Tweet

Hiring Good Salespeople

Written by: Peter Gilbert

Article Overview: Customers and markets have changed, competition has intensified and products rapidly become commoditised. Consequently salespeople who are no more effective than a product catalogue will be replaced by a new breed of professionals who have a new focus: Demand creation, philosophical alignement, in-depth understanding of their customers' businesses, positioning, executive credibility and the delivery of value. Consequently sales forces and their HR departments will have to use "best of breed" tools and processes for consistently recruiting genuine sales talent.

Hiring Good Salespeople

Hiring Good Salespeople

Our customers have changed. The economics of our businesses have changed. Our markets have changed, and we face new competitors on every front. Is it any surprise that our sales
organisations must change to adapt to dramatically changed circumstances? But, in many cases, sales organisations and the HR functions which support them, have failed to respond.

Dramatic shifts in buyer-seller relationships have seen the balance of power swing back from sellers to buyers. In short, buyers have become better at buying than sellers at selling. Sales organisations face huge challenges because there is no longer any sustainable competitive advantage through product superiority. Author Jerry Stapleton points out that a second problem is that the sales reps’ customers just do not need them any longer – at least not the
way that they used to. Traditionally, salespeople brought value to their customers by facilitating transactions and communicating information about their products and services. Almost overnight these two core functions of salespeople have lost their value. These functions, once the life blood of selling, are diminishing in value as a new era of selling is replacing the old. Customers will not pay for them and often will not even tolerate them.
They are making that known to their suppliers.

The market today is demanding, highly professional and highly specialised salespeople who have a new focus: demand creation, philosophical alignment, in-depth understanding of their customer’s businesses, positioning, executive credibility and the delivery of value. These people are in desperately short supply and sales organisations are increasingly turning to their HR functions for help and guidance in recruiting the new sales talent, and finding that the cupboard is bare. Research is revealing that the calibre of the salesperson has become the single major determinant of whether customers will buy from your organisation or not. So having the knowledge tools and processes to identify genuine sales talent is vital.

Key Learning Point No.1
Sales is becoming increasingly specialised and there are at least 14 different types of salespeople. So it is absolutely crucial to understand what type of salesperson is most likely to succeed in a specific sales role. There are simple tools available to make this determination.

Factors Influencing Customers Decision to Buy
Price 18%

Quality of product/service 21%

Offering a total solution 22%

Calibre of the salesperson 39%


Key Learning Point No. 2
Really great salespeople are often not much interested in theory and tend to be intuitive rather than academic. They are definitely not stupid, but they have other priorities. In HR Chally’s database of over 500 000 salespeople there is an inverse correlation between
academic achievement and sales success, so many organisations who demand rigorous academic standards, often screen out the best sales talent. This is particularly common in banks and IT companies.


Key Learning Point No. 3
Is there a link between academic achievement and sales success? Sales is more a talent based than a learned skill. You can teach anybody to play golf, but you cannot turn the average weekend golfer into a Tiger Woods. It is the same with sales and the rule of thumb the 20% rule applies for training salespeople. You can turn a 5% into a 6% (a poor investment) but you can turn an 80% into a 96%.

Key Learning Point No. 4
Hiring accuracy for sales performance is generally poor – often little better than making decisions based on the flip of a coin, because the most common tools used for recruitment are ineffective. Hiring success rates aren’t much better than a coin toss*

Selection Method: Improvement Over “Chance” (% increase)
Typical Interview 1%

Personality Tests 1%

Experience 5%

Scorable Interview 7%

Criterion validated test 25-35%


Key Learning Point No. 5
Sales managers and HR departments draw up long laundry lists of desirable attributes for salespeople, with no evidence about which are important and predictors of on-the-job performance. Statistical research (validity) studies on predictors of job success indicates that the single most important predictor skill or criteria accounts for almost half the total success prediction. Each additional criterion adds around 50% of the value of the preceding one. More than six factors actually dilute the accuracy of selection.

Factors Affecting Selection Accuracy
1st factor 50%

2nd factor 25%

3rd factor 12%

4th factor 6%

5th factor 3%

Key Learning Point No. 6
Evaluating personality instead of job skills has proved ineffective in predicting future performance in different job roles. This is especially problematic in the popular “short tests” with 20 to 30 questions. Some tests that fall into this group are: MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator), DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness), PIP (Personality
Interview Profiler), PSI (Personal Style Inventory), OPQ (Occupational Personality Questionnaire) and many others. Many of these tests are useful but not predictive.
Any truly effective sales recruitment system would contain the following elements or steps:

1. Clearly understand and define the specific sales role

2. Understand that you find different types of salespeople in different places;

3. Define your “disqualifiers” and screen out unsuitable candidates;

4. Develop a preliminary short list and utilise role specific, structured scorable interviews to develop a short list;

5. Conduct thorough reference checks; and

6. Finally, utilise a criterion validated predictive test to determine the candidate’s suitability for a specific role.

As a guideline, you should achieve 90% or better hiring accuracy and a 20 - 40% improvement in sales productivity.

Related Articles
  The Pros and Cons of Hiring Green Salespeople
  Signs That The Economy Will Soon Improve
  3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring
  Does Changing Compensation Increase Sales?
  5,000 Reasons to Hire Salespeople Today

Article Tags: balance of power, buyer seller, calibre, core functions, cupboard, demand creation, determinant, dramatic shifts, hr functions, knowledge tools, life blood, new era, new focus, power swing, product superiority, sales reps, salespeople, salesperson, stapleton, sustainable competitive advantage



Related Forum Posts
Re: looking for experienced affiliate feedback - Hi Nancy, Hiring an experienced firm to market and sell your products is certainly a viable option. It all depends on whether you want to spend more of your time or money. Hiring a firm is going to cost a good bit I imagine. On the flip side, to do most of the work yourself and attract affiliates to sell your products for you will require much less money but a lot more time and effort. Do you have a budget to work within? Or perhaps maybe you have a loan to get things moving?
Re: Search Engine Optimization - Hi Thomas, So what would you recommend? Hiring an SEO expert or simply trying your hand at doing it yourself?
Hiring freelancers - Hi John, Hiring freelancers is a great way to reduce some of the burdens on your time before you hire full time. The first person I hired came on for an hour a day until we were able to take more time from him. I have always first looked to people I know for hiring freelancers. If there was someone in my immediate network who I think could help I approach them about it. If you have to go outside, look at references from your network. I have hired a number of people who have worked out well based on a reference from a friend. You can also try the elance route. I have had mixed results here. Some of the people I have brought on have been fantastic while others have been duds. My best advice here is to be very specific with what needs to be done because you are not meeting the people you hire face to face - everything is online. Try hiring more than one person if you can to test them out and look at the references and rankings they received from previous employers on elance. Good luck!
Re: Search Engine Optimization - [quote="Kevin":18cbigeg]Hi Thomas, So what would you recommend? Hiring an SEO expert or simply trying your hand at doing it yourself?[/quote:18cbigeg] I would suggest learning it on your own. The internet is evolving daily but can you guarantee a hired SEO expert is. The more you learn, the more creative ideas you have when optimizing your sites. An SEO expert might specialize in one aspect, where you have a chance to take SEO to the next level when you dig deep within yourself and branch out to all aspects. But if you do hire someone make sure you get a credible resource on your side.
Re: Networking - Good work, just remember to continue to plug away and dont stop. Good luck, Matt Belock


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Why SEO is important for your online success

3 Health Insurance Misconceptions

Four Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Should Blog

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.