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Skill Sets Only the Best Sales Managers Possess

A recent Gallup poll found that 82 percent of the time, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for a management position. The research looked at managers for a wide range of industries, and in a wide range of roles and found the data was fairly even across the sample. “If great managers seem scarce,” Gallup writes, “It’s because the talent required to be one is so rare.”

The key attributes a top performing manager possesses includes the ability to engage team members and customers, a knack for keeping high achieving staff from leaving for another employer, and the ability to create a culture that embraces high productivity.

In sales, managers are responsible for key metrics that drive a business forward. Getting the right person who can consistently meet and exceed the position’s expectations can make or break whether an organization achieves its revenue goals.  So what makes a great sales manager?

Here are 3 of the top sales management skills:

1. Ability to Engage the team

Many attributes of great managers and inspiring leaders are difficult to measure, but a group of neuroscientists at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation are beginning to work on ways to discover how our brains are wired when it comes to leadership. An article in the Ivey Business Journal titled Neuroscience and the Link between Inspirational Leadership and Resonant Relationships outlines initial findings of tests they conducted. Executives volunteered for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) tests to see how their brain centers would activate on hearing statements about feelings and episodes they’d had at work. The testing revealed that resonant leaders had the ability to unlock the part of our minds that are open to new ideas, while dissonant leaders actually deactivate the part of our mind that accepts new ideas.

Demonstrating that we are hard wired to be inspired by optimism and repelled by pessimism gives us a good starting point for identifying potential leaders and managers. Peak’s experience having recruited high performing sales managers over the years tells us that some managers can seem fantastic on paper, but they may also be loners or less inspiring as managers. Companies that place an importance on hiring great managers recruit master motivators who boost a team’s confidence during sales slumps and rally them to work together in the pursuit of profit— and fulfilment. Our experience in the field tells us that it’s easy enough to train an employee who has the right personality on how to do the job – but almost impossible to make an uninspiring manager alter his personality.

2. Ability to Retain Employees

Hiring an inspiring, motivating manager is the first, and arguably the most important, step in retaining top performing sales people. Gallup’s research revealed that managers account for at least 70 percent of variance in employee engagement scores across business units. “This variation is in turn responsible for severely low worldwide employee engagement,” notes the article, adding supporting statistics from other Gallup research which states that only 30 percent of U.S. employees are engaged at work, and only 13 percent are engaged worldwide. Mangers who can engage employees will have a much better opportunity to retain them when recruiters start calling.

Retaining employees, particularly in sales positions, requires more than just a good manager. As a recent report by the Society of Human Resources Managers found, it’s easier to retain employees who become embedded in their jobs and their communities. This supports Peak’s own experience in recruiting sales people for marquee employers.

Employees find it difficult to leave a job where they have friends and mentors, where they feel they fit well, and where they feel valued. A world-class manager will foster all of these traits within their team, but it’s also important to have corporate support all the way around – great manager’s work hard to rally for all the extras the sales team might need in order to foster a greater sense of belonging in team members. They try to get more budget for team building outings, for example, or better funding for team meals and entertainment.

Successful sales managers also know when to reach out to leaders within the company to help retain an employee – for instance working with HR to develop better incentive packages for top performers. And, following the old adage, if you love something, set it free, a good manager knows when it’s time to move a top performer up the ladder rather than out the door.

3. Ability to Create a Positive Work Culture

While it’s important for a manager to successfully oversee the large issues associated with managing a sales team, it’s a manager’s ability to successfully and consistently manage the everyday issues that will determine the long-term success of both the manager and the sales team. The Gallup poll outlines the mix of abilities a manager should possess in order to rally a team day-by-day. These managers have the ability to motive and they have an assertiveness to drive outcomes. They create a culture of accountability that’s easy to understand, and they build relationships with employees, co-workers and clients that foster an open dialogue. Finally, they make decisions based on what’s good for the company rather than what’s politic at the moment.

This is absolutely consistent with our own experience. The right culture leads to the right results and sales managers that understand this and can cultivate the environment for success are the exception to the rule.

It’s a tall order to find a manager who can shoulder the responsibilities that make a team excel, but there is hope. Gallup’s research showed that for every one manager in ten who possesses a natural talent for managing, there is another two people in ten who can function at a high managerial level if given the right kind of coaching and training. And with the right recruiting engine, these are not insurmountable odds.

Want more information on how to hire top performing sales managers? Check out these posts:

Useful Resources For Sales Managers:

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Hiring Salespeople: A Core Process You Must Perfect

Effective Sales Hiring Tips

If you haven’t built a team of highly qualified and skilled sales professionals, don’t waste your time and money investing in sales processes, training, compensation plans, technology, marketing support, or strong products and services.

Depending on the industry, somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople aren’t capable of being successful at their jobs. It’s a frightening statistic, but scarier still is understanding that a bad hire—a salesperson who lasts less than a year—can cost your company anywhere from $250K to $800K (or more), including lost business opportunity.

In today’s hyper-competitive buyers’ market, “mis-hiring” has become an epidemic, forcing sales leaders to rethink their approach to hiring. They have learned, all too painfully, that yesterday’s hiring methods no longer apply. These lessons include:

  • A salesperson with a past record of stellar performance won’t automatically perform in the future.
  • Accuracy in salespeople’s resumes has declined, so rigorous reference checking is required.
  • A candidate who interviews well enough to get the job may not be good enough to deliver the numbers after they are hired.

To change the mis-hiring paradigm, many sales leaders are casting aside their informal, gut-instinct approach and building high-performance sales teams by implementing a formal hiring process.

A formal process provides an objective assessment of each candidate, which is one of the most critical success factors in hiring.

Key elements of an effective sales hiring process include:

1. Forming an internal hiring team comprised of multiple stakeholders. For a small company, those stakeholders might include the CEO, VP of sales, and VP of marketing. A larger company might enlist the regional VP of sales, HR representative, and local sales manager.

2. Stakeholder agreement on how the position and company will be described to the candidate. Hiring is a balance between buying (candidates selling themselves) and selling (convincing the candidate to join your team). Highly qualified candidates are more likely to join your team if everyone they meet articulates a consistent story.

3. Establishing a benchmark against which the process will be measured. Data points might include the average salesperson’s performance against quota, their average tenure, the time to first sale, etc.

4. Building a profile for each unique sales position that defines the critical skills and traits required for success. Each skill and trait should be prioritized and scaled to measure the degree of candidate compliance. The profile for a sales “hunter,” for example, is quite different than the profile for a “farmer.” In the example below, stakeholders have determined that a reasonably high level of business knowledge is required for this particular position. A full profile usually contains 12-20 skills and 6-12 traits.

Effective Sales Recruiting Process

 

5. Writing an accurate job description. Don’t include profile details in the job description because a candidate could potentially identify what the interviewer is looking for and prepare “perfect” answers.

6. Providing recruiters and HR staff with a simple document that filters out “fatally flawed” candidates. For example, if a candidate must have at least five years of sales success in your industry, anyone who does not meet that criterion is eliminated. Screening against specific criteria allows internal hiring team members to dedicate their time to more qualified candidates. Technology solutions that perform much of this screening are readily available.

7. Engineering a set of first-round interview questions. Used as directed, these questions will enable internal team members to probe for required skills and traits based on the profile. Interviewer observations as well as the candidate’s answers are recorded and analyzed later.

8. Training the hiring team on how to perform structured interviews. It is essential that interviewers follow the questions, which have been specifically designed to generate responses that reveal whether the candidate possesses the traits and skills required for job success.

9. Educating interviewers about the importance of objectivity. Structured interviewing reduces the natural tendency to view a candidate subjectively, which could lead to overlooking weaknesses.

10. Devising a set of second round interview questions to facilitate further exploration for critical skills and traits, and to enable the interviewer to identify and quantify weaknesses uncovered in the previous interview.

11. Validating the candidate’s claims and uncovering inconsistencies through a rigorous reference checking procedure. Effective reference checking requires persistence and skill, because many companies are reluctant to provide information about former employees. The best reference checks are conducted with people not provided by the candidate. Sales leaders with a wide network can often find “blind” references who will offer an honest appraisal of a candidate, if they are confident that the discussion remains between them and the person doing the hiring.

12. Requiring sales position candidates to substantiate assertions about their past performance with tax or other formal documentation. If they claim they made $500k a year for the past five years, they should be able to prove it.

13. Requiring final candidates to participate in sales call and presentation simulations. Evaluate the candidates against required skills and personality traits derived from the profile.

14. Implementing psychometric testing and background checking. These tests rarely lead to hiring someone you have no enthusiasm for and often “expose” candidates who have managed to hide deficiencies through the interview process.

15. Engineering individual ramp-up or on-boarding plans to ensure that the gaps between the profile and the candidate’s proven skill set are closed during the first thirty to ninety days of employment.

16. Implementing a continuous improvement component. In order for this process to continue working into the future, there must be a mechanism that provides stakeholders with feedback and includes the flexibility to make adjustments.

You may initially think that this kind of formal process will “take too much time,” but you’ll quickly discover that the number of candidates who make it to the final stages is limited. The process works like a sales funnel; candidates “qualify out” all along the way. As a result, the hiring team has time to focus only on the most qualified candidates. Additionally, candidates get impression that your company is serious and well-managed. Finally, both candidate and company become aware of the gaps between the candidate’s capabilities and what’s required to get the job done, as well as how those gaps will be filled.

Dave Stein is an internationally-recognized expert in B2B sales performance. Read his blog at davestein.biz and follow him on Twitter: @davestei

Image courtesy of Tim Caynes.

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What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Sales Manager

When I became the leader of a sales team for the first time in the mid 90’s, I did not have the luxury of selling for many years and being mentored by someone who could teach me the ropes. Instead, I was a company founder who filled a need that we had at the time to build our sales team, and I kind of made things up as I went along. As I think back to those days, I realize how much I struggled to achieve my goals, and while I was successful, I can’t deny that it probably had as much to do with luck and timing as it did with my will and effort.

It was a time of great learning but there are a few lessons that would have served me well if I had known them in advance. Here are the top things I wish I had known before becoming a sales manager.

Process is critical

Without many years in sales myself and having to take over leadership of a sales group, I didn’t appreciate the value of a structured selling process. I told my sales reps to call-qualify-develop and close and left them to their own devices beyond this, which meant that each rep sold in their own unique way. Beyond ensuring that customers received different experiences from my sales team, it made it very difficult for me to coach and develop my reps. It also made it difficult for me to forecast and/or proactively address problems because I had no system for breaking down a rep’s pipeline of opportunities and/or looking at whether they were focusing on activities that would lead to success. In short, without a structured process in place, some of the characteristics of a dysfunctional sales team were beginning to reveal themselves.

Get the Right People on the Bus

Not all sales people can sell. This is an obvious lesson to me now, but as a first time sales manager I assumed that with enough effort and coaching, any rep could be successful. I now know that it is the small minority of reps that consistently exceed quotas. Most reps are at best mediocre and a significant percentage of the sales population will never achieve their goals no matter how much training and management you throw at them. Trying to achieve your own targets with a sales force of mediocre reps is like boxing with one hand tied behind your back.

Hire Slowly, Fire Fast

In my early times as a sales manager, I had a tendency to let reps miss their quarterly targets indefinitely without any repurcussions. This was partly due to the fact that I didn’t know how to manage failing reps and partly because I didn’t like firing people, but I quickly came to realize that accountability is a very powerful lever. A sales force that is not held accountable for meeting its goals is a sales force that won’t regularly meet its goals. So, from that point forward, when reps fell behind, I would work with them to make sure they were performing the tasks that would lead to success. I can tolerate bad luck, but not poor habits. If a rep couldn’t deliver the right results or the right behavior, I quickly parted ways and found another rep who would.

Wining Culture

Early in my career I assumed that a culture of success would naturally occur over time. I had it backwards. To achieve success, a sales leader has to actively create a winning culture, which starts with their own actions and by helping the team establish the habit of achieving increasingly larger goals. This is very powerful. When the team uses the language of success, behaves in ways that leads to success, helps each other be successful, expects to be successful, and has a low tolerance for failure, success is far more likely.

Learning these valuable lessons made life a whole lot easier and probably saved me from losing my hair, but more importantly enabled me to achieve much great success as a sales manager.

Photo Credit: Asim Bijarani via Compfight cc

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

Is Your Sales Team Comprised of Order Takers or Order Makers?

Order Taker in Sales

Describe cold calling to someone outside of sales and they will cringe at the notion of contacting an unknown person and likely hearing that they don’t want to speak. Even sales people who claim to embrace hunting will often avoid cold calling if given the choice.

There is no doubt that prospecting for new customers is hard work and all but a few personality types have the disposition to embrace the practice and do it well. The practice, however, remains one of the most powerful ways for sales teams to achieve superior sales results (check out these stats!).

But if you were to take a stroll through the average sales team across the country, as we often do at Peak Sales Recruiting, you would find that many of the sales people responsible for acquiring new customers are not only not suited to, but actually not doing the work that would lead to finding new customers. This is particularly the case on sales teams where the responsibilities of the sales reps include a mix of managing existing accounts and finding new accounts, since this scenario allows the sales person to compensate for the lack of new business by delivering sales from existing accounts.

The Downside of Order Taking

While pursuing easy sales sounds like a smart thing for sales teams to do, there is a huge risk involved without some degree of balance between sales from the existing customer base and new customers. Sales might be strong in the short-term, but will suffer in the long-term as the sales team looks for low hanging fruit and becomes reactive rather than continually staying ahead of the competition and regularly bringing aboard ideal customers that can contribute to long term growth and profitability.

Many sales managers don’t like to admit that their sales teams may be relying too much on existing accounts, but the numbers won’t lie. If there is a problem with the prospecting machine, it will show up in the sales results from new customers, before it shows up in the overall sales numbers.

ORDER TAKERS ORDER MAKERS
Focus on any customer that is in buying mode regardless of whether the customer or transaction is ideal or not

Find themselves in competitive scenarios where size of discounts often dictate who wins the business

Wait for the phone to ring

Do whatever they can to avoid making outbound calls – preferring to network and get referrals

Sell what the customer asks for and leave money on the table because they are not conditioned to probe for higher value solutions

Excel in the accounts that offer less opportunity and are less desirable to competitors

Regularly fall short of sales targets

Target ideal customers whether they are in buying mode or not

Spend working time penetrating and developing opportunities that will contribute to quota attainment

Avoid competitive scenarios by speaking to prospects about needs before they have been identified and/or acknowledged

Win business based on value not price

Create long term relationships by offering solutions to real customer needs

Transaction sizes are larger as a result of shaping transaction with the customer rather than simply selling what the customer asks for

Consistently achieve or exceed sales targets

#tablepress-3 from cache

Which type of salespeople is your team made up of?

For more on sales hunters, check out these articles:
• Job Description of an Account Executive / Sales Hunter / New Business Developer
• Sales Compensation – Hunters vs. Farmers
• How to Hire Hunters

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

How to Write a Sales Manager Job Description

sales manager jd

The key to writing a great Sales Manager job description: articulate specific performance objectives and highlight how a candidate will advance their career at your organization. 

High performing sales managers are gainfully driving revenue for their employers and not perusing job ads. So if you need to hire one, you are going to have to be more creative than the average employer and your job ads will need to stand out.

No longer is it good enough to list an exhausting, yawn inducing set of requirements and experience levels in your job description. Instead, a job description must position the opportunity, intrigue the reader, and present an irresistible challenge to an achievement oriented individual, yet still include the skills and experience required to excel in your unique sales environment, as well as the performance objectives, and a ‘sales DNA’ profile that the successful candidate must possess in order to qualify for the role.

As hiring expert Lou Adler correctly states, including sections that articulate specific performance objectives not only has the direct benefit of differentiating your JD, but also has the indirect benefit of potentially becoming “the cornerstone of ongoing performance-management process by comparing real job requirements to what the person has actually achieved”.

Since job descriptions are a key ingredient in the recruiting process, here are the 6 must have sections that every sales manager job description should be comprised of, in addition to several examples of the responsibilities sales managers typically have.

Overview

The job description should begin with a brief overview of the company. It should include the organization’s recent successes, growth, culture, values, and why it is a great place to advance a career. Since high achieving sales people tend to be money driven, it must also include information on the compensation package being offered, including base salary, on-target variable elements, and company benefits.

Goals

Your organization’s strategic goals for the new hire should come immediately after the overview section since they are the ultimate benchmark in determining whether or not the prospective candidate would be up to the task. Begin the section with the key metrics that indicate how your company measures performance in this role. Adding specific information such as numbers and percentage goals to the description will not only help potential candidates understand how challenging the role will be for them, but will force your hiring team to clarify the expectations attached to the new hire.

Meet revenue guidelines and develop strategies for maintaining profit goals on a quarterly and annual basis.

• Responsible for overall sales growth of __%.
• Maintain sales costs within __% of the target identified by the executive team.
• Increase sales in direct and online distribution channels by $__.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities outline what the opportunity will be like on a day-to-day basis for the potential candidate. A compelling  job description states measurable tasks that are tied to the organizations’ sales strategy.
Qualified candidates for a sales manager position expect that they’ll be accountable for key performance metrics, so consider taking an opportunity in this section to add numbers that will demonstrate how challenging and exciting the opportunity is.

• Work with the senior management team to set revenue and sales goals on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.
• Create and implement a comprehensive sales training program within __ months that will keep your sales team at the forefront of the industry and help each salesperson to reach their goal.
• Become a mentor to the sales team and nurture relationships with each associate in order to help them achieve their goals.
• Work with senior management to devise and implement innovative go-to-market strategies.
• In the next __ days, work with the sales team to upgrade lead-scoring criteria.
• Demonstrate an advanced understanding of our market, our competitors, and other economic indicators to steer our sales department with your forward-thinking vision.
• Create new programs to meet the needs of our channel partners and help them exceed revenue expectations with our products.
• Increase customer satisfaction ratings by __% and create innovative programs for upselling.
• Ensure accurate reporting on lead generation and sales efforts, including pulling data and metrics to provide detailed information about pipeline status.
• Lead (daily, weekly, monthly) sales meetings to motivate your work force, providing new and innovative training and information on an ongoing basis.
• Provide frequent updates to senior leadership and other departments as needed or requested, including high-level reports for our annual meeting and for our board of directors.
• (Daily, weekly, or as required) travel to meet with potential and existing clients, as well as field sales staff.

Experience

Hiring managers frequently use experience as a selection criteria when evaluating sales candidates. Relevant experience gives some indication of a particular candidate’s ability to perform certain tasks and can encompass a number of elements including buyer groups, technology, geography or territory, sales cycles, and deal sizes.
Companies seeking the very best sales management talent focus on experience that is aligned with the desired selling and management tasks stated in the responsibility section of the job description.

• Successful experience selling _______ (product/service or related product/service) to _____ (buyer/group).
• Successful experience closing __-figure deals.
• Successful experience monitoring and evaluating sales rep progress against stated expectations, in addition to aligning and changing behavior with performance expectations.
• Successful experience managing a team of __ + salespeople.
• Successful experience utilizing a CRM to manage team sales tasks, pipeline, and closing data.
• Successful experience hiring and onboarding sales representatives.
• Successful experience building and managing a territory (include geography if necessary).
Proven experience working within a __ (small, medium, large) company environment.

Skills

Successful sales managers have skills that set them apart from other average and below-average sales leaders so it is vital that a job description list the key skills required to be successful in your unique selling environment.

• Demonstrated ability to hire high performing sales people
• Strong ability to coach sales reps to higher performance
• Ability to accurately forecast future sales volumes
• Excels at selling intangible solutions into the B2B market
• Proficient at Target Account Selling
• Ability to analyze, establish and execute presales strategy
• Excellent qualification skills
• Skilled at building rapport, opening doors, and understanding business requirements of senior decision makers.
• Skilled at providing market recommendations and customer feedback to the executive team.
• Ability to elicit needs from key decision makers.
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Ability to influence others.
• Strong time management, qualification and negotiation skills.
• Ability to manage, optimize and identify opportunities with partners, members, process enhancement and program growth.

DNA

As mentioned in our article, Hiring The Right Salesperson: Sales DNA vs. The Resume, top performing sales people share certain traits. These traits drive top sales managers to consistently achieve their business and personal goals.

• Driven, energetic, professionally ambitious.
• Competitive.
• Sense of urgency.
• Confidence.
• Optimism, resilience and perseverance.
• Ability and need to influence others.
• Team player.
• Solution oriented.

Need more information on successful recruiting tactics and techniques? Download our book, Sales Recruiting 2.0, right to your Kindle.

Require more sales specific job descriptions? Check out these two articles: Job Description of an Account Executive, Job Description of a Vice President of Sales.

Photo Credit: pinprick via Compfight cc

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

2015 Sales Compensation Trends

Sales Compensation Trends 2015

In January, the World Bank announced cautionary good news. The organization’s Global Economic Prospects Report (GEP) predicted growth for developing countries, soft oil prices, a stronger U.S. economy, and the continuation of low interest rates globally.

As experts continue to talk about economic recovery, this positive outlook for the global economy is reflected in corporate earnings which are experiencing an uptick as well.

The Alexander Group’s 2015 Sales Compensation Trends Survey Executive Summary, published in January of 2015, provides insights on how sales compensation strategies are keeping up with the economy. This is the 13th annual report published by the Alexander Group with participants comprising of more than 100 sales departments, representing a wide range of businesses and industries.

Survey respondents reported that revenues are up, that they are set to hire more salespeople, and that current compensation programs are effective. Indications are that sales managers can continue to feel confident about their top performers meeting their goals and achieving their incentive plans, while having to pay even more to these high achievers.

As companies settle into 2015, some may already be enjoying the benefits of a brighter outlook, while others may still be struggling. The report provides a benchmark that Sales Managers, CFOs, and CEOs can use as a gauge.

Revenues, Costs, and Incentives

The Alexander group’s top finding is an anticipated increase in overall revenues. Survey respondents reported that they expect sales revenue growth of 7.5% in 2015. Since revenue projections affect sales targets, Sales Managers should be prepared to alter reps compensation packages accordingly to ensure they align with company objectives and drive the right kind of behavior. According to the report, 2014 should remind sales managers how important it is for market changes to be reflected in new compensation plans.

Last year, respondents projected revenue growth of 7%, yet Sales Managers anticipated a 3% incentive payout at the beginning of the year. By the end of 2014, the payout costs to sales personnel more than doubled to 7%. And while salespeople cannot control the various elements that affect sales success (ie. economic conditions, competition, or a customer’s financial challenges), an effective comp plan, according to Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes, will encourage attention to these factors by rewarding accurate forecasting or market intelligence.

Fortunately, companies are taking steps to ensure proper alignment of sellers’ objectives with organizational objectives. 90% of companies reported that they will make changes to their sales compensation plan for 2015, with 10% planning to make ‘significant’ changes to reps compensation plans. Just over 64% of the companies surveyed plan to increase base pay, with a median budget increase at 3%.

Fully two-thirds of companies report that the best performers – those in the 90th percentile – could earn two to three times their target incentive. For employers looking to retool or expand their team with top sellers  — the only type of salesperson that should be added to a team – this reality underscores the importance of having a highly competitive and attractive compensation plan.

Is your company projecting numbers like this?

The Alexander Group’s study paints a positive picture for sales departments for the year ahead. The numbers indicate that companies are looking forward to a healthy year, in addition to aligning their goals and objectives in the right way to motivate their sales teams. Companies and sales leadership that are not feeling as confident as these numbers suggest still have time to make adjustments for a healthier 2015.

Looking inward

A recent paper published by the CSO Forum titled, “Send the Right Message with your Compensation Plan” provides perspective on effective compensation strategies.  In it, Thomas Blondie, CEO of Spin.com, notes, “if your sales force is not producing the results you need them to achieve, one of the first things that you need to seriously consider as the sales leader for your company is are we to blame?”

Blondie encourages sales leadership to look inward and focus on three key areas to see if they’re sending the wrong messages to their sales force. He suggests focusing on compensation, recognition, and involvement as the best measures.

At the core of compensation strategies for salespeople is commission – and commission caps are bad, argues Smiley (so do we – read why). Putting a cap on commissions sends a clear signal to the salesforce that they shouldn’t push their limits. He also encourages management to show some compassion for salespeople who often suffer under nail-biting sales deadlines for their commissions – by staggering closing dates or updating the commission approach to seasonal sales, employers may generate increased performance out of the sales team, while simultaneously boosting employee retention.

Smiley also believes in the power of non-monetary rewards for salespeople, including increased recognition and involvement. By inviting top performers to participate more in decisions and rewarding them with perks, employers build deeper ties with the sales people that matter most. Not to be forgotten, according to Smiley, is that reality that management can learn from top performers, so including them in discussion about sales strategy and compensation may ultimately benefit the entire team.

Small updates for world-class companies

As sales teams start making their way through 2015, they’re hopeful that the numbers will continue to be on their side, but as the Alexendar study shows, it’s important to create a balance between goals and rewards and adjust, if needed, as the year goes on. Companies that feel they’re not on the best track can still right the ship by asking questions, pulling ideas and insights from top performers, and being open to making adjustments to systems and processes. A rising tide lifts all boats – make sure yours is in the harbour.

Sources:

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

Sales Hiring: Culture and its Impact on Recruiting

Culture and its Impact on Sales Recruiting

Cultivating the right internal culture is an afterthought for many organizations and yet culture plays an enormous role in business success.

What is Culture?

A company’s “corporate culture” can be thought of as the general norms, traditions and assumptions that govern employee perceptions, thoughts and behaviours at work. The term “corporate culture” came into vogue in the early 1980s. Sociologists, communications professionals, and organizational behaviorists made the idea of cultivating the right corporate culture an important issue in academia, and as the term made its way into our collective consciousness, companies began adopting new approaches to creating a positive corporate culture.

Today, corporate culture is often mistaken for a company’s brand image or “a company that has a lot of perks”, but there is more to culture than how a company markets itself or whether it offers free lunches and hosts pizza parties. In fact, building a good corporate culture has more to do with cultivating a sense of trust and goodwill into the very fabric of your company so that employees feel recognized, listened to, and engaged when they’re at work.

Companies that get corporate culture right have employees that evangelize on their behalf. Enjoying a reputation for having a good corporate culture is a big boost for companies when they are recruiting high achieving salespeople – and sometimes a good reputation even helps a firm spend less money on salaries and retain the best employees for the long-term.

Sales Rep Turnover is around 25.5%” – CSO Insights

How important is corporate culture to sales hiring?

A recent study conducted by Glassdoor, an online career community, surveyed more than 5,000 of its members on a number of factors that influence how they make career decisions. The study found that corporate culture is among the top five biggest considerations job seekers take into account before accepting a job offer.

The study reveals that people care about where they work and the kind of work they do. It also shows that potential employees are vetting companies carefully to make sure the job they get delivers a good work-life balance.

In sales, the structure of compensation packages is an important matter for potential hires. According to the Glassdoor study, fully 94% of sales professionals surveyed reported that the base salary is the most important element of their compensation plans, while only 62% felt commission rates are the most important aspect of their compensation plan.

Sales professionals are also motivated by what they sell. 78% of those surveyed said they would accept less money to work at a company selling something compelling.

Firms that work hard to entice the best talent develop competitive compensation packages and look for salespeople who show a passion for what the firm has to sell. These two simple strategies can help usher the best talent into the workplace, sometimes at a lower cost.

When it comes to retaining employees, corporate culture continues to play an important role. In the study, 84% of employees said they would consider moving to another employer whose culture and values more closely aligned with theirs. This is an astonishingly high number and speaks to not only the value of cultivating a great corporate culture, but also how hard it is to get culture right.

How can you get the word out about your corporate culture?

Word of mouth is extremely powerful so employees and ex-employees are the front line for a company’s reputation. They share their experiences about your company casually at parties or in lunch conversations, and on social sites such as Glassdoor or LinkedIn. They can also be critically honest when a friend or colleague interested in making a move calls them to ask about what it’s like to work at their company.

An employer’s first line of defence is finding out what their employees really feel — and say — about its corporate culture.  Anonymous surveys are an excellent medium that employers can leverage to get very honest answers about their employees perceptions about the corporate culture in which they work. Hiring Managers, working with HR, can also see what current and past employees are saying on Glassdoor, one of the most popular online employer review sites, or use social listening tools like Google Alerts or Mention.com to keep an ear on what people say.

For additional information on how to ensure your online reputation is up-to-date, read our article, Does your Company’s Online Reputation Matter when Sales Recruiting? which quotes Cameron Herold, founder and COO of BackPocket, as saying, “In this day and age, companies that don’t have an exceptional online presence are simply not going to attract A-level talent.”

Of course getting culture right is much more than simply having a great website. It takes genuine commitment by a company’s leaders as well as a lot of time and effort to build a culture of winning that in turn, fosters success.

Sales departments that are serious about attracting the best talent enhance their corporate culture by committing to excellence and offering employees continual training. For sales managers, the benefit of continual training is threefold: First, training sales people in a consistent, customized, measurable way that focuses on behaviors and follow-up activities lets your sales team know that you’re invested in their professional success. Second, it benefits your firm’s competitive advantage as a result of heightened seller effectiveness. Lastly, having a training plan in place can turn employees into brand ambassadors, amplifying your recruitment efforts year-round. Moreover, it gives management more leverage in holding the team accountable for achieving increasingly higher results.

How can you change your culture?

If you find you’ve got a bad reputation in the marketplace, it’s not too late to change.

A recent article on the Sales Benchmark Index blog notes that high turnover in the sales department is a key indicator that something’s wrong with the firm’s sales culture. The article suggests creating a common vision for the sales team as a first step toward gearing up a better corporate reputation. The article also provides a series of questions to ask in order to start the conversation with your team and get buy-in from them on the path to developing a more positive work climate.

The article also suggests that as employers undergo a culture shift, leadership must be transparent about the pros and cons of working for the organization when talking with candidates. This gives candidates a better opportunity to evaluate their own ability to fit in with the selling culture, and gives hiring managers a better understanding of the candidate’s likelihood of success.

An article in Fast Company by Beth O’Neill, How to Shape your Company Culture before It’s Too Late is a helpful reminder for companies that want to update their culture. O’Neill suggests that organizational leaders need to be clear on their mission, vision, and values. She also suggests fixing the following three key aspects of everyday work life to help employees feel better about their workplace, and by proxy update the perception outsiders have about it.

The first change according to O’Neil, provide structure for how meetings are run since “meetings are the microcosm of the organization’s culture.” Mattel CEO Bryan Stockton, who was ousted early this year, blamed part of the problem with innovation at Mattel on a bad meeting culture. A recent story on NPR’s Morning Edition by Yuki Noguchi gives a great deal of detail on how meeting culture can slowly erode a corporate culture.

O’Neill recommends fostering the development of a good meeting structure that can be adopted by the whole company. According to O’Neill, meeting managers should formalize the process of the desired outcome of each meeting by making sure there is a meeting agenda, everyone invited has a role to play, and there is a record of what was agreed on in the meeting. This is one of the key ways to begin fostering a better corporate culture.

Next, O’Neill suggests creating a clear decision making processes so that employees can focus on making decisions efficiently and in a structured manner. Finally, O’Neill advises that the company define what success will look like, particularly for process and relationships. This gives employees a vision to follow and shows them what their being measured by.

Sales departments and corporations are gearing up to welcome the next generation into more senior roles, and as Millennials climb the corporate ladder, they’re bringing their ideals with them.  Work culture is one of the top three qualities that matter most to the next generation when examining prospective employers. In fact, nearly 80 percent of Millennials look for people and culture fit with employers, even before they consider the career potential a company might offer them. Companies that begin a culture shift now will be poised to attract the best talent on the current market, and in the future.

In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value” – Louis Gerstner

Sources

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

Hiring Solution Salespeople in an Evolving Sales Landscape

Hiring Solution Salespeople

One of the biggest shifts in selling approaches occurred in the mid-1980s when Mike Bosworth, formerly of Xerox Computer Services, popularized “Solution Sales.” Bosworth championed the idea of selling “expert to non-expert”, in which salespeople proactively uncover a customer’s business requirements and position offerings as a ‘solution’ to these business needs rather than simply waiting for purchase requests. In the early days of selling computer systems, this value-based approach empowered salespeople to develop a package of products and services that would benefit the prospect in a unique way. It also made it difficult for competitors to replicate offerings because conversations were occurring at the business level rather than the product level.

The successes achieved by early adopters of the solution sales approach led to widespread adoption by sales leaders. In fact, a full three-quarters of sales leaders report or aim to be some kind of full solutions provider (Dixon and Adamson, 2011). While the value associated with the strategy has been realized by thousands of sales departments, solutions are becoming increasingly complex as sellers compete to provide the most ‘comprehensive’ solutions.

But the movement hasn’t been entirely positive. To a large extent, the approaches mass adoption by B2B sales leaders actually reduces the competitive advantage gained from employing solution sales. Moreover, increasingly complex solutions have led to a prolonged selling process, requiring more involvement from the customer at each closing stage, ultimately leading to what Dixon and Adamson call customer “solutions fatigue”.

Buyers have responded to “solutions fatigue” by becoming more sophisticated about their own technological requirements. This change, according to Nicholas Toman, is threatening Bosworth’s model, turning the solution sale back into an ‘order-fulfilment’ discussion. So what is one of the most effective ways for sales leaders to maintain a value or solutions approach? Hire the right kind of solution salespeople.

Is your organization truly offering solutions?

Before sales leaders can begin their search for the sales person or people that fit their unique selling environment, they must firmly establish that their offering is indeed a solution. Writing in BRW, Peter Finkelstein argues that in order for sales leaders to determine if they are actually offering a solution or if a move to a solutions approach would drive revenues, they need to examine their corporate philosophy and culture.

According to Finkelstein, leadership should evaluate if their current buyer segments offer long-term sustainable growth opportunities and identify what solutions buyers in those segments want. He goes on to argue that sales leaders must then explore what it now produces and identify how these need to be changed, extended or adjusted (if at all) to accommodate the expectations of the buyers in the sales segments. In addition, Finkelstein advises leaders to examine whether they are ready to embrace the idea of extended partnerships and/or re-evaluate their current partnership programs to ensure that they meet the demands of the solutions buyer. These, however, are not the only considerations sales leaders must take into account to ensure their corporate philosophy aligns with the desired actions of their sales force. Sales leader must also ensure that their teams are incentivized accordingly.

Writing for Gartner, Tiffani Bova underscores an often overlooked issue sales manager’s face when trying to move over to a solutions approach and build their sales team accordingly. According to Bova, many sales forces are not actually performing solutions sales, but instead have simply bundled products and identified them as solutions. This can be problematic since reps become ‘over’ compensated for selling products when in fact the customer or their channel partner “actually creates the ultimate value of using a particular technology in combination with other products and services.” And when business value isn’t delivered to the customer – which is the heart and soul of solution selling – selling effectiveness decreases and a brand’s reputation can be damaged.

What makes a great solution salesperson?

Companies that actually offer solutions can begin structuring, or restructuring, an effective sales force. World-class companies understand that the sales cycle is different in complex solutions sales and that hiring salespeople with demonstrated, year-over-year success selling complex solutions have more predictable and consistent selling success in this context. As Finkelstein notes, “[solutions] salespeople have to have a far broader and deeper understanding of what buyers want and expect and what implications there are for making a decision.” Finkelstein suggests that companies recruit sales people who have superior analytical skills, broad knowledge of their industry, and the ability to think independently since informed buyers expect an informed seller that can add value and accommodate a more complex buying environment.

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has conducted a number of studies on solutions sales professionals, and delivered three key findings about the highest performing solution sales people:

  1. They know how to evaluate prospects using a different set of criteria than those used by other reps, “targeting agile organizations in a state of flux”, rather than those that have a clear understanding of their requirements.
  2. They target stakeholders who are “skeptical change agents” in the organizations they want to sell into.
  3. They employ a method of coaching potential customers rather than asking about their purchasing process.

The CEB research, when boiled down, reveals that high achieving solutions salespeople seek to be more informed and more empowered than average salespeople. Rather than simply responding to identified needs and buying requests, high achievers engage prospects before they understand their requirements entirely and before they are able to articulate how a ‘solution’ will meet their requirements. High achievers also apply filters to see which companies might be most open to change and avoid working with companies that are “hamstrung by structures and relationships that stifle change” as a method of decreasing failure rates.

Identifying top performers

To mitigate hiring risk, leading sales departments work with HR and/or recruiting firms to develop a structured interview process that assesses and analyses salespeople for the traits that are required for success in solution sales.

Here are a few tips:

  • Screening questions should be designed to uncover how candidates evaluate prospects and how they approach a complex solution sale.
    • Have candidates describe how they incorporate collaboration into their selling process.
    • Ask the candidate if they reach out to partner organizations in order to enhance a deal.
    • Have candidates describe how they work with prospects throughout the phases of a complex sale.
    • Require candidates to discuss recent wins and losses. Check that the candidate has consistently met or exceeded their quotes in each of the past 5+ years.

Read more on effective sales interviewing questions and techniques, here.

Top solution sellers will not only be able to answer these questions in detail, but will articulate how their analytical and evaluative skills have contributed to their consistent selling success.

Ensuring your offering is truly a solution, in addition to incorporating a structured assessment program that assesses a candidate’s skills, experiences, and selling traits will mitigate hiring risk and produce the right solution sales candidates that will drive sales, fast.

Looking for additional information on solution sales? Check out Dave Stein’s excellent article, Is Solution Selling Dead or Just Misunderstood.

Sources:

Photo Credit: professor.jruiz via Compfight cc

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

B2C vs. B2B Sales Recruiting: Establishing the Differences

B2B Sales Recruiting vs B2C

When we launched Peak Sales Recruiting many years ago, we looked at the market and recognized the under served need for companies to recruit high achieving sales people. While it was overly common at the time for recruiting companies to specialize their services outside of a geographical region, we saw an even more acute need for B2B companies to recruit and hire top performing sales people.

Over the years, Peak Sales has been engaged in thousands of successful B2B sales recruiting searches. Those outside the sales profession might wonder why the business to business (B2B) matters. Aren’t all sales the same? Aren’t B2B sales the same as B2C? Hardly.

There is a stark contrast between B2C and B2B sales and consequently, the sales recruiting techniques are very different.

First, lets take a look at the differences between the two types of sales and how this impacts the selling activity.

B2C vs B2B Sales Recruiting

Now, lets contrast the differences we typically see in the most successful B2C and B2B sales people:

Sales Recruiting B2B vs B2C

Summarizing to this point – in many cases, B2B sales requires a more sophisticated person with a higher level of training who can have a larger impact on company profits and success, and consequently who commands a higher level of compensation.  This distinction has an enormous impact on how companies approach sales recruiting.

Need for a Strong Sales Hiring Track Record – since each sales person involves a high investment in recruiting and training, combined with the fact that they are responsible for generating significant sales as well as managing important customer relationships, the cost of a failed hire is relatively large.  Failed sales hires can have a devastating effect on sales numbers, sales force costs, company reputation and customer relationships and in turn, employers need to ensure that their sales recruiting and hiring processes select the right candidates.

Advanced Candidate Assessment Techniques – The complex set of tangible skills and intangible traits required to make B2B sales people successful are not always obvious or easy to measure and assess. An objective assessment process combined with advanced assessment techniques and background checks are necessary to properly determine whether a salesperson has the necessary traits in sufficient levels to be successful in each unique selling environment.

Extensive Searches – The unique demands of different selling environments mean that there is often a smaller pool of potential candidates from which to hire for each open sales position. Furthermore, the best sales people are employed, not actively seeking new employment positions, and not easily accessible. Employers must have a strong recruiting engine and be creative in order to get exposure to the consistently high achieving sales professionals that also possess the right domain knowledge skills and experience.

Careers Matter – becoming a consistent and high achieving B2B sales person requires time, patience and commitment. Those sales people that have put in the time to achieve success are less likely to change employers unless the career opportunity is legitimate and compelling. In order to attract the best B2B sales talent, employers need to ensure that they are not only an employer of choice, but also offer at or above market compensation and robust careers.

To your B2B sales hiring success!

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

Is the Extrovert Always Right for Sales?

Extroversion and Sales

It’s interesting to note that a paper in the American Psychological Association titled “Introverts and Extroverts” published in 1924 ends with a question about whether introverts and extroverts belong to personality types at all.

The paper provides definitions of both terms – an introvert being “an individual in whom exists an exaggeration of the thought processes in relation to directly observable social behavior, with an accompanying tendency to withdraw from social contacts.” An extrovert, conversely, is “an individual in whom exists a diminution of the thought process in relation to direct observable social behavior, with an accompanying tendency to make social contacts.”

Introversion and extroversion have become archetypes in society, but do these generalizations bring any true insight with them, or are they simply a way to classify people quickly without too much thought?

Introversion and the sales persona

It has long been conventional wisdom that extroverts make better salespeople than introverts, however, recent research undermines this assumption and gives hiring managers more to think about than simple generalizations. While extroverts certainly do better socially in situations that are important in many selling processes, it is sometimes the introvert who can gain more trust, demonstrate more competence, and ultimately win the sale. It might be that a healthy mix of introversion and extroversion is the best combination to look for when you’re hiring a new salesperson, in addition to the right sales experience, skills, and DNA.

The challenge is finding those candidates who fit your organization’s unique selling environment. Perhaps it is a candidate who is in the middle of two extremes. Someone who stands out in the interview process by demonstrating confidence, the feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities, yet exhibits that they can think realistically about their own limitations as a sales person, how they are working to transcend these limitations, the challenges presented in your sales cycle, and how their skills and experiences would enable them to overcome these and close deals.

The confidence game

A recent article in Business Life examines the difference between confidence and competence in employees and whether or not they are promoted. The article delivers some interesting findings from the scientific community that  “back up complaints that can be heard echoing in the canteens across the country – that it’s not always the best who get promoted, but the best self-promoters.”

The article pulls from U.K. research on students that shows those who are more comfortable about speaking frequently in a confident tone of voice were perceived as being more convincing in their abilities than those who were actually competent in tests.

In the U.S., similar studies deliver similar results. A Washington Post article, Why Extroverts Fail, Introverts Flounder and You Probably Succeed, cites a meta-analysis of 35 studies of nearly 4,000 sales people that found the correlation between extroversion and sales performance was barely above zero (if you’re really interested in data and analysis of personality traits and job performance, this is a comprehensive study to read.)

the correlation between extroversion and sales performance was barely above zero”

The Washington Post article also cites a study conducted by a Wharton School of Management researcher who studied sales representatives at a software company. The researcher identified introverts and extroverts with standard personality tests and then tracked their financial performance in sales. The group that stood out with the most sales were “ambiverts”, or people who are somewhere in the middle of the scale between extroverted and introverted. In this particular study, ambiverts beat extroverts in sales by 24 percent.

Finding and hiring ambiverts

It can be tempting – and almost seem natural – when hiring salespeople, to gravitate toward the more confident extroverts. Sales departments want and need professionals that project a sense of confidence and possess all the social skills they’ll need to be successful. But if you think about past hires at your company, it’s likely that at least one or two salespeople who seemed great on paper, and even better in person, just didn’t have the right skills after six months on the job.

There’s a lot more to hiring salespeople than personality tests. It’s a process that requires a structured and discipline approach. One of our recent posts, How to Interview and Spot the Traits of Top Sales People, gives an overview of the traits to look for in a job candidate during the interview process, along with tips on what questions to ask during the various interview phases. These tips will help you unearth the traits you’re looking for beyond personality, including a candidate’s level of ambition, confidence, and optimism, as well as their sense of urgency, how they interact with others, how they solve problems and how organized they are; the traits that are indicative of selling competence and success.

Updating the hiring process

The Business Life article makes the point that an interview situation is where an extrovert is likely to shine, while an introvert has a great chance of doing their worst. To battle the stereotypes, the author recommends what we recommend to our clients; that having a highly structured interview process that involves as many stakeholders in the sales and human resources department as possible will mitigate hiring risk by removing personal bias from the interview process. Combine this approach with third-party psychometric testing and your hiring committee will better understand a candidate’s traits – the most important factor in determining sales success.

Similarly, the Washington Post artict-le encourages readers to forget the stereotypes and look for “those who take a more calibrated approach – who can talk smoothly but also listen keenly…who combine the extrovert’s assertiveness with the introvert’s quiet confidence.”

It’s not easy to gain this much insight into a candidate – it takes a lot of experience interviewing to know what the right questions to ask are, how to ask those questions, and how to look and listen for cues from the interviewee. Sales people are usually outstanding in the interview process because they are excellent at selling themselves. We also underscore the fact that the cost of a bad sales hire can range from 75 to 150 percent of the rep’s annual quota, so the return on investment for implementing a structured and rigorous screening process to ensure a candidate’s confidence matches their competence is significant.

[bctt tweet=”The cost of a bad sales hire can range from 75 to 150 percent of the rep’s annual quota”]

Introverts, extroverts, and ambivalent all have something to bring to the table. The tough job is to find out how much they know, how well they learn, and how much they’ll care about selling for your company. Leading organizations pull their resources together and work with their team to define the kind of salesperson the team needs, and what kind of personality will be most successful. Consider working with HR to implement the best testing available, and back up the testing with insightful, open-ended questions and remember that a sales person’s skills, experience, and DNA are independent of whether they are an introvert or extrovert.

Sources:

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)