How I Learned I am a Sales Consulting Imposter

The title of today’s article might be confusing, but it’s true.  Phil told me so.  But before I share what he said, I have some anecdotal evidence that supports the claim that I’m an imposter.  Here are ten reasons why I could be an imposter:

1. I stand tall but I’m actually just 5′ 6″
2. I’m a white collar professional yet I never wear a jacket or tie
3. I have helped B2B sales teams for nearly 40 years but prior to that I sold only B2C
4. I invented and perfected the OMG sales assessments but there was that time around fifteen years ago when I chose to hire a salesperson without using the assessment – of course, he failed
5. I have conducted virtual sales training since 2009, but it was because I didn’t want to travel anymore, not because it worked better  (Today, it works much better!)
6. I threaten to hit resistant salespeople with baseball bats from my collection but it’s an empty threat because the training/coaching is virtual
7. I train and coach salespeople to make cold calls by phone but I haven’t had to make a cold call myself since 1986
8. I create endless analogies to sales, have analyzed millions of rows of sales data, wrote 2 books, published 2,000 articles, but I don’t have a college degree
9. I help companies build sales teams large and small, but my team at Kurlan & Associates has never exceeded nine people
10. Despite helping companies in more than 200 different industries, I never had a client in the music industry, where I spent 10 years prior to founding Kurlan & Associates

See? I’m in imposter!

Back to Phil.

We often help companies hire salespeople and I was recently vetting candidates for one of my clients.  I scheduled a five-minute pre-screening call with a candidate who was recommended and scored quite high on the OMG sales candidate assessment. Most recommended candidates are excellent and I expected Phil (not his real name) to be quite good as well. Remarkably, only three of the 21 Sales Core Competencies were weaknesses, but Phil also had a strength that could be problematic when combined with one of the weaknesses:

• He scored 100 on the Doesn’t Need to be Liked Competency, meaning he doesn’t care what people think about him or say about him – at all.  I prefer the score to be closer to 88 because salespeople who score 100 can be too aggressive. This is the strength that could be problematic.
• He scored 17 on the Relationship Building Competency, meaning he is terrible at building and maintaining relationships and may not care about being likable.
• Within the Sales Posturing Competency, he had a weakness in the attribute, Maintains Appropriate Amount of Patience.
• Phil’s final weakness was his low score on the Rejection Proof Competency, meaning he doesn’t handle rejection very well.

Back to the five minute call.

I didn’t like this candidate.  He was way too cocky and aggressive, he wasn’t prepared, and he didn’t like my questions.  I ended the call after about a minute and a half because I knew he wasn’t going to advance in the sales recruiting process.  I told him that if he didn’t hear back from me by the end of business the following day, then he didn’t make it to the next round (an interview).

Considering the findings on his OMG assessment, imagine what could happen if he felt rejected when he didn’t get the follow up call the next day. Consider how his lack of patience, not being a relationship builder and not needing to be liked, could manifest.

Did you imagine what could happen?

What actually happened was he sent me this email :

Dave:

What a complete poser you are… never looked at my resume prior to speaking with me? Completely unprepared and then bulshitted that you said in your email to have the job description open when in fact you never said that in your email?

“If you ace this 5 minute interview you may be selected for the 6 for a teams meeting with me?”

You are simply a legend in your own mind with zero substance… and an embarrassment to the likes of Sandler and Brooks… you simply read the Cliff Notes and labeled yourself a subject expert.. what a complete joke you are and your “Bliblical sales study?” Even more hilarious and a complete joke.

I hope I made my message clear… simply a cheap dollar general power.

I was not surprised over how he acted out.  I’m thankful that the combination of findings on the OMG sales candidate assessment allowed me to prepare for such an outburst.  I have pretty thick skin so my immediate reaction was to read it to my wife and son and see if they would laugh as hard as I did.  Sadly, neither of them laughed.  They were pissed that someone would take a shot at me like that!  Phil tried his best to trigger me with the Sandler/Brooks/Cliff Notes comment, but he failed, and his first two paragraphs were complete lies as he tried to cover his ass.

You should have at least seven take aways from all of this:

• First impressions are the only impressions that matter.
• OMG assessments frequently come to life right in front of your eyes.  This was one of those times!
• It reinforces OMG’s recommendation rules: A “Not recommended” candidate is always a “No”; but a “Recommended” candidate may become a “No.”
• When you know a candidate won’t fit, don’t waste an extra minute of your valuable time on them.
• Phil bragged about his own success, non-stop, for 90 seconds.  Don’t believe a word a candidate says without challenging and verifying.
• Sales DNA competencies often trigger chain reactions and we observed that with Phil.
• As an interviewer, you must never become emotional about candidates or their inappropriate reactions.

You now have all of the evidence to come to a conclusion. Am I an imposter like Phil claims?  You decide.

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