Prospective clients often come to us with a typical problem: many of the salespeople they hired seemed great during the interview process, but under-performed once they were hired.

When a new sales hire doesn’t work out, the loss is huge. Poor-performing salespeople can cost thousands in lost opportunities and revenue, and worse yet—damage a company’s reputation and credibility.

As part of Peak’s 5 step process for recruiting top sales talent, we help our customers clarify their hiring requirements so we can focus our search on finding candidates with the specific characteristics and traits that will make them successful in our customer’s unique selling environment.

Oftentimes we find that companies use job descriptions when hiring salespeople that require candidates to have certain qualifications. Over the years we have found that the typical hiring requirements of most firms have little to do with sales success. In fact, some of these “need to have” conditions adversely limit the pool of candidates and create great costs for the business.

Sometimes these requirements are carried over from previous job descriptions or tossed in to fill out a job description. The bottom line is that they detract from the focus on what really matters.

Why Many Need to Have’s are Not Really Need to Haves:

Many of the typical hiring requirements that employers use in job descriptions are neither necessary nor sufficient for sales success. Here’s the top 3 “Need-to-Have” requirements most often listed in job descriptions and why your company doesn’t actually require them.

1. Why salespeople don’t “need-to-have” university degrees:

Steve Martin writes in the Harvard Business Review that more often than not, top sales people are born, not made. Martin administered personality tests to over 1000 top salespeople and estimated that:

“Over 70% of the top salespeople are born with ‘natural’ instincts that play a crucial role in determining their sales success.”

Dave Kurlan, the author of Baseline Selling, too points out that “salespeople don’t succeed because of their education.” As Kurlan points out, many top companies like Google who carefully study their recruitment efforts, have arrived at the conclusion that there is no correlation between higher education and success.

What Kurlan and Martin are pointing to is that selling prowess is not determined by a piece of paper or four years of tuition. Too many companies require their salespeople to have university degrees—when such a requirement has nothing to do with sales success.

The question then arises: what determines success in the sales world?

Our experience has taught us that top sales achievers have certain innate qualities, traits and attributes—what Martin called “natural instincts.” We call these traits the Sales DNA. A candidate’s Sales DNA is the most importance factor in determining sales success.

Selling is something that comes naturally to the best salespeople. It’s something a university education cannot teach. This is why it makes little sense to require a university degree for a sales job.

What is this Sales DNA? Gallup has researched these traits of top sales achievers for over 30 years and concluded that the Sales DNA includes traits like “motivation, ability to influence and build relationships; creativity, innovation and problem-solving abilities; and natural tendency to derive joy from their work.”

Our experience over the years has confirmed this too. More often than not, the top sales earners are successful NOT because they have a college degree, but because they have characteristics such as ambition, drive, confidence, optimism, goal-orientation, persistence, competitiveness and curiosity. That’s why our recruiting process includes not only strict, behavioural based interviewing by our seasoned interview team, but third party, psychometric testing that spells out not only what drives an individual, but how they can be managed to produce optimal sales results.

2. Why salespeople don’t “need-to-have” experience:

Many sales job descriptions stipulate that the candidates “need to have” X years of experience.

But, like education, past experience too is a poor determinant of sales success. It matters not where someone worked, but how they behaved in a relevant and similar sales environment and whether they demonstrated the behaviours required to be successful.

Gallup conducted a massive study of over 250,000 sales reps in over two dozen industries which revealed that “sales is primarily a talent-driven occupation.” Top salespeople have innate talents or tendencies that are “extremely difficult or even impossible to teach.” Thus, experience, like education, has little impact on sales success, or in Gallup’s not-so-subtle words, “traditional reliance on experience, education, and skills or competencies is a grossly inadequate and often misleading way of building your best team.”

In all our years of work with top companies around the world, we too have found that experience cannot predict future sales success.

There are several dangers with relying on past experience as the key to recruiting.

Experience doesn’t protect an employer from mediocre salespeople who just happened to work in a fast growing company. The candidates’ sales numbers may look pretty on paper but they might be extremely poor when looking across the industry or even at their colleagues. Sometimes top salespeople are the product of their environment, and may not be able to duplicate their past success in their new environment.

Experience may even be a detriment to selling in certain situations. As people’s buying habits and methods change, sales tactics learned years ago can seem obsolete and harsh today. Experienced salespeople might need to unlearn their past habits, costing money and time for a new employer.

Top sales people keep up with changing times and are flexible enough to sell to today’s buyers. However mandatory hiring requirements often stand in the way of spotting real sales talent. Many salespeople with great sales DNA, yet only have 5-7 years of experience, are often disregarded by companies that make it mandatory for candidates to have 9+ years of experience. Maturity may play a role in ensuring that a seller can relate to a potential buyer, but if a sales candidate has demonstrated that they can perform the job successfully, does it really matter if they have less years of service than the job description requires?

Experience is not a holy grail when it comes to recruiting, nor should it be dismissed, especially if it is in the same industry or niche. It can be a useful tool but should not become a hard-fast rule while screening sales hires.

“Research by Leadership IQ confirms that 46% of all new hires fail within 18 months of being hired, chiefly due to ‘attitudinal factors’.”

3. Why Salespeople don’t “need to have” sold X product previously:

Experience in selling a similar product is perhaps the most desired requirement in recruiting. Experience tells us, however, that if a candidate has been successfully selling the same kind of products, this experience can be a good indicator as to whether they will be able to contribute to your bottom line from day one. To sum it up, if a candidate has sold similar products to similar industries and worked in familiar environments, then their contacts, innate understanding of the vertical, and past selling habits might come in handy at your company.

But as with the other two requirements, this requirement isn’t overly necessary.

Working for the competition in the past is no guarantee that they will excel at your company nor an indicator that the sales person will fit with your organization and culture. In fact, working for the competition may be a detriment if it means they think and do things considerably different than what your company requires. Their specific product or niche experience should be viewed through the lens of your own organizational needs.

Remember that it is not necessary that only salespeople who have worked for direct competitors will be able to succeed at your company. In fact, many employers overvalue sector experience so much that they miss out on other great sales hires and stellar candidates who may not have worked in that sector before, but have worked in environments with a similar offering, selling process, buyer, and prices and would be rewarding hires nonetheless.

Each selling role and environment is unique—even within the same sector. A Hunter’s DNA will push them to succeed even if they don’t have sector experience. It is a great sales attitude and work ethic that creates great sales results.

As we have said before, sales recruiters should expand their pool of candidates by recruiting across a variety of industries. Often, the industries may differ, but the sales approaches, product features and selling tactics can be the same.

Searching within a broader candidate pool, might help you find great salespeople in a more cost-efficient manner than if you restrict your search for people within specific industries. The larger the pool of candidates the more leverage an empolyer will have in hiring the ideal person at the right price.

Companies can unknowingly limit their candidate pool if they continue looking at these meaningless requirements when filling their sales jobs. When the starting pool is weak and screened based on unnecessary metrics, well-meaning companies lose out on star sales professionals who can boost revenues.

Hiring people with top-notch sales DNA—personality and behavioral traits— will lead your organization towards A-players and radically lessen chances of attrition or failure.

Like what you’ve read? Check out our eBooks here!

References—
Rally the Troops—Gallup Business Journal
Hiring for Attitude—Research & Tools to Skyrocket your Success Rate—Leadership IQ
What Google Might Know About Hiring Salespeople—Customer Think
Are Top Salespeople Born or Made?—Harvard Business Review

Photo Credit: george.bremer via Compfight cc

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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)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

Your team has found what look like some great candidates for your open sales position. You have planned your interview questions to help filter out the mediocre and find the top performers. You have reviewed your compensation package and are certain it is competitive. You feel you are ready to hire the company’s next super star. STOP.

Before you sit down at your desk to interview candidates, make a stop at HR, or you may be risking a law suit. Many questions that seem innocuous can land you in legal hot water, and the laws may have shifted without your realization. It is part of HR’s job to keep up on changes in employment law, so be sure you ask them to review your intended questions before sitting down with candidates.

Here are some questions and issues you may want to discuss with HR or your organization’s legal department before diving into your interview process:

Age: Most sales managers are aware they should not ask directly about age, but may not be aware they can violate age discrimination laws with offhand comments that may indirectly ask the candidate to expound upon or reveal their age.

• Illegal: Wow, you look much too young to have been a top sales performer at such a large organization!
• Legal: How long did you work for XYZ Company, and can you tell me more about your accomplishments there? How many deals were you able to close, who are your primary buyers; do they reside in the C-suite?

Gender-specific questions and questions about marital status and family: It is illegal to discriminate based on gender. It is crucial that you don’t ask any question that could be interpreted to be digging for information about the candidate’s marital status, spouse or children.

• Illegal: Do you have children? Will you be able to travel for business and work the long hours this job requires or do you have to be home by 5:00 to take care of your children?
• Legal: Your sales territory would include five states, so you will be on the road quite a bit, and that will include some overnight stays. Since you will be busy with sales calls during the day, you may have to do some paperwork nights and weekends. Would you be willing and able to work these kinds of hours and spend some nights away from home?

Sexual orientation: Questions about sexual orientation are illegal in California and some other places. There is no reason to inquire about this at all.

Country of origin: It is illegal to discriminate based on country of origin. You cannot ask about nationality or native tongue, but you can ask candidates to verify they can work legally in the country. You can also ask what languages they can speak or write fluently – if that is critical to the job. HR should have attorney-approved forms regarding legal-to-work verification. It is best just to let HR verify these forms and supporting documentation.

• Illegal: We have a position opening up in Mexico City. Are you from Mexico? Is Spanish your first language?
• Legal: We have a position opening up in Mexico City. Are you fluent in Spanish?

Ethnicity and race: It is illegal to inquire about either ethnicity or race, even if comments or questions seem complimentary.

• Illegal: Since you are African American, you would do well in this sales position, because there are many African American prospects in the territory.
• Legal: There is really no legal question or comment about ethnicity and race.

Religion: Don’t ask about religion with the reasoning that you are trying to find out what holidays the candidate will want to take off or for any other reason.

• Illegal: Are you Jewish? Will you want Hanukkah and Passover off? It would be great if you were willing to cover for some of the other client service representatives around Christmas.
• Legal: The company gives the following holidays off: [List them.] You also can take [#] of personal days per year. (Check with HR about this one, as it is possible you may have to give important religious holidays off in certain jurisdictions.)

Disability: You cannot ask a question that would cause the candidate to tell you about a health issue or disability.

• Illegal: We are looking for real go getters who can take a tough schedule on the road, because this sales territory is quite large. How many days were you sick last year?
• Legal: The schedule for this job can sometimes be grueling. The territory is quite large, and it requires long hours and a lot of time on the road. Can you handle being on the road 50% of the time?

Physical attributes: You cannot comment on height, weight or other physical attributes.

• Illegal: With your good looks, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in the door to pitch new prospects.
• Legal: Tell me about your experience in getting through the gatekeepers in order to pitch new prospects.

Affiliations: It is illegal to ask generally about clubs and affiliations.

• Illegal: What clubs do you belong to and what are your political affiliations?
• Legal: Do you want to discuss any professional organizations you think are relevant to helping you perform your job?

Military status: It is best to just avoid any comment on their military background.

• Illegal: It is important that our clients can reach you, and that they feel their rep is available to them. I see you were in the military. Are you still in the reserves? Might you be called away from work to serve?
• Illegal: What kind of discharge did you receive?
• Legal: Do you have any potential plans that would require you to take time away from your field position?

Arrests: It is illegal to ask if a person has ever been arrested, because someone could have been arrested and then exonerated.

• Illegal: We really need someone we can trust in this positon, because you will have access to confidential company and product information as well as certain financial accounts. Have you ever been arrested?
• Legal: It is legal to ask about felony convictions, and factors about the felony can be considered when making a hiring decision. There is a fine line here when weighing these factors, and it is better to avoid this issue during your interview and just leave gathering to HR. HR will likely use attorney-approved forms. Of course, HR can also be helpful in performing background checks.

Financial information: It is illegal to ask if a candidate has ever declared bankruptcy, but it is legal to run a credit check.

• Illegal: We want high-powered salespeople who know how to make money. We are looking for winners. Have you ever declared bankruptcy?
• Legal: Do not ask about financial background during an interview. Rather, your HR department can ask the candidate to sign a form giving consent to a check credit. Many U.S. states allow employers to use credit history as a factor in hiring decisions, but in some states there are restrictions.

Special Note on asking about earnings: It is a common practice to evaluate a sales person’s level of success by looking a their history of commission earnings and in most jurisdictions it is legal to ask a candidate to prove their income in one way or another. Once you have had your interview questions sanctioned by the HR department, if you need to deviate a bit during the interview, stick to the straight and narrow and only ask obviously job-related questions. If there is any doubt at all about the legality of a question, don’t ask it. An off-hand comment can cost the company a lawsuit.

*CAVEAT: This blog does not give legal advice, but here are some questions and issues you may want to discuss with HR or your company’s legal department. Questions labeled as “illegal” and “legal” should be checked with your HR department or attorney. Examples are based on U.S. and Canadian law, but U.S. and Canadian law differ (from each other and other countries), as do laws from state to state in the U.S. Please check with your HR department or attorney regarding the issues raised in this blog post and how they apply to your company.

Sources
8 Interview Questions You Should Never Ask, Inc.
13 Questions to Avoid During a Job Interview, Entrepreneur
Discrimination during a Job Interview, Lawyers.com
Interview Questions: Legal vs. Illegal, Canada Human Resources Centre

Image courtesy of  Naypong | FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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• About
• Latest Posts

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)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

Sales leaders don’t have enough time in the day and it’s costing them.

They are busy developing strategies and implementing tactics to drive their companies to the next level, and sometimes the necessary minutiae of managing their team can come in second. But there is help, and it is close by in your company’s human resources department. Yet, many leaders do not want interference from HR, and only look to them for tactical, not strategic, support. But the best leaders invest the time to teach HR what the sales department really does and the type of people that perform best within it. They take key members of the HR department along for a sales call or two, so they can see up close and personal just what it takes to succeed in sales. They give them a solid understanding of the duties performed by people in different sales roles and realize that with this knowledge, HR can provide a great deal of time and money-saving support, as well as provide invaluable advice in critical decision making.

Here are some areas where a strategic partnership with HR can pay off:

Employment Law: Hiring, staff management, compensation plans and terminations are all legal minefields. Even some of the top sales gurus have been known to unwittingly recommend practices of questionable legality. Sit down with your HR Department and get a firm hold on what you can and cannot do legally. Give them your list of interview questions to review. Discuss compensation, incentive and bonus plans with them. And, of course, if you are even considering terminating an employee, your first stop is the HR Department.

Recruitment: Once HR understands the structure of the sales department, what it is selling and to whom, HR can help to recruit for those roles. Here’s how.

Job Descriptions: Although no doubt sales leaders have a good idea what they want in a candidate, HR can take the job description you give them and put it in standard company format and check to be sure it is within the law. They can also search for similar job descriptions from other companies to show you additional responsibilities and metrics to consider incorporating into your plan.

Sourcing Candidates: HR can reach out to likely passive candidates from other companies or on online sources such as LinkedIn. They can also manage the relationship with sales recruiters.

Diversity: There are ethical reasons for building a diverse sales force, but it is also very good for business, particularly where customers are made up of both men and woman and are of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. But when is it legal to proactively seek people of a particular gender, race or ethnicity? And if a company does not do that, is it open to legal action if its work force ends up comprised quite predominantly of white males? This is an area where Sales needs to seek the strategic advice of HR.

Screening Candidates: With the direction of Sales, HR can help provide structure (processes, scorecards and scripts) which helps to weed out unlikely candidates and preinterview more likely ones. HR can also give valuable insights into the candidates they pass on to Sales for further interviews.  HR can also provide scheduling support and arrange travel which allows the sales team to focus its time on selling.

Personality Testing: This is one of the most important ways HR can help Sales. HR can arrange for personality testing that will help Sales decide who to hire and give insights on the best role for each candidate. For example, a candidate who shows a very healthy ego but low empathy may be a top performer in new account acquisition, but may not have the patience required for nurturing existing accounts. This is a critical aspect in order to hire the right sales person for your company and that is why we utilize industry leading psychometric testing in our recruiting process.

References and Background Checks: When sales managers are on the fence about who to hire, they will probably want to call key references themselves. But for those calls that are meant to check the veracity of resume and interview claims, including previous income, HR can be a great help. Of course, HR can also do background checks that go far beyond the resume.

Compensation Packages. Sales leaders will have their own ideas about how to compensate their staffs, but HR can help them to align sales goals with the broader goals of the company. Sales vice presidents should also familiarize themselves with all benefits offered, and discuss them with HR if they do not come up to the benefits packages offered by the competition. The compensation plan is how to motivate the sales force and influence them to support business goals; its importance cannot be underestimated.

Onboarding: It’s no secret that the first days can be critical to a salesperson’s ultimate success and their impression of a company. HR will should not be responsible for sales and product training, but they can help make onboarding a lot less painless. For example, they could mail all those tedious forms in advance, so your new hire can minimize time on the job filling out w-9s and contemplating health care options. HR may also be able to help you coordinate the logistics, if not the content, of training events. This may not be all that strategic, but this source of support should not be overlooked.

Termination:  Before terminating an employee, sales management must follow a structured plan. It bears repeating that sales vice presidents and managers should sit down with HR well before there is a need to terminate in order to get a good understanding of legal issues, then sit down with HR again if it is necessary to terminate. Here are some ways HR can help:

• Review plans for goals and metrics salespeople must meet in order to remain employed with the company
• Review sales management’s termination decision, so if termination is necessary, it can never be claimed it was a personal vendetta
• Advise on how to document the employee’s activities and performance, and compare them to the job description, the expected numbers and other written expectations
• Advise what the sales manager should do in the form of warnings and written instructions so the problem employee can attempt corrective action
• Be present as a witness at termination meetings
• Conduct an exit interview to inform the person of the details of any packages or benefits they will receive

Exit Interviews: Of course many employees leave of their own volition. For all employees leaving the company, HR should conduct exit interviews which may give valuable insights into how the culture of the company can be improved and how to retain more sales staff in the future.

The key take away: Don’t overlook the value that your HR department can bring to your sales recruitment and talent management plans.

Sources

Closing the Credibility Chasm between Sales and Human Resources, Sales Benchmark Index

Sales and human resources — a perfect collaboration, Philadelphia Business Journal

How to Fire an Employee Without Being Sued, INC.

How to Set Up a Sales Compensation Plan, Elizabeth Wasserman

Who Makes for the “Best” Hire?, Allan Schweyer

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles | freedigitalimages.net

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• About
• Latest Posts

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)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021