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Talent Management
- A Most Costly Mistake – Three Tips for Hiring Success
- Developing Today’s Sales Managers
- Focus on Your High Performers
- How Can I Improve My Chances of Hiring the Right Salesperson?
- Passion, Priority, and Performance
- Recognizing Talent and Realizing its Potential
- The Three P’s of Performance – How to Uncover Each
- What's the Cost of a Misfit Sales Manager?
- Why Doesn’t My New Salesperson Get It?
How Can I Improve My Chances of Hiring the Right Salesperson?
Having to replace someone who has left or who was removed from the job can kill your team's sales productivity. Furthermore, missing on a new hire can set the team back for an even greater period of time. From our experience working in the field directly with managers, we've noticed that managers who struggle with turnover tend to over emphasize selecting their salespeople based on experience, skills, and knowledge. While this criterion is important, it's not what separates the best performers from the rest.
To improve selection success, think about your very best salespeople. Consider some of their values, motives, and traits (VMTs): curiosity, integrity, a strong work ethic, commitment, competitiveness, personal accountability, and customer-care orientation are all examples of hidden talents that drive success. Identifying which characteristics your best people have, and determining which are critical and directly related to the success of the job at hand is the key.
Skills and knowledge are trainable; values, motives, and traits are not. Determining how to draw out the VMTs in an interview becomes critical and arguable more important than interviewing to determine required skills and knowledge. Below are some examples of questions which can draw out a person's VMTs. Try tailoring these questions to job-specific requirements and competencies and add them to your interview guide:
- Tell me about a time when you won a deal despite not being the low-cost provider. How did that make you feel? What did you learn that caused you to do something different in your next deal?
- When you have provided great service to a customer or prospect, what did that look like? What did you most enjoy about delighting the customer?
- Share an example of when you’ve faced an organizational roadblock to winning the business. What did you do? Why did you do that?
- What are two or three characteristics you believe make you good at working with internal partners? Share examples of when you‘ve leveraged those characteristics.
Interviewing and selecting based on VMTs is very effective. Having the patience to select the right person and the resilience to avoid the looks-good-on-paper hire can go a long way and help build that high performing and productive team.