Welcome to the May edition of @Peak, the newsletter for people who care about driving revenues and bottom line results!

(You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up through the Peak Sales Recruiting website or we have communicated with you in the past about building exceptional sales teams. If you are want off the list, please feel free to let us know by reply email.)

Analyze this! The secret to our success

		The awful truth? More than half of all sales hires will fail! Poor hiring is a big part of the reason that technology companies replace fully one third of their sales force every year!
The right candidate for the role produces better results every time.

Today, we'll share one of our most powerful secrets for reversing these numbers.

It's part of the process that allows us to find outperforming sales professionals for our customers, salespeople that are twice as likely to be top performers on their teams.

What is the key step that most companies miss? You need to properly analyze the sales role and key elements of the selling environment to pick sales people who will not fail.

(Want to get started right away? Take our new online tool for a test drive.)

Think you are already doing this? Think again, and read on!

Here's what you may not know: Customers tell us that we go about this with a level of rigor they have never seen before, internally or externally, and it is a core part of the process that makes our approach more than twice as likely to produce top perfomers than standard approaches to sales hiring.

We have learned that the more rigorously we stick to our process, the better our results. The main steps in our process are:

1. analyze the sales role and the selling environment
2. create a search strategy
3. execute the search strategy
4. screen, screen, screen

Everything in the process hinges on the first step being done well.

When you properly define the selling environment (including factors like sales cycle, call volume, quota and deal size, and type of product, for instance), you are positioned to find the specific experience, skills and DNA (sales personality) of candidates that can deliver revenue.

Companies may acknowledge they need candidates with "five years of successful enterprise software sales," but that will not help them search for and identify candidates who are uniquely positioned to perform in the specific selling environment.

They may even get down to defining the role as a "hunter" or "farmer" role, before they hand the search off to their HR department to find someone that's a fit.

But hiring companies often fail to go farther. Going farther is essential.

Experience does matter. The question is, what experience matters most to this particular job?

That's the queston the Sales Role Analyzer answers.

The quick web-based questionnaire produces a report to help technology companies better articulate the key elements of the sales role and selling environment. The output provides a unique search and screening tool, and can be printed for reference or shared with colleagues involved in the search.

Give it a try. It's free, and will give you a taste of the proven, risk-reducing process we go through with our customers.

While it won't present you with a list of ideal candidates (that is something we'd have to charge you for!) it will give a sense of what factors in a candidate's past experience are most likely to influence success in your environment.

Want more help with your search? Contact us.