Peak Sales Recruiting

Every successful business knows that it’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of its best sales people. Having a talented sales force can make or break an organization.  It stands to reason, then, that hiring the best and most qualified sales people is of critical importance. However, most managers don’t relish the prospect of hiring. [...]

Now more than ever before, successful sales hiring is absolutely critical to sales success. When so few hiring managers are trained to conduct sales interviews, it is no surprise that failure rates are as high as 70% on some teams. Here are 20 sales interviewing mistakes to avoid: No structure or preset agenda for the interview [...]

Candidate assessments and tests can be useful tools in the sales hiring process, but there are literally thousands of tests available for evaluating candidates and it can be confusing to know which one to use and when. Worse yet, many tests are either ill conceived and provide inaccurate assessments or are applied incorrectly and provide [...]

John Warrilow, Author of Built to Sell, talks about the business impact of selecting top performing sales reps and the value of a competitive nature in sales performance. While competitiveness is a characteristic of many top performers, a competitive nature can be disruptive, particularly if that nature manifests itself in confrontation. We prefer to see [...]

There is always a large pool of sales people actively searching for work (we call these Active Candidates) and some of the applicants to any open sales position just want a job – any job. These people are casting a VERY wide net, and will take whatever happens to wander into that net. They are [...]

Finding salespeople who will perform exceptionally well is a big challenge for many sales organizations. When dealing with sales people who are trained at selling themselves, it can be tough enough simply knowing who to speak with so it can be extremely valuable to have a method of quickly deciding who is worth your time [...]

We are often asked whether it is better to arrange a series of sales interviews back to back or interview new candidates as they become available. The answer is simple. If you have the luxury of having multiple candidates for an open position, meet them all sequentially over the course of a few hours. The [...]

Interviewing sales people is never an easy task. Much like peeling an onion, interviewing sales people involves, getting past the conditioned sales responses and peeling away the facades, to get to the real root of what someone is all about and whether they will do well on your team. We often get asked what are [...]

Interviews are the staple method for most companies when hiring sales staff and often there are multiple interviews conducted by different team members of the hiring company. Some companies will take the screening process a step further and conduct in depth reference checks. All of this is done to ensure the new hire is the [...]

The job description is the starting point for most people when they recruit sales people. Not for us. One of the first things we do when we are engaged to find top performing sales people for our clients, is set the job description aside. Why? Most job descriptions are written with good intentions, but fail [...]