sales candidates
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Baby Fish and New Salespeople Experience the Same Fate
- August 1, 2024
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If your turnover is less than 10% you have a turnover problem – not enough turnover! If your turnover is between 10-20% you’re good. If it’s greater than 20% it’s worth exploring what is contributing to your high turnover rate and how to fix it. Sometimes it’s because you are hiring the wrong salespeople. Sometimes it’s lack of effective onboarding, lack of effective sales training, lack of coaching, lack of accountability, or lack of leadership.
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5 Sales Hiring Mistakes and Fake Resume Claims
- October 10, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One of the regional sales managers asked, “What are the 5 Biggest Mistakes that Sales Managers Make When Recruiting Salespeople?”
While that question is quite easy to answer, most companies, including their recruiters, HR professionals, sales leaders and executives are guilty of some or all of the following 5 mistakes:
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Can Preventing Hiring Bias Benefit the Sales Hiring Process?
- August 21, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You’re hiring and you need to identify the ideal salesperson for a particular sales role and you need someone to sell enterprise solutions to the C-Suite. Aside from all of the other requirements, you’ll need to find someone who has done this before.
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Applicant Tracking and Sales Candidate Assessments Fit Like Ducks Take to Water
- November 21, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Back to the Applicant Tracking analysis. My first takeaway is that it validated what I knew only anecdotally –
that just about every mid-market and large company are using cloud-based applicant tracking systems and smaller companies are quickly moving in that direction too. It makes sense. If companies are using cloud-based job sites to source candidates, then it only makes sense that they would be integrating applicant tracking as well.My second takeaway is that with all of these companies sourcing from the cloud and tracking from the cloud, why aren’t more of them using the best sales candidate assessment in the cloud? I have 4 possible answers to that question:
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The Science of Sales Selection vs. the Marketing of Modern Selling
- August 14, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I started with more than 100 sales-specific findings and narrowed them down to the 18 findings and scores that clearly differentiated their tops from their bottoms. A mistake made by behavioral scientists and sellers of personality and behavioral styles assessments is that they only look at top performers and identify common traits. They fail to realize that the bottom performers have the same personality traits and behavioral styles as the top performers and none of those traits or styles are predictive of sales performance.
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How to Finally Get Sales Selection Right
- June 16, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Before I share some crucial sales selection tips, I need to begin with some baseball. My apologies to all of my cricket and soccer obsessed readers.
My team, the Boston Red Sox, just lost their seventh consecutive game. They are in last place and heading for their third last place finish in the past four years. The outlier year was 2013, when they won the World Series. I think there was far less talent on that championship team than on this year’s edition, but the 2013 team had a rallying cry (Boston Strong) and everyone overachieved. You can’t count on everyone overachieving each year, so in lieu of that, as Jim Collins would say, you must have the right people in the right seats.
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Why You Must Hire Salespeople Right Now
- June 4, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Forbes conducted a survey of Fortune 500 CEO’s and 82% of them said they would be hiring more people within 2 years. Why should that be important to you?
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Why My Golfing May be Just Like Your Sales Recruiting
- October 14, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
On the rare occasion that I have the opportunity to golf, it doesn’t matter what I choose for clubs, balls, gloves, tees or clothing. At this point in my life and very short golfing career, just being out with a friend is good enough for me and if we count his strokes, and my lost balls, our final scores might even be competitive!
That’s how some companies recruit salespeople. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they come from, if they have selling skills, and whether or not they have any experience. These companies treat sales recruiting like the instructions on their shampoo bottle – they rinse and repeat.
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Top 4 Reasons a Great Salesperson Can Fail at Your Company
- October 9, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I asked the attendees if they had ever hired a great salesperson that still failed and everyone there said, “Yes!” I asked if anyone could explain how or why a great salesperson could fail, and the group offered up many guesses, but weren’t able to come up with my top 4 reasons. Here they are:
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What Percentage of Sales Candidates Are Hired?
- July 21, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In very simple terms, 6% means that 20 candidates must be assessed for each one who is hired. With an overall recommendation rate of 28%, those 20 assessments will yield approximately 6 candidates who are worthy of your time. But there is much more to consider.