- August 17, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve seen it so many times in so many companies. The strategy for attracting and selecting salespeople isn’t working for one reason or another. Salespeople fail, quit, aren’t developed or managed, are disgruntled, underperform and just plain don’t meet expectations. And this is the rule, not the exception. So you shouldn’t be surprised when a company, experiencing these outcomes, makes a change.
The problem is that they continue to modify strategies that weren’t good strategies to begin with. And then they don’t understand why the newest version of the strategy fails as well. For some reason, too many companies don’t seek out a best practice recruiting strategy and continue to experiment instead. Often times, that’s when we meet up with them and their newest strategy is to utilize our industry leading sales specific pre-employment test. As I’ve stated before, that’s only part of an integrated hiring strategy because when you add an assessment to a process that doesn’t work, there’s a good chance it will continue to not work. The process has to be well grounded too.
So it’s important to assess your candidates but it’s equally important to surround that assessment with a proven, effective process that assures a flow of quality candidates and a successful hand-off to sales management.