Some interviewing guru’s believe that the best way to evaluate a person’s suitability for a high pressure sales role is to put them in stressful situations during the interview process to predict how they might react in real world sales scenarios.
If you are accustomed to recruiting perennial top performers who are gainfully employed, then you face a challenging dilemma: do you roll out the red carpet to make them comfortable with you and want to work for you or do you put them through a series of hard tests which may result in a loss of enthusiasm about joining your company?
The answer is both. To make sure you hire a top performer you need to perform an accurate and objective assessment and you need to “romance” the candidate so they choose to leave their current job. How do achieve that balance?
Here are three ways to deal with this:
1. Use Assessment Tests – leave the tough profiling to someone else, by using personality/behavioral trait assessments that will independently and objectively characterize your candidates. Compare the feedback to your own notes to make the right hire.
2. Hire a Recruiter – Candidates know that companies that can afford a retained recruiter are often the ones you want to work for so they will let the recruiter perform their various assessments to qualify candidates. Once that work is done, you get a fully qualified candidate and you can focus on enticing them to leave their current role.
3. Develop Rapport and then Perform the Evaluation – When a candidate is inducted into your screening process, start with a warm somewhat neutral stance, build the relationship and let them know this is a competition and you want to know why they think they should be selected to join your company. Most top sales performers will react positively to this challenge and see this as an opportunity to sell themselves at which point you get to ask them tough questions or put them through hoops.
You have to walk a fine line to properly assess a candidate while developing a relationship with them. It can’t be all roses, but on the other hand almost all great candidates are going to be working and have other options and won’t want to join your company if you alienate them, so unless you have an excess of great candidates beating down your door, you will probably want to work on making them want to join your company.
To your success!
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Job boards are one of the first places most organizations will search when they want to hire inside sales reps, but while job boards are a huge source of resumes and entry level candidates, relying on them can be a frustrating experience. As one customer explained to us, just sorting through the volumes of unqualified candidates can be exhausting and you are lucky if you find any qualified candidates at all.
Whether you are a CEO or a executive level sales leader in your company, hiring the right sales leader for your organization can make or break your business. Get it right and they will build a strong team of achievers, increase company morale, and generate revenues profits and growth for the company. Hire the wrong person and in a best case scenario, company growth will stall. In a worst case scenario, targets will be missed, customers will leave, staff turnover will increase, and you will have a mess that could take years to clean up.
best phrase a sales person can use to build trust and increase the likelihood of closing a sales is to respond with “I don’t know” when stumped by a question rather than making up an answer. Perhaps this has to do with the perception that sales people will say anything that they think gets the sales so therefore, any sales person who admits they can’t answer a question, must be telling the truth and be demonstrating honesty.
Companies make huge investments in creating value propositions that will attract customers, but reading the typical job ad shows far less effort is put into attracting the top class sales talent that will actually secure those customers. Boring checklists of required credentials and bland mentions of the company’s mission statement will attract lots of candidates in this economy, but few if any of them will be the highly desirable types because these ads don’t speak their language. Forget about “competitive” compensation, benefits and management “that cares about its staff” – these are all important, but every company promises these things. Where is the sizzle??
Interviews are the staple method for most companies when hiring sales staff and often there are multiple interviews conducted by different team members of the hiring company. Some companies will take the screening process a step further and conduct in depth reference checks. All of this is done to ensure the new hire is the right person.
promotions had a huge influence on customer decisions and Herb Tarlek’s character on WKRP in Cincinnati was a funny depiction of the truth, but not totally out of line. Next watch the movie Tin Men to see what selling might have looked like 50 years ago. Each of these eras had their own characters and methods of inducing buyers to buy and today is no different. Pervasive access to information via the Internet and more sophisticated buyers has changed the way buyers buy and the way organizations sell. This in turn has an impact on the people that get hired and traits top performers possess.