Top 10 Tips for Hiring Salespeople

In my conversations with company presidents, one of the frustrations I'm constantly hearing is that they can't hire great salespeople.
My philosophy has always been that sales is a different type of job. What other career is there where a person gets rejected as often as in sales? What other careers are there that people fall into because there is nothing else for them to do (a career of default). How many other jobs are there where you are paid on performance? How many jobs have the types of "freedoms" allowed to salespeople? Since sales is a different type of job, they way you recruit salespeople needs to be different.

Dave Kurlan, author of Baseline Selling, recently published a blog with his top 10 tips to recruit salespeople. Having spent 15 years recruiting salespeople they happen to be parallel to mine.
Here are his tips:

1.This is a perfect time to be hiring - the economy is quickly turning around - heading into an upswing - and you must have excellent salespeople to find opportunities and get them closed by outselling your competitors.

2.Hiring is not an experiment. Trial and error will set you back the length of your sales cycle and learning curve plus the cost of your salaries and draws.

3.You absolutely must know whether you have been hiring the right people or not, why, and what you must change to get it right. This is where the sales force evaluation comes in. Accurate answers to all of the possible "could it be...?" questions. It's not unusual to have 10-20 of them that must be answered in order to be certain about what must change.

4.You must know what it will take for a salesperson to be successful in your business, calling on your market, against your competition, and with your pricing and product, and it goes WAY beyond industry knowledge and experience.

5.Job descriptions are for employees - the people you hire - they aren't for posting your jobs. You provide the new salesperson with the job description when they report for their first day of work. The job posting is a description of the person you're seeking to hire.

6.Jettison or redeploy your under performers. Everyone is a role model for your new salespeople so you must be certain that everyone is modeling the right kind of behaviors and competencies. It's similar to the hopes you have for your children when you hope they meet and become friendly with good kids from good families. The problem is that some of your salespeople aren't and won't ever be able to model what you want and you'll need to know whether they can be developed to do this or not. The Sales Force Evaluation provides the insight to make these decisions too.

7.You must let go of old beliefs, guidelines, methods and processes. The organization that isn't yet a client (and might not become one) from the last example above made a broad statement that will absolutely kill any attempts to improve their ability to select successful salespeople. One of their leaders said, "your hiring recommendation (hirable, not hirable) will be a deal stopper for us". They want the option to hire the people who don't have a chance of being successful. This despite the fact that they haven't had consistency from the people they've previously selected. Why are they taking this stance? They had a problem with some other assessment - not a sales assessment - so they believe that if the mini-van of assessments wasn't predictive, then the Mercedes of assessments won't be either.

8.You must have patience. I know you want those new people in place in two weeks but let's be realistic. Six months from now, would you rather be saying, "Sure glad we waited to hire the right candidates!" or, "I wish we waited to make the right hires - this isn't working out and we'll have to do it all again..."

9.Success in sales has little correlation to college education, degrees, years in sales, or even industry experience. Stop putting so much weight on these criteria and instead, make sure the candidate can outsell your competition.

10.Success in sales has much less to do with who your new salespeople know than is thought to be true. I've seen more examples of this myth than you can believe. If your company is the one everyone wants to do business with - the industry leader, price leader, or technology leader, then salespeople with a book of business will thrive because the customers will follow them to your door. On the other hand, if you are the new kid on the block, have new (different and not yet accepted as the standard) technology, higher pricing, are value challenged, or have decent but not great products/services, then the books of business your new salespeople bring along may not follow them to your door.

To read Dave's full blog entry click here:
http://bit.ly/9dq2pR

These ideas may be a little different than what you are used to, but they are spot on. I've seen them work in the field and I couldn't have written them better (so I didn't). Thanks Dave!

Everet