2 True stories: Day One selecting the right sales person!
Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty!
So I am sitting at a network lunch and telling my table that I help companies improve their sales performance, assisting you to select the right person in the first place to helping you assess the talent that you have and, designing focused reveue generating training &/or coaching. The guy to my left immediately said that’s interesting because my company is now at a point where I am wanting to employ a full time sales person. We converse and he tells me he is going to use a recruitment agency that have previously supplied him with engineers. I ask him what is the cost of getting your recruitment wrong and he says over a 3 month trial period including the agency fee around £8000 but that is acceptable. Now here’s the thing, he hadn’t calculated his time in making the decision nor the sales opportunities lost, or the possible negative impact on existing customers. He had plans for growth; and the wrong sales person could contribute enourmously to that growth, or knock them back a few years. Selection is difficult but in sales it is crucial. There are 3 areas that you need to focus on: first does this person have the right attitude and motivation for my customers, do they have the experience that I need in this position and finally, do they have the right skills at the right level for this post? The one that is probably easiest to gauge is experience, but be careful to differentiate between 1 years experience repeated 15 times and 15 years experience growing & developing as a sales person.
The others: attitude, motivation and skills need objective measures, linked to the type of sales and offer that you sell. With many small firms the owner managers have had no sales training and have little understanding of selling and even less of sales people. Selection often comes down to – do I like this person, can I work with them – and this could be an expensive mistake.
Bigger firms often have a Sales Director &/or an HR person who can usually assess experience and attitude, often with the help of a psychometric like MBTI, however the fundamental flaw is that many pyschometrics are generic in nature or focus on an aspect of managing people, life skills or a personality profile that requires adaption & intepretation to be applied to a sales person. Very few focus on selling - and even fewer on selling skills specific to the selling role that needs filling. A trial period may show up gaps in skill but should you really practice on your customers?
Now back to my networking lunch and my neighbour who is not sure he wants to recruit a sales person now except that I tell him there is a way of making it easier, cheaper and more certain. Okay says he, lets talk! After story 2 I tell you what we talked about.
Tomorrow comes the second story which is about a newly appointed sales director who inherited a top sales team; or did he?
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