Why My Golfing May be Just Like Your Sales Recruiting

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.

This approach is a self-fulfilling prophecy which, because of their willingness to accept anyone who will take the job, is guaranteed to fail. Nearly every recruit will fail quickly and they will find themselves restarting the recruiting process again a short while later.

When it comes to finding and selecting new salespeople, you can choose the easy path and have consistently poor outcomes, or take the more challenging path and have consistently good outcomes.

When you look at it that way – easy gets you bad and difficult gets you good – there isn’t much reason for continuing to do it the easy way.  Of course, if you have always done it that way you may not be willing to change…

What makes the difficult way so difficult?

You’ll need a lot more of the right candidates, and a few great tools to help with selection.

One client, hiring for an inbound sales role, assessed nearly 1,000 candidates in the past 12 months and that was just the beginning!

Another client needed to identify a needle in a haystack.  They needed an extremely capable salesperson that could sell big deals to the C-suite of enterprise size companies AND the winning candidates would also need to have highly evolved technical skills.  Nearly 200 candidates were assessed for that role.

A third client assessed around 250 sales candidates for an inside sales role while a fourth client assessed more than 2,000 candidates for a traditional outside sales role.

Each of these clients saved huge amounts of time by doing the following 10 things:

1. They assessed first and asked questions later.
2. They used a very accurate, sales-specific assessment that is incredibly predictive of success in a sales role.
3. They did not look at the resumes or contact any candidate that was not recommended by the assessment.
4. They used online applicant tracking for candidates to collect experience-based information to further filter which candidates would be contacted.
5. They interviewed the recommended candidates with the right experiences by phone for 5 minutes.
6. They scheduled face-to-face interviews with the best of those candidates and only then ran their normal recruiting processes.
7. They selected, hired and on-boarded great salespeople.
8. They coached, directed and guided these great salespeople, holding them accountable to appropriate KPI’s from day 1.
9. They significantly reduced turnover, increased ramp-up time and exceeded goals for sales revenue.
10. They did not have to start the recruiting process again.

This was all made possible by the use of one, very customizable, very useful and accurate sales candidate assessment.  It works for every sales role.  It works in every industry.  It will work for you too.  If you would like to take a test drive, click the image below for a free trial!

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