Hiring the Right Salespeople

Any experienced sales manager knows four things:

Sales is the lifeblood of the organization
Hiring managers only hire applicants who will be “top tier.”
Eighty percent of sales people consistently produce just 20% of the sales.
Sales applicants are accomplished fibbers.

What is the bottom line? Hiring managers habitually set themselves up for failure. To better understand why this happens, hirers need to tease apart the sales and sales-hiring process into four areas: the sales cycle, the salesperson interview, selling and buying skills, and sales motivation.

Sales Cycle

Anyone who really understands the sales process knows that selling involves a complex collection of specialized skills:

Developing and maintaining trust and rapport. No one buys a product he doesn’t trust, from someone he doesn’t trust, supplied by a company he doesn’t trust.
Probing and questioning to discover a need for the product or service. If the prospect knew she had a need for the product, she would have already filled it, right?
Effectively presenting the product’s benefits. If the prospect trusts and respects the salesperson, product, and company, and admits having a problem, then the salesperson has to show that her suggestion is the right one.
Helping the prospect overcome the risk of actually making the decision. Risk can include being wrong, looking bad, or not appealing to personal feelings.

Anyone who doubts the need for trust, probing, and reducing risk should pay attention to the emotions that arise when watching car commercials. Car commercials provide good depictions of salespeople who think that selling consists entirely of attracting attention and promising low prices, rather than about developing buyer trust. After all, what sane buyer trusts a costumed salesperson wearing a diaper and promising the lowest price in town? Let’s see how developing rapport and probing for needs are glossed over in the sales interview.

The Salesperson Interview

What was your toughest sale? What kind of animal would you most like to be? Show me your last three years’ earnings statements. How do you prospect? Sell me this pencil! These are all earnest, yet ineffective, attempts to identify effective sales employees. The above challenges are earnest, because they screen out blatantly incompetent sales applicants. But they’re also ineffective because applicants are not evaluated for critical selling skills. Did we mention that salespeople are outstanding fibbers? This salesperson interview falters because the hiring manager only looks at an applicant’s presentation and ability to overcome objections. Trust-building skills are not evaluated and probing skills are taken for granted. Furthermore, the “motivation” aspect of selling is hidden. What is the bottom line? Because the four selling skills and sales motivation are not fully evaluated, only 20% of the people hired become high producers. The rest are left to flounder.

Selling and Buying

Anyone who examines his buying experiences can agree that people like to buy things. But customers don’t like to buy products from salespeople they distrust, when they don’t perceive a need or believe the product is the right one, or when they feel at risk. A fully competent salesperson invests considerable time and energy into developing a personal relationship. The foundation of this relationship leads to thoroughly understanding the prospect’s situation and problems. The clueless salesperson simply believes that he can talk anyone into buying anything. To most people, that sounds like manipulation, not solution selling. When a sales manager asks the sales applicant to “sell the pencil,” both parties have already taken the two most important sales skills for granted: rapport-building and skilled probing. The only way to evaluate whether the sales applicant has the right discovery and trust-building skills is to put him into a sales simulation that specifically evaluates the full range of sales factors. If not, today’s ace pencil-seller has an 80% chance of becoming tomorrow’s bottom producer.

Sales Motivation

This is a tricky area to evaluate. Did I mention that salespeople are skilled fibbers? Sometimes they even fib themselves into the wrong sales jobs. They’re hunting when they would rather be farming. A while ago, I developed a short survey to help hiring managers learn more about job motivation. Items evaluated how people felt about the world around them (for example, was the world benign or untrustworthy?). In the beginning, I presumed that everyone would score low on the scale, but I was surprised to see that salespeople tended to “max-out” ó especially the ones who were hunters. The survey results showed that hunters tended to view the world as a hostile, competitive place where social Darwinism separates the winners from the losers. Time and again, the same pattern emerged. Recruiters, software salespeople, entrepreneurs, and even fellow consultants also saw the world this way. Hunters scored off the chart on motivation, and farmers scored low. Based on the hunters’ high scores, one would not want to be stranded on a desert island with one of these folks unless they planned to be part of the menu. Why? Basically, high-scoring people believed the world was a hostile place filled with people who were out to get them unless they were able to get them first. On the surface, they were cheerful and outgoing, but trusting their motives was like getting an irresistible urge in the woods and using poison ivy for a sanitary product: big mistake! What is a typical attitude, interest, and motivation pattern for a sales hunter versus a farmer? Here are some examples.

“I Could Do That!” Ivan

Here’s an example from a salesperson who expressed an interest in jointly developing new products. The order of importance indicates how much of a priority it is for him. The percentile score indicates “strength.”

99% on “the hunter scale”
93% on the impulsive scale
87% on expressive and outgoing
47% interest in solving complex problems
40% willingness to follow rules
33% interest in innovation and creativity
27% interest in quality and teamwork
1% expressed interest in work
1% willingness to change

What can we expect from looking at these scores? We see someone who is friendly and charming (high expressive score), right up to the point where he steals your company’s secrets and markets them as his own (high impulsive and hunter score, combined with low teamwork score). The low innovation and problem-solving scores indicate someone who likes other people to come up with new ideas.

“Hunt and Share” Harry

Here is a second example:

99% on “the hunter scale”
99% interest in innovation and creativity
93% on the impulsive scale
87% on expressive and outgoing
60% interest in teamwork
60% interest in being flexible
47% interest in solving complex problems
40% willingness to follow rules
15% expressed interest in work
10% interest in quality

What can we expect from this profile? This person is a hunter who likes to come up with innovative ways to approach sales (high scores in hunting and innovation) and is willing to work with others to accomplish his goals (middle scores in teamwork). Of course, someone will have to pick up the pieces left behind, because he scores low in rules, commitment to the company, and quality.

“Looks Good, But No Cigar” Larry

Here is a final example:

93% on the impulsive scale
93% expressed interest in work
73% interest in solving complex problems
60% interest in being flexible
53% on expressive and outgoing
53% on “the hunter scale”
33% interest in innovation and creativity
15% interest in quality
10% willingness to follow rules
10% interest in teamwork

This profile suggests a hunter, but the candidate is actually more of an office steamroller (high impulsive, commitment to the job, and problem-solving scores). There is not enough “hunter” (he’s in the middle range) to make this person a sales competitor. In other words, he might look good in the interview, but might fail on the job.

Conclusion

Selling is a complex formula of skills and motivations that applicants seldom reveal ó it is up to the hiring manager to use a broad range of tests and simulations to identify whether the applicant has the requisite skills or not. What is the cost of identifying someone with the right skills? In dollars, it is relatively cheap. In “warts,” the average hiring manager has to kiss seven frogs for every prince or princess (which makes it a lesson in managerial patience). In other words, six out of seven candidates cannot make the grade. Of course, one could always default to the usual way, go back to the 20/80 rule, and spend his free time coaching.