If you are a business owner or a sales manager and you are underwhelmed by your pipeline, conversion, average ticket, or client retention, look no further than the mirror. it is easy to try to put a Band-Aid on your sales leakage problems with training and consultants. However, all you are doing is asking your sellers to be the type of person they are not.
The driving force in the sales success of any company, regardless of scale, is the quality of the sales team. If you are suffering from any of these sales maladies mentioned above, it is because you allowed these individuals into your company, and you haven’t replaced them. There is a myriad of reasons that they still have a chair inside your organization, but none more compelling than that you haven’t developed a reliable system to attract, vet and recruit outstanding sellers. The long-term effects of this is a widening aperture in your sales system that is permitting the slow creep of mediocrity to infiltrate you culture.
In the spirit of “Misery loves company”, you might be gratified to learn that you are not alone. In a study of over 2,000,000 newly minted salespeople, only 6% were considered “Elite” (defined as climbing to the top half of the sales organization within the first 6 months), 20% of that group were good, but took longer to achieve expected results. However, fully 74% of these sales hires were a colossal waste of money.
So why do we all have such difficulty hiring salespeople? In a FORBES report, it was determined that salespeople are the second most difficult position to hire after the “C’ suite. The reason is simple. Salespeople are a crafty bunch that possess enough finesse and common sense to outsmart most assessment tools and nearly all hiring processes.
Perhaps you believe that your seller interview questions are profoundly “telling”. The truth is that the candidate was asked those same questions by in their two previous interviews. It is fair to say that some of these questions are very revealing. But the key to hiring great salespeople is that it is not what they say during the process, but rather what they do. The answers to your great questions will only tell you how they think. It is their pursuit of the position that will tell you what they will do when you give them that chair.