon the assessment itself as the lone hiring criteria. An outstanding predictive assessment such as those provided by H.R. Chally is only one valuable component of the hiring process and Chally themselves would tell you that it should be no more than one third of the overall hiring decision criteria. The other two thirds of the selection process should consist of such highly subjective components as the applicant interviews, assessments of cultural fit, and some sort of personality alignment assessment. In other words, the parts that causes most of us to frequently make costly hiring mistakes.
When hiring a sales professional you would think it should be easier because you have some very objective criteria to apply to the decision making process. The past performance of sales professionals is always a documented fact at their places of previous employment. Unfortunately, due to strict laws on what past employers can and can’t say on reference checks, verifying past sales results can still be a bit of a crap shoot. Even if you can verify the actual results, what you can’t always know are all the other factors such as how difficult was the sell itself, how tough was the territory, how were the leads generated, how much was luck a factor, how much closing assistance was provided, etc. When was the last time you interviewed a prospective sales person that didn’t hand you a resume that would lead you to believe they were the world’s most successful sales professional?
Over the years I have personally been involved with the hiring of hundreds and maybe even thousands of sales professionals for every size of company from sole proprietorships to Fortune 500 companies and many types of industries from casket sales to consulting sales. I have hired some amazing superstars and I have hired some amazing disasters. I made hiring decisions based upon interviewing systems taught by recognized experts such as Brad Smart and I have made hiring decisions on pure, gut level instinct alone. While I certainly wouldn’t say I have learned to eliminate all my hiring mistakes I certainly think I have managed to learn from my mistakes. I have boiled down all my hiring successes and failures into a collection of attributes that I believe you will find in every successful sales person that works for you or that you might potentially want to hire. I call them the Five “P’s” of Successful Selling. Over the next few blogs I will address each of them as well as provide tips for how to spot them in potential applicants.
Those Five “P’s” in no particular order are:
Passion
Purpose
Position
Persuasion
Persistence
The first P I will address this week is Passion. If someone isn’t an absolute raving fan of what they are selling you can predict that they won’t be highly successful over the long haul. You can tell very quickly when you are being sold by someone with passion. Their eyes light up, their gestures become very animated, and the excitement they feel for what they are selling becomes quite contagious. They are evangelistic in their approach and, when they see a good fit they feel they are doing you a disservice if they can’t help you see why what they are selling is PERFECT to solve your problem. Passion is not something you can fake or turn on and off like a water faucet. I have known some reasonably effective sales professionals that were technically proficient in sales skills yet had very little emotional attachment to what they were selling. If all you are shooting for are “reasonably effective” sales people feel free to skip this attribute completely but I have never met any true sales superstars that didn’t possess this passion for what they were selling.
While it is fairly easy to determine when you are in the presence of a passionate sales professional how do you go about predicting if an applicant will have any passion for your products or services? There are actually a few pretty good keys to look for. Have the applicant tell you about what he sold at his last job. If you don’t see some of the signals I mentioned above there is probably a good chance he wasn’t passionate. Ask him to describe what he knows about what your organization sells. A truly passionate sales professional will have done their homework to see for themselves if they could get excited about your company and what you sell. You should get a sense of their potential for passion when they describe what they know about you and your products or services. Finally, ask them to describe what they enjoy the most about selling. In this situation you are not looking so much for WHAT they say but how they say it. Any decent sales professional will know to recite such things as sense of accomplishment, creating satisfied customers and other such stock responses but do they “light up” when they describe them? While passion isn’t always an absolute predictor of success the lack of it is always an indication that someone will be “reasonably effective” at best.
You might be asking yourself why I would pick such a difficult time in the economy to blog about hiring sales people. At a time when so many companies are laying folks off it would seem counter intuitive to write about the subject of hiring. The truth is, there is no better way to fight your way through tough times than to sell your way through and that my friends involves hiring the top talent available.
In next week’s part two of “Hiring top Sales Performers” we will address the next two P‘s Purpose and Position.
Chuck Terry is the Executive Vice President and CSO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights
Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.
