- February 3, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Buying a snowblower? Pick one, have it delivered, wait for a snowstorm and blow some snow. What’s the worst that can happen?
Planning to go out for dinner? Choose a restaurant, make a reservation, show up and enjoy. What’s the worst that can happen?
Hiring salespeople? Spec the role(s), post your job descriptions, collect resumes, choose some candidates to interview and make some hires. What’s the worst that can happen?
If you have a sales cycle of several months or more, subsidize your salespeople until they are self-sufficient, and in early 2022 it takes 3 months to find a suitable candidate, you are screwed before you start! Once you finally identify a decent candidate, you have hours, not days or weeks, to make a decision and pull the trigger and what’s the worst that can happen? Six months or more pass before you realize that salesperson won’t make it and you not only wasted a half year’s salary, you lost six months, have an empty territory or vertical, and have to start over from the beginning!
It doesn’t have to be that way and here’s why.
There are several keys to getting sales selection right and we can discuss them here:
- Compensation: Base salaries are in and while you would love to hire a salesperson who is willing to eat what they kill (straight commission), most salespeople are not well-suited for that kind of pressure. Your on plan total compensation for the first year must be appealing or in today’s market good salespeople will ignore you.
- Location: Many salespeople love working from home and leveraging video platforms to generate revenue. They can be MUCH more effective and should be much more successful. You’ll need to offer a remote option to attract good salespeople.
- Job posting: The job posting must stand out and describe your ideal candidate instead. Don’t post a job description, post a candidate description, don’t make it about your company, and you’ll have a better chance to attract the best candidates.
- Sales Candidate Assessment: In today’s candidate market you MUST have a crystal ball to differentiate the duds from the studs and more importantly, identify the salespeople who are the best fit for the particular selling role you are hoping to fill.
- Confidence: If you get the first four things right, then you will have the confidence to pull the trigger before you lose a good candidate to another company.
Today, I conducted a tailored fit for a company that will use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) accurate and highly predictive sales candidate assessments. The tailored fit adds an additional layer of customization – in this case 30 additional criteria – to help identify the right salespeople. We also use tailored fits as a proof of concept, to show skeptical potential clients that our sales candidate assessment accurately differentiates their top producers from their worst under performers. Check this out:
So what are we looking at here?
We start with 185 or so findings inside 21 Sales Core Competencies. Then we identify the findings and scores that differentiate the tops from the bottoms. In the example above, eight of the differentiators we identified are actually selection criteria that the company wasn’t aware of and was badly messing up. Four of the differentiators are related to motivation which is ironic because most executives believe they have a tremendous ability to identify and hire motivated salespeople. Two of the findings are related to Sales DNA, weaknesses that sabotage performance. Seven differentiators reside with traditional sales core competencies. Two identify salespeople’s suitability for working remotely and their ability to self-start. And six of the differentiators represent specific selling skills.
Explained another way, the top producers prospect consistently, are extroverts and score high in the Hunting competency. They reach decision makers, take a consultative approach and uncover compelling reasons to buy, sell value and leverage sales technology. They can work remotely, and have experience calling on business users, asking for up to $25,000, selling conceptual services that are not top of the line, in a hunting role with high pressure to perform while working at a major corporation and a turbulent and ever changing culture. The bottom under performers do not.
This company was not using OMG’s assessment and managed to hire some very ineffective salespeople. As long as they follow OMG’s recommendations, they will never make mistakes like this again! The salespeople that OMG recommends move to the top half of the sales team within 12 months while 75% of the salespeople that are hired although they were not recommended by OMG, fail within 6 months. Read that again to make sure you read it right.
The 33,000 companies that have used this tool to assess more than 2.2 million salespeople, have hired nearly 100,000 salespeople. They have 62% less turnover, shorter paths to productivity, and 80% higher quota attainment.
You can be consistently successful hiring salespeople if you follow my 5 tips and use OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessments.
Need to see a sample? Request one here. Choose Sales Candidate Assessment.
Need to try it out? Request a free trial here.
Ready to save time and money, hire with confidence and start using OMG? Have an OMG expert help you get started
George Kriza sat down and interviewed me about the challenges of finding and hiring salespeople in the current economy. Watch it now!
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