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3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring

Guest post by: Graham

Article Overview: Insight to why companies fail to hire strong sales and business development people. The reasons why they have not developed a process for finding, attracting and retaining strong sales professionals.

3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring

I came across this interesting sales article from Dave Kurlan, developer of the Dave Kurlan Sales Force Evalutaion Tools, it may be of interest to you! 3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring (Posted by Dave Kurlan on Tue, March 27, 2010)

Yesterday I participated in a Webinar sponsored and hosted by EcSell Institute where I presented my ideas for how not to screw up your 2010 sales hiring. Most of the attendees had participated in a survey where they said that getting hiring right was extremely important, but only 8% felt they had the skills to do this effectively.

When I answered questions from the audience, the best one, in my opinion, was the most obvious. It went something like this: "If your recruiting process works so effectively, and your assessments are so predictive, and they save so much time and money and consistently identify top performers, then why don't more companies use them?"

Isn't that just an awesome question? Without question, it is the question I ask myself every single day. Why are there only 8,000 companies using this great process and assessment when it could be 8 million companies? I believe there are three reasons.

1.Ego. Most sales managers simply have a mindset that they should know how to do this without asking for help, relying on tools, or following someone else's process. After all, they've done it before (badly if you measure it by the percentage of over achievers they hire - fewer than half of the last 10 people yesterday's group hired were achieving!).

2.Money. Every company pays their worst performer far more than it would cost to get the right process, tools and skills in place. Even though every hiring mistake costs as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars, some companies simply don't view those losses as line items. However, they do see the cost of assessments and consulting as line items and mistakenly believe they can't spend the money.

3.Fear. Fear of the unknown, of being wrong, of change, of losing control, of being criticized, and of a learning curve.

These are 3 powerful reasons for not going down this path. Yet, they are 3 reasons over which executives should be embarrassed and apologize. Companies just plain suck at hiring the right salespeople. How could they do any worse by implementing best practices?

End of the article.

Interestly, whenI work with CEOs I ask them this sales hiring question "How many salespeople would you hire, if you knew they would all be successful?" in general the overwhelming answer is "All of them" so why waren't they hiring? Because they have failed in the past for find successful salespeople. If you want to build a successful business you need to find, attract, qualify and retain successful salespeople period. for more infomation refer to my Bio.

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Article Tags: Building a Sales Force, Sales Hiring, Sales Recruitment



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