sales candidates
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Top 10 Reasons Why Your Great New Salesperson Might Fail
- June 30, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When a great salesperson is recommended by Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment, and this star has a great track record, and great references, should we expect this person to succeed?
Most executives do.
But even though salespeople will tell you that “If you can sell, you can sell anything”, that statement is only true some of the time. Here are some examples of salespeople who are successful in one environment, but usually fail in another:
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Case History – Achieve Lowest Turnover in the Entire Sales Force
- May 27, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Why would an enterprise (that has standardized on OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment, had OMG customize it for every sales role in the company, and has terrific data from its first year of use) have one department with significantly lower turnover than all the others?
Could it be any of the following 10 Reasons?
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Finding the Right Sales and Sales Management Candidates
- May 22, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Seven years ago, a company may have wanted sales managers who were task masters, holding salespeople accountable to top of the funnel metrics. While that could still be true today, a company should be looking for a sales manager who is an extremely effective sales coach, who spends 50% of the available time coaching and developing salespeople.
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Your Next Sales Candidate: Looking for “The One”
- March 5, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You can get sales selection right, but it takes the right process, tools, interviewing skills, and selection criteria. As with the sales process, you can’t skip steps, take anything for granted, or be too casual about your role in any part of the process.
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Are You Any Good at Evaluating Sales Talent?
- February 11, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You can probably spot an energetic, motivated, likable, memorable, polished, polite and attractive salesperson from a handshake away. Aren’t those the ones you like best? Aren’t those, especially when they have industry background, the ones you hire? And don’t they all perform just swell?
No? Why not? After all, they met all of your criteria, didn’t they?
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What Percentage of Sales Candidates are Worthy of Being Hired?
- January 13, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s an interesting question and one that has more than one answer. I wrote an article back in September of 2013 that asked the question, Are Sales and Sales Management Candidates Getting Worse?
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Global Warming, Social Selling and The Sales Force of Tomorrow
- January 8, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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Sales Candidate Shortage – More Proof That Sales Isn’t Dead Yet
- November 7, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
As you probably know, many people have been writing premature obituaries about the impending death of selling. Of course, that’s been going on since at least 2006 when I posted my first rebuttal to this silly claim, and as recently as last month when I posted my latest rebuttal. It’s being perpetuated by extremist marketers who are claiming that inbound will become the be-all end-all.
It’s simply not true.
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Are Sales and Sales Management Candidates Getting Worse?
- September 10, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There are more sales experts, self-professed and otherwise, than ever before. There is more free content on sales and selling than anyone could have imagined. There are probably twice as many books on the subject than just 10 years ago. There are categories of sales tools and CRM applications where none existed a few years ago. Companies are spending more money on sales force evaluations, sales training, consulting, sales leadership development, sales process, infrastructure and sales recruiting services than 5 years ago. And selling has changed more in the past 5 years than ever before.
With all that, shouldn’t the quality of sales, sales management and sales leadership candidates be on the rise? Yes, it should.
But there’s a problem. The quality has not risen. It seems to have worsened!
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Personality Tests, Sales Candidate Selection – How Tests Measure Up
- June 17, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
As with costumes, you only need to take off the mask and you’ll see what’s underneath. No exceptions. No apologies.
Personality tests aren’t predictive either. Oh, they say that they are? Then why is their validation of choice “construct validity” rather than “predictive validity”?