Four pitfalls to avoid when hiring sales people

The unemployment rate in Northern Colorado, Boulder County and Denver currently ranges between 3.5 percent and 4.5 percent. For companies recruiting salespeople, we’re approaching “over employment,” which means that most salespeople who want a job have one. In other words, for salespeople, it’s a seller’s market in which they, the salesperson, have leverage with a prospective employer.

In this over-employed market, we consistently have organizations coming to us for help with finding and hiring the right talent. Over the years, we’ve learned some pretty important lessons around interviewing and hiring sales people. Here are four common pitfalls you should try to avoid:

Mistake 1: Don’t interview the resume! Fast forward to your next interview. It’s five minutes before the candidate will be on the phone or in front of you. You say to yourself, “Who is this guy?” You then frantically print out the resume and skim it. You then proceed to interview the resume: “Tell me about the job you had. What was your success there? Why did you leave? Blah, blah, blah …”

I’m sure your process isn’t as bad as this. However, here’s the mistake: You need to know who and what you are looking for. Not just: “I need a go-getter,” “won’t take no for an answer,” “trusted adviser” with “a Rolodex.” Who doesn’t need that? Define your needs beyond the resume and the clichés. Easier said than done, but start with understanding about what the key job functions actually are and rank the importance of each one.

Mistake 2: Don’t emphasize the wrong selling skills during the interview process. You only have a certain amount of time with your candidates. Make sure you know which skills are most important for success. For example, we sometimes hear clients say that they ask a candidate to “do a presentation” during the interview. Often, your client deals are won or lost long before the presentation is made. Having them do a presentation is not a bad idea, but what’s your process for understanding the candidate’s ability to question and qualify what the client actually needs? In your world, is that more important than the presentation? In the past, have you hired reps that love to present and then spend their days and nights “chasing” and “following up?” Did your interview process actually perpetuate the wrong culture and start your reps out with bad habits that are tough to break?

What are the top 10 skills they need to execute to be successful? We often see this list vary, but presentation skills are rarely in the top five. If presentation skills are only one key job function, how about including a sample discovery interview in your interviewing process so you can gauge the candidates questioning and listening skills.

Mistake 3: Don’t assume that just because they can do something, they actually will. “Will Do” is the hardest thing to judge during an interview. Attitude and motivation sometimes can be faked long enough to get a candidate through an interview. We recommend you use hiring assessments to measure core behavioral competencies around ambition and drive, taking action, resisting stalls and objections, accepting responsibility, controlling and closing, questioning and qualifying, and a need for approval.

Without objective assessments you’re playing Russian roulette with your payroll budget and sales quotas. 

Mistake 4. Productive salespeople can be hard to find and even harder to hire. By their very nature, they’re good at selling. They often show you who you want to see. Unfortunately, we haven’t perfected a “salesperson detector” like a metal detector at the airport that goes off when a productive salesperson passes through it. All too often, we hear of hiring mistakes that are made because a leader or an owner hires someone they know, someone who was recommended to them by a friend or client, or just someone they like.

When we “fall in love” with the sales candidate, we’re much more apt to make hiring mistakes and overlook vital flaws. The antidote for making these mistakes is to take emotion out of the hiring process and instead follow a field-tested sales hiring system. To make it even more challenging, the sales hiring system is often longer and requires more diligence than hiring for other positions like operations, administration or accounting as those skill sets are much more easily vetted and verified. On your next hire, slow the process down, be more diligent and you’ll be much more likely to hire a productive salesperson.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Contact him at bbolak@sandler.com.

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