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The Most Common Sales Interviewing Mistakes

Optimized-Interviewing Mistakes

This may sound like a familiar scenario. That new sales person you hired isn’t working out. After six months on the job, he hasn’t met one monthly sales goal. And, he doesn’t get along with others on the team. How did this happen? He seemed so great in the interview!

If this sounds familiar, maybe it’s time to look at your interview techniques to determine if you are making these common sales interviewing mistakes that prevent companies from hiring great salespeople:

1. Not Asking Open-Ended Questions

If you ask mostly closed ended questions, candidates can often guess the right answer from the question and have a 50% chance of answering the correct answer – even candidates who are a poor match for your open role. Pose questions that require the applicant to provide thoughtful, detailed answers. The more the applicant tells you about their motivations and sales philosophy, the better you are able to judge whether they’re right for your company.

  • Questions such as “tell us about your largest sales achievements” or “why do you want to work here?”  may seem trite, but the answers will tell you a lot about the motivation and makeup of the applicant.
  • Another open ended question such as “how would you describe your sales style?” provides useful clues to how well he or she relates to customers. Do they listen to the customer and build relationships or are they all about the hard sell? Is their style right for you?
  • Asking “what specific features about our products do you think are most attractive to potential customers?” provides insight into whether the applicant has done his homework and researched your company. How will they position your products to customers?

2. Not Asking Behavioral Questions 

There is a stark difference between behavioral interview questions which focus on what someone has done and regular questions which focus on what someone would do. For instance, if you ask a sales candidate to describe how they have successfully sold a new product in a price competitive market, you will get a very different answer than if you asked how someone would sell your new product which exists in a price competitive market. The former questions forces someone to demonstrate that they have the critical experience and gives you insight into how they will behave if you were to employ them, while the latter question will elicit a theoretical answer which likely represents what the candidates thinks you want to hear, but may not provide any indication of how they will operate on your team.

3. Not Asking Follow-Up or Cross Referencing Questions

Many salespeople are able to predict the questions they will hear in an interview. They can often concoct convincing answers which may make them sound more accomplished and skilled than they actually are. This is particularly true for salespeople that can’t hold jobs and have more experience interviewing than closing sales. The key to breaking this is to ask key questions multiple time or multiple ways and to ask follow on questions that challenge the answers. For instance, if someone claims to have made 50 calls a day in a particular role, ask them to talk about their ratios of calls to closes. More often than not, winners know their own metrics and the metrics make sense when stacked against total sales performance. Does it all sound plausible? Challenge claims. If he or she cites percentages, ask for real numbers. Increasing sales by 50% is not very impressive if the real numbers were small to begin with.

4. Ignoring Applicant’s Language and Demeanor

There are many small queues which provide useful insight into both the real character of the person you are interviewing and their level of honesty.

  • Is the applicant conversant with standard sales terminology? How about the terminology used in your particular business?
  • Does he or she seem comfortable when citing facts and figures about  past accomplishments? Do his or her claims seems exaggerated? If so, they probably are.
  • How does the applicant present himself? Does their casual manner or formal dress strike the right tone for your business? Will this candidate fit in?

5. Forget to Check the Facts

Check all facts listed on an applicant’s resume, including college graduation dates, degrees earned, dates of past employment and, if possible, details such as salary history and the authenticity of awards claimed. Do this both in interviews and in reference checks. Ask around within your network. Does anyone you know also know the applicant? Does their story check out?

While there is no way to guarantee that your next new sales hire will be perfect, avoiding these common sales interviewing mistakes should increase your chances of hiring a great sales rep.

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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)

CSO Insights on Sales Hiring

A colleague forwarded to me a copy of the the Accenture report Connecting the Dots on Sales
Performance. The report, which analyses the 2012 CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization
Study, is a bit outdated, but still contains many useful insights.

We have pulled some quotes and added our own commentary.

The report suggests that changing customer behaviors, the blurring lines of multiple
industries and a shift from traditional to solution sales are making it difficult for employers to hire and retain
the right sales people.

CSO Insights 2012 data shows an overall lack of rigor in sales organization acquisition and retention processes.
Although a full 65.5 percent of CSOs believe that a scientific approach, such as using a competency testing to
hire sales representatives, delivers greater sales effectiveness, the data shows that very few organizations are
actually pursuing a more systematic hiring practice.

Peak’s Take: This is consistent with our own findings. Organizations
that have a structured formal approach to sales hiring are the exception not the rule, yet it is hard imagine
anything more critical to sales success than getting the right sales talent onto your team. Not surprisingly, we
often see a correlation between a lack of rigor in sales hiring with a lack of rigor in other aspects of the sales
organization including sales management and processes. And consequently mediocre results.

On the fact that hiring success is improving:

The 2012 data shows that more organizations are improving at hiring the right sales
people with 35.3 percent of CSOs saying that they consistently hire representatives who succeed at selling.

Peak’s Take: This means that an alarming 65% of organizations are not
consistently hiring reps that succeed. There is lots of work to be done in the average organization.

On the percentage of reps who are reaching their quotas:

The percentage of sales representatives attaining quota is not improving. In the last three years, a startling 36
to 47 percent of sales representatives have not reached their annual sales quota numbers.

Peak’s Take: It is not surprising that the percentage of sales reps that
are succeeding does not align with the number of sales managers who who claim to be successful at hiring. Sales
managers are a competitive bunch and I have met very that would admit a major portion of their team was missing
targets, even if that was in fact the truth. It will also take time for improved hiring practices to fully impact
the overall performance of sales teams.

On staff turnover and the ability of sales organizations to retain sales reps:

Organizations are continuing to experience high attrition problems. CSO Insights 2012
data indicates that the annual sales representative voluntary and involuntary turnover is at 21 percent.

Peak’s Take: The issue here is usually not only the lost staff and the
sales production they represent (the best sales talent tends to consolidate at the best companies), but also the
enormous lost investment in hiring, training, managing and developing sales reps that  must be replaced after hiring
them.

On the bottom line impact of effective sales hiring:

According to Accenture analysis, since talent hiring and retention policies impact as
much as 10 percent of the top line per year, it is imperative for CSOs to use scientific profiling to reduce
attrition rates

Peak’s Take: This is the knockout punch. 10% is enormous. Even a small
improvement in sales hiring effectiveness will have a huge impact on the success of most organizations. The sales
leaders who invest in their sales recruiting engine and place a priority on a structured approach to sales hiring
will hire better reps and drive superior sales results.

See the full report here: Connecting the Dots on Sales Performance

To your success!

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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)

Assessing Your Sales Compensation Plan

The answer depends on several factors, some of which can be hard to determine. Consider this: High turnover among sales staff may appear on the surface to be a bad thing. But if the skills of entry-level sales reps are adequate for the business you’re in, turnover may simply signal that your sales staff have done well and are now ready to move on. Why pay more for experienced talent if it’s not necessary?

On the other hand, don’t assume that your sales team is productive just because they are making their goals and not complaining. Perhaps they’re content to mine the established customer base because your compensation plan doesn’t encourage them to develop new business. An extra incentive for new accounts could motivate the sales staff and increase your market penetration. Then again, if they are paid more for new business, will they just go for the easy sell, pushing the cheapest item on the sales floor simply to get that new customer bonus? In that event, you’ll be paying them more for generating less revenue!

The key to assessing your sales comp plan is to measure it against the goals of your business strategy. Ask yourself:

1) Are your sales people demonstrating the behaviors you want to see?

The plan should be structured to reward the behaviors that are most likely to drive the strategy and achieve your business objectives. If the answer is to sell more big ticket items, and you are not seeing this, then you need to be sure your plan incorporates generous incentives for selling the right products and services. If the answer is to help your business serve a new demographic, then think about including a bonus for the rep who opens the most new accounts.

2) Am I losing reps to competitors who pay more?

People leave for a variety of reasons, and in some cases this is a good thing, but if you are losing good people to competitors and you think compensation might be the reason, ask yourself this: is your compensation plan competitive in today’s talent market? In other words, if you have to hire new sales staff, will you be paying enough to entice the best people to come to work for you?

3) Does the plan seem to effectively motivate some reps and not others?

You want the plan to motivate everyone on the sales team and to be perceived as fair, but different people are motivated in slightly different ways particularly as they mature and life situations change. Does your plan work for all sales people, the old hands as well as the up and comers?

4) Is your cost of sale inline with your business goals?

If you have a plan and stick with it in spite of fluctuating market conditions and changing sales volumes, you might find that your costs are too high relative to your output (your CFO will usually give you plenty of warning that this is happening) and you may need to make sure your sales comp plan scales effectively with sales production. Basic commission at the low end and accelerators at the higher end of performance can be a great motivator for reps while keeping costs inline with business goals.

Taking the time to answer these four questions will go a long way toward determining if your sales compensation plan is or is not effective.

To your success!

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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)

Inside vs Outside Sales – Are these roles blurring?

There are many different types of sales roles, but traditionally there have been two main divisions in selling: those who sell to the people that come to them (inside sales, aka in-house sellers, aka inbound) and those that go out and hunt down their own prospects then close the deal (outside, those who sell on the outside, or outbound). Now as sales evolves and the economic conditions demand that more sales are done on the phone rather than in person, the lines of inside vs outside sales are blurring.

Why Are Sales Hunters So Hard To Find?

These days, even B2B companies employ large inside sales teams to work on driving new business. In some cases, there are sophisticated organizations with lead gen and cold calling teams that seek deals, nurture them and then hand over larger deals to senior reps who close them as well develop strategic accounts. Are these inside or outside?

In the sense that they travel very little, and work in-house for the most part, they are inside sales, however the fact that they hunt and close new business makes them outside in the true sense of the word.

As we have previously written the personalities for outbound vs. inbound sales are completely different. Trying to get someone to make cold calls when they lacks the DNA to do so can be very frustrating.

The Distinction Between Inside and Outside Sales Are Definitely Blurring

But there are also slight differences in the type of person that enjoys face to face selling vs phone selling. Some people communicate with their hands and this isn’t that simple on the phone.

Today many outbound sales roles are 90% phone based and 10% in person selling, which demands a rep who can both influence a prospect on the phone and sell in person. In smaller companies reps manage a territory and will be responsible for both fielding incoming calls and making cold calls, so this demands skills in both hunting and lead conversion. These factors combine to demand a multi-skilled rep with a unique DNA.

To your success!

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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)

3 Reasons To Start Selecting Sales Hires Randomly

When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament ~ Mark Murphy, Author of Hiring for Attitude, as well as the bestsellers Hundred Percenters and HARD Goals (quoted in Forbes Magazine).

The way many sales managers hire, they might as well be making random choices. To be frank —the results would probably be as good as what they are doing now, and possibly better.

If your hiring success rate is less than stellar, you may want to start hiring randomly as well. To get you started, here are three completely random ways to choose your next sales rep:

  1. Take the stack of resumes and throw them in the air with gusto—really make them rain. The one that lands on top of the pile on the floor gets the job.
  2. Crumple the resumes in to balls, and shoot them from increasingly farther distances into a waste bin basketball hoop. The resume that goes in from the greatest distance wins.
  3. Ask the interns to review the current candidates and make a recommendation.

Of course, these ludicrous approaches would never work. But most sales job interviews aren’t much better, and they are lousy predictors of how the candidate will perform on the job. Stephanie Clifford reported in an Inc. magazine article, “The New Science of Hiring,” that standard interviews have only a “.2 correlation with predicting success.” What??

The price of failure is enormous (see What is the cost of a bad sales hire?), but there is good news: sales and hiring managers can avoid these costs. A study by Harvard University, showed that the vast majority of turnover can be directly connected to errors during selecting and hiring new employees.

Over the years, Peak has increasingly relied on scientific and behavioral techniques to assess candidates and their suitability for our customer’s open sales positions. The 90%+ success rates of our candidates speak to the value of our methods but there is also more broad support for leveraging science in the hiring process. CEB, the world’s leading member-based advisory organization, reports that firms that use assessment science to choose and develop sales reps get 16 percent better performance. In addition, employees are 50 percent more likely to continue working with the company rather than leave.

Why don’t sales managers make more objective hiring decisions using proven scientific techniques? Many times they interview with methods they experienced when they were hired, using archaic questions and cheesy challenges. In other words, they don’t know any better, nor do the other managers in the firm. They compound the problem when they add other errors as well, including:

  • Not checking references. A surprising number of hiring sales managers do not check references at all. On the other hand, a report from the Society for Human Resource Management shows 96% of HR managers do check references. However, the vast majority of the references only verified employment.
  • Not preparing for the interview. Glancing at a candidate’s resume as the interview starts is not adequate preparation.
  • Hiring to fill a desk. This is common when a company gets extra busy. They may a rep to fill a desk just to relieve some of the stress on sales and support staff, only to realize they made a mistake when business returns to normal.
  • Allowing interruptions as the interview progresses. Hiring a sales rep has long-term consequences for a firm. Sales managers should provide the focus the process warrants.

It is a bizarre fact that the hiring process is the most important part of running a business, yet is the business process is most likely to be ad-hoc.

Finding great sales talent is like looking for a needle in a haystack – blindfolded!

Not that it is easy. It’s tough to find the right salesperson in the best of conditions. Only a small percentage of those applying for a job tell the truth about their relevant background and experience. Not only that, two-thirds of resumes had creative embellishments of some kind!
Despite these challenges, your current hiring practice can be improved significantly by using proven scientific and behavioral testing methods. See more of our sales hiring insights here > Sales Recruiting Insights

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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)

Paying Sales Commissions on Revenues vs. Profit

Sales Commissions

There are many different ways to structure and layer sales compensation and commission plans and most are based on revenue performance, but in some sectors compensating based on profit is popular and there are situations where it may make sense for your company as well.

Compensating on Revenues
The most common form of sales compensation, involves a paying a commission on sales. This works well where sales people need to be highly focused on driving top line results and growth. It is also typical where the sales person cannot influence margins either because they are selling an offering with a non-negotiable price or because the sales rep does not get involved in delivery. The benefit is that compensation is easy to calculate and sales people are not distracted by anything other than sales.

Compensating Based on Gross Margin
Compensating based on gross margin is popular in the services business where there are no fixed costs and in other price sensitive businesses such as Value Added Resellers.

Commission based on profit or gross margin has its pros and cons.

In the pros column the sales rep’s compensation is tied to their contribution to the bottom line, something that sounds like it could have no downside. It has the effect of encouraging sales reps to chase profitable business (however this can be achieved with fixed pricing as well) and striving to maximize profit, a healthy share of which the company keeps. Compensating on gross margins also discourages discounting because even a small drop in price might have a big impact on overall margin and therefore commissions paid out.

In a services business paying on gross margin can cause the rep to be distracted from the selling effort if they are worrying about how much delivery is making on a project and consequently how much they will be getting paid. This can even cause frustration if the rep feels delivery is not performing effectively and furthermore, there may be instances where you want to offer some concessions to win an account however this will cause your rep to lose interest as they will not be rewarded for their sales effort. In both cases these issues can be mitigated by paying on forecasted gross margin rather than actual gross margin.

In the end each company’s specific goals, business model, sector and set of economic conditions will dictate which path to take, and a properly structured plan will be a win-win for the employer and sales rep regardless of whether they are paying sales commissions on revenue or gross margin.

To your success!

Eliot

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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)

Sales On-Boarding in Small and Medium Sized Companies

How do you bring your new hires onboard your business? Leading corporations often have an orientation and indoctrination program that matches the multi-stage recruiting process they implement to ensure they get the people they believe are best suited for the roles they will fill within the company and the best fit for the company culture. They do spend considerable sums finding the right people, it makes sense to invest in keeping them and they are firm believers in the old adage’ “begin as you intend to go on”.

That’s fine for the larger companies with resources to invest and staff to manage the on-boarding, but what about small to medium enterprises (SME)? I know from first hand experience (my own included) that in smaller companies, the predominant philosophy applied to new sales rep on-boarding philosophy is sink or swim.

I am not proud to admit that more than once, in my start-ups, we would hire a new rep, show them their desk and phone and literally ask them what they needed from us to get going. Then we would cobble together whatever was required and ask them to start pounding the phones looking for leads. They would learn our company culture and how we sell ad-hoc and by osmosis.

We did this even though it is completely counterintuitive to invest a lot of time and money to find people and then potentially compromise your return on that investment by not setting reps up to be successful and hit the ground running. Partly I was too stupid to know better and partly I didn’t have anyone to help me provide a more comprehensive approach to acclimatizing a new sales hire.

No Excuse for Risking Your Investment in People

And it really is no excuse. There is a reason why a few start-ups grow faster than all the others and later in my career, I realized you are compromising results by not have a structured program for bringing new hires on-board.

We have written about sales on-boarding basics before on this blog, so I won’t rehash that, but suffice to say that the most successful companies, no matter how big or small, value their staff and want to ensure their new hires settle in with the minimum of problems and obstacles and the investment is small compare to the difference in sales output vs. the sink or swim approach which may work some of the time, but most of the time doesn’t.

To your success!

Eliot Burdett

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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)

Should You Put a Cap Sales on Commissions and Earnings?

Several studies have shown that high-achieving salespeople are motivated by financial rewards (Harvard Business Review, PsyMetrics, SalesDrive, and others). That’s not to say that all salespeople are primarily motivated by money or that money is the only thing that motivates them, but achieving high income is a big factor in motivating behaviour for most salespeople and this is particularly true when we are talking about top performing salespeople.

So when it comes to the sales compensation and the notion of capping commissions, there are some very real implications. As we have written about before, the comp plan influences the day-to-day behaviour and activities of sales reps (see Sales Compensation Plans that Lead to Great Sales Hires).

As a sales manager, I have used all sorts of carrots to entice reps to work a certain way. I put commissions on new sales and the reps brought in new accounts. I added accelerators and the reps pushed to hit new levels of sales. I added a reward for calls or meetings and reps became motivated to achieve those goals and earn more.

Besides being money motivated, top sales reps are very goal oriented so the carrot works well in sales.

Conversely, if you cap sales commissions, you remove the incentive to behave a certain way once the cap is reached and a sales rep that is no longer motivated by a comp plan represents a loss of control for the employer. I don’t know too many sales leaders who are comfortable with not being in control, therefore I don’t know too many sales managers who are fans of a cap on commissions.

Perhaps if your company had limited growth plans or barriers to delivering more business, then a cap might make sense to discourage growth. Remember that this may frustrate your best sales reps and potentially cause them to consider other employers where they can achieve uncapped earnings

If, on the other hand, your company goal is to grow and maximize profits and your compensation plan is profitable at any level, then every new sale represents profit so there is no economic downside for encouraging additional sales and paying additional commissions.

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)

Why Are Sales Hunters So Hard To Find? (and the Importance of the ABC’s of Recruiting)

There are literally a million different varieties of sales roles from those that handle inbound calls for information to those that manage existing relationships and those that open new accounts. The most coveted type of sales professional, what we tend to call, ‘Hunters’ pound the pavement (or the phone as the case may be), find their own prospects and generate their own leads, and develop and close new business. And they are very hard to find. A question we are often asked is “why is it so hard to find hunters?”

What Makes Great Sales Hunters?

Being an effective hunter requires a unique blend of personality traits including goal orientation, ambition, confidence, optimism, competitiveness, resilience and perseverance. This combination of traits is what leads a person to pursue opportunity like a bulldog, make numerous calls on cold prospects where rejection and failure is a real possibility and succeed in spite of adversity and poor odds. This combination of traits is also rare. Various studies have shown that perhaps only 10-20% of the population possess these traits and even fewer are in sales.

It is a simple fact that most people are better suited to other pursuits than hunting for new business and furthermore, of those that are actually suited to finding and closing new business, even fewer are suited to do it for your company. But wait, it gets worse. Even fewer still are suited to hunting in your company AND interested in joining you at the moment versus staying where they are or joining one of the many other employers that are also competing for their services.

Furthermore, the traits required to be a great hunter are hard to assess and many employers have trouble determining which candidates have what it takes and which don’t. Taken any sales team and look at the the individuals tasked with hunting. What you are likely to find are a mix of decent hunters and those better suited to farming who have been put in roles where it is folly to expect them to excel.

A Very Small Percentage of the Population
In the end you are looking at a tiny fraction of the population who are hard to spot, which explains why hunters are so hard to find. No wonder sales training and performance improvement is an enormous industry. Skipping the tough work of searching for hunters is the easier path to building a sales team. Except it usually doesn’t work. Proof of this can be found in the level of failure in the sales sector. Nearly 50% of reps are below target in many sectors and in some the stats are worse.

Always be Recruiting
So what’s the antidote? Simple. Never stop recruiting. Look everywhere and look often so that you increase your chances of being exposed to the mix of DNA that makes a great sales hunter and when you spot it, make sure you get it onto your team. Then set them up to succeed so it is a win-win relationship and they never want to leave you to work for another employer.

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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.

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