Sales Recruiting: Successful by the Numbers

Danita Bye

Any sales manager knows that the sales game is a numbers game. The more contacts you make, the more sales you’ll ultimately score. Unfortunately, though, many of those same sales managers apply that philosophy to hiring salespeople, figuring that they’ve got to work their way through a deck of promising, yet eventually disappointing salespeople to find the few who’ll put consistently winning sales on the board. In other words, these sales managers view sales hiring as a roll of the dice. After all, resumes and interviews can only tell you so much about how a hire will perform in your company, selling your products and services – right?

Absolutely right – on both counts. Hiring high-performing salespeople is a numbers game, though not in the same way that sales is. Resumes and interviews are poor predictors of sales success. But if sales managers are right about those things, where are they going wrong when they hire? For the answer, let’s look at a few numbers:

• According to a recent CSO report, managers report that almost 50% of their sales force need improvement and only around 5% exceed expectations.
• According to Jacques Werth, President of High Probability Selling, only 3% of customers buy based on good rapport with their salespeople.
• Based on Sales Growth Specialists’ research, 60% of a salesperson’s success rides on being accountable for results.

From these numbers, we can deduce that:

• If sales managers could more accurately predict success, they’d save their businesses considerable cash currently wasted on an overactive hire/fire/rehire cycle.
• A likeable interviewee does not translate to sales success.
• Sifting out candidates who aren’t likely to take responsibility for their results would mean fewer rehires, a much stronger sales team, and far easier and more productive sales management.

The major takeaway here is that hiring right the first time is critical for building a winning sales team in the most cost- and time-effective manner possible. And one of the keys to doing that is to put resumes and interviews in their proper place in the hiring process.

Most Sales Hiring Processes are Upside Down

After significant research and practical experience, Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group recommends the following sequence when hiring top sales personnel:

Note that the proper sequence of events does not necessarily correlate to their importance. Note especially the lower importance of searching (gathering resumes) and interviewing.

Searching for salespeople by soliciting resumes is not only one of the least important moves in the hiring game, it’s not even the first one. Clearly and precisely identifying aspects of the ideal candidate for your sales team and for your unique customer base is. Ignoring this foundational step is the reason that so many businesses spend so much time and money just to hire the right salespeople.  After all, if you don’t know what qualities make for a top salesperson in your organization, what are the odds of hiring one?

There are a number of tools and processes designed to help you paint a picture of an ideal new player for your sales team, a picture you’ll refer to often as you assess your candidates (from qualified resumes, steps two and three) in the fourth step of the process. In this phase, you’ll match candidates with the qualities you’ve identified as leading to sales results for your business, using a variety of psychological and behavioral assessments in combination with tests that measure aptitudes, values, integrity, and belief systems.

Sales Assessments – assess even before you interview

But why put so much effort into assessing candidates before you even interview them? As mentioned before, resumes are of limited value, especially when many companies are fearful of legal reprisals and when the National Referencing Corporation reports that 30 million people have secured employment by lying on them. Therefore, you need to double-check, using the sorts of sales assessments mentioned above. Only then are you ready to interview.

Interviewing Is Important – But Not as Important as You Think

According to a Michigan State University study, over 90% of all hiring decisions are based on an interview, which is only 14% accurate in predicting success. But if you’ve been following along, you’ll realize that much of the hiring decision should have been made before the interview takes place.

Not to say the interview has no importance; it just needs to be viewed in the proper context. Interviewing correctly is key to winning the hiring game, and though what makes a good interview – and a good interviewer – is beyond the scope of this article, you can find out more about the topic on my site: Sales Growth Specialists.

Contrary to popular opinion, successful hiring is not a crapshoot. Nor is it a numbers game, though scoring the sales numbers you want means hiring by the numbers – and understanding the real importance of every move in the hiring game.

Gain further insight into Sales Recruiting by downloading Danita’s e-Book called: Measuring Sales DNA

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye built her reputation on building and inspiring process-oriented, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100-turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their businesses to the next level. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales leadership to increase sales, creating predictable revenue streams.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving to become an equity partner and national sales manager for a Minneapolis-based medical device company. In this capacity, she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to a run rate of $20 million in just ten years.

Danita has authored numerous articles on sales management and leadership.  In addition, she was a featured as a sales development expert on the TV show, “The Ruthless Entrepreneur,” which is currently airing on the Oxygen Network. Leadership Shift, Management Acceleration and a library of eBooks on critical sales management issues are available on the Sales Growth Specialists’ website.

Danita can be reached at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com, 612-267-3320 or 800-256-2799.

For more insights on Sales Strategy and Sales Process, visit www.SalesGrowthSpecialists.com.

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