Understanding the Sales Force

Based on what I’ve seen from evaluating 8000 sales organizations and 300,000 salespeople, your salespeople are probably no better or worse than those at the 8000 other companies.  However, what would happen if they were more prepared?  What would happen if they prepared for every possible scenario?  What would happen if they practiced every day, like the Red Sox?

Salespeople may be like children, but in training they’re more like bagels in an oven.

Using the OMG Sales Candidate Assessments in your sales recruiting process is remarkable in that you’ll almost always see the findings on the assessment come to life if you handle the phone interview and live interviews the way we teach them.

Lesson – you can’t skip any steps in the recruiting process.  When the assessment says “Not Recommended” you must consider that to be a flat-out No.  When the assessment says, “Recommended”, they must still ace both the phone interview and your face to face interviews or you can’t hire them!

That’s the magic of the phone interview we teach.  In just two minutes you can filter out the weakest of the recommended sales candidates so that you interview only the cream of the crop.

I won’t be touring in 2008 so these will be my last public appearances for a while.

Guy Kawasaki is in so many places these days that I would be extremely surprised if you didn’t know him or his work.

Author – Guy has written The Art of the Start; Selling the Dream; How to Drive Your Competition Crazy; The Macintosh Way; Rules for Revolutionaries and more!

I spoke to a very lively group of 130 CEO’s in Cincinnati today and the question about creating more of a sales culture came up.  There are several steps to accomplishing this:

One of the weaknesses we often identify is when salespeople become emotionally involved.  This isn’t a case of them getting too close to their prospects, customers and clients as much as it is a case of them reacting emotionally.  When salespeople become emotional, they don’t see things as objectively, react when they should respond and don’t present themselves as effectively and professionally as when they are under control.