hiring salespeople

  • Understanding Competency Based Assessments – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!

    • June 24, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    As an example, let’s say you were seeking to hire a ditch digger.  While you must identify someone who is strong, can use tools and dig holes, the width and depth of the hole, as well as the difficulty of the digging is more important.  Will this individual dig in sand, screened loom, compacted soil, clay, gravel, or rock?  If an assessment, even one that was specific to ditch-digging, only looked at the tools they had available and their ability to dig in general, it would not necessarily identify someone who could dig monumentally huge holes in soil with large rocks.

    It’s the same with a sales assessment. 

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  • Can You Find The Perfect Sales Candidates for Your Sales Team?

    • December 1, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

     I am helping one company find a single needle-in-a-haystack sales leadership candidate and it has taken nearly six months.  I am helping another company find 3 sales leaders and received 3,765 applications.  What’s the difference?

    For the answer to be meaningful, we have to look at the entire job market, not just sales candidates.

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  • The Chainsaw Massacre and Building Sales Teams

    • September 14, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Despite the existence of both a science and a process for hiring salespeople, most efforts also tend to be hit or miss and the emphasis always seems to be on miss.  There are plenty of reasons why, and we can discuss some of them, but the biggest and most insane reason is…

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  • A Home Run – How the Right Data Can Help You Hire Your Ideal Salespeople

    • July 13, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    From time to time I’ve posted some compelling top/bottom sales team analyses using sales assessment data from Objective Management Group (OMG).  From nearly 250 data points in 21 Sales Core Competencies, we identify the specific findings and scores that differentiate a company’s top 3 performers from their bottom 3 non-performers.

    There are several reasons for doing this:

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  • Why More Salespeople Are Being Recommended for Difficult Selling Roles

    • June 24, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Something else we haven’t done for quite a while is revisit Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales selection statistics on the percentage of people that are recommended for various selling and sales management roles.

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  • Startups Almost Always Get The Sales Thing Wrong

    • March 19, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Typically, founders of start ups put it all on the line – everything – their house, savings, loans from friends and family and perhaps bank loans, angel investments and more.  As brilliant as they are, in most cases, sales is not one of their strengths and it’s not until the business has a logo and a website when they realize that success won’t come until somebody sells something.  Oh-oh, now what?

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  • Key to Successfully Hiring Salespeople: Getting it Right Versus Getting it Over With

    • December 21, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Recruiting salespeople doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated, but it is a process and needs to be completed thoroughly and correctly.  Ask yourself this question: eighteen months from now, would you prefer to have spent five months to get it right and have a productive new salesperson, or three months getting it over with, only to have to do it again four months later, and again four months after that. 

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  • Masks and Sales Assessments – You Lose a Little Freedom and Control for Safety and Confidence

    • September 18, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The same thing happens when clients use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) accurate and predictive sales candidate assessments.  They lose a little freedom because they no longer arbitrarily interview salespeople who they feel like interviewing, and refrain from simply offering positions to people because they have a gut feeling about a candidate.   However, they lose some control because one half to two-thirds of the candidates will not be recommended when they aren’t great fits for the particular sales role for which the company is hiring, or simply aren’t very good salespeople – period.

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  • How the Correlation Between Restaurants and Covid 19 Applies to Sales Assessments

    • September 17, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    But does it really matter whether this is causation?  Is there that big of a difference?  Is correlation enough?  It depends on what you are trying to show.  Let’s take sales assessments for example.

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  • The Best Solutions for Hiring Great Salespeople for Your Company

    • August 28, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    These are all examples of inappropriate solutions to the simple question, “What is the best way to get there from here?”

    How about the simple question, “What is the best way to assure that the salespeople I am about to hire will succeed in the chosen role?”

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