Poison Ivy and 2 Powerful Lessons for Hiring Salespeople

Recently, I wrote an article about hiring salespeople based on the Shania Twain song, Don’t Impress Me Much.  Coincidentally, the sales hiring advice in this article is also loosely based on a song I heard.  Over the years, I’ve written more than 20 articles using music analogies and I listed them at the end of this article.

April 17 was the anniversary of Linda McCartney’s death so in honor of her, the Beatles Channel on SiriusXM played Poison Ivy.  I’m fairly certain I have never heard that song before and for good reason. I don’t mean to criticize the dead, but as a former professional musician, I believe that song is awful and she couldn’t sing.  Linda was married to Paul McCartney, and after he taught her to play piano, he put her in the band.  Nepotism!

I’m guessing that Paul also used a common strategy called Hope.

Paul McCartney hoped it would work out with Linda, and while Wings was a very successful band, let’s be honest.  Linda would not have been hired to perform on vocals or keyboard in any other band – not even a local wedding band!  Why?  She was a photographer and shouldn’t have quit her day job.

We see nepotism in every family owned business where the founder/CEO/President gets the entire unqualified family involved.  The family learns to adequately perform in most of the roles but the brother in charge of sales, the nephew managing major accounts, the daughter in account management, and the wife doing estimates just aren’t cutting it.

Let’s not forget the Hope part of this…

Hope is used when sales leaders interview and select sales candidates.  They decide that from among the following 10 characteristics and qualifiers, the candidate:

1. is attractive
2. is smart
3. is well-connected
4. came from the industry
5. has a well-written resume
6. has technical knowledge
7. is likable
8. has presence
9. worked at a billion dollar company
10. worked for a customer

By themselves, none of the ten are predictive of success in a sales role.  So why do sales leaders place such importance on those 10?:

• They are in a hurry to fill a vacancy
• They want to get the sales hiring over with because interviewing prevents them from conducting personal sales
• They don’t know any better so why not hope?
• They aren’t using anything predictive of success
• They believe their gut instinct is actually predictive

So what can be predictive?

How the candidate performs on the OMG Sales Candidate Assessment is the most predictive!

How the candidate responds when you challenge the claims on their resume- very predictive!  You can see the OMG assessment come to life when you do this.

How the candidate attempts/succeeds at turning around the interview so that they are in control by asking questions is very predictive and also an opportunity to bring the assessment to life.

How confidently the candidate can walk you through how they landed a difficult sale/account is predictive of what they could replicate with you.

Regular readers know that this isn’t the first time I’ve written about hiring salespeople and it’s not the first time I’ve used music, a band, a musician, or a song to make my point.  I wouldn’t have to do write about this subject again if sales leaders would, in the words of my son, “lock in and figure it out.”

On May 6, at 3pm ET, I am hosting a 30-minute walkthrough for CEOs on What Your Expectations of a Sales Leader Should Be. Learn More/Register

Here is a list of additional articles from the past 20 years (that blew my mind!) where I used music as the analogy for the sales lesson:

Use Music to Understand the 12 Criteria Prospects Use to Buy from Salespeople