Lou Adler hits it on the head "again"! Many of the salespeople I have interviewed over the years have said they can sell anything. Their track record in a variety of industries would seem to back up their assertion. But oftentimes a client insists that a person has to have worked in
THEIR industry or they won't even consider them. Makes me wonder if they are really looking for the industry experience - or the book of business???
Here's Lou's take on hiring great sales people: (seen on
ERE.Net)
"Over the years, I’ve been involved in developing hiring tools for sales representatives in a variety of industries including high technology, financial services, industrial products, consumer products, auto sales, woman’s cosmetics, business services, medical products, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.
Surprisingly, most sales managers make the same bad decisions, regardless of the product or industry.
Here’s the list of where most sales managers go wrong. Start eliminating these error-producing behaviors and just about all of your sales hiring mistakes will go away.
They think their job is unique. They’re not. There is a common sales process behind each one, that when understood can be used to benchmark any candidate’s past performance against.
They overvalue first impressions. First impressions don’t predict performance. People with great first impressions are frequently incompetent and people with marginal first impression often have a track record of great success. It’s best to measure first impression at the end of the interview and then determine how the candidate’s first impression affected their performance in consistently achieving quota. From what I’ve seen, the best sales managers don’t worry about first impressions, they worry about the candidate having a track record of achieving good sales results selling similar products, to similar buyers, in similar situations.
They overvalue their gut or instinct. This is only acceptable when the sales manager has a track record of hiring all top performers who all make quota in combination with very low department turnover. Emotions, intuition, or instinct are poor predictors of on-the-job success. A track record of past performance selling similar products or influencing similar buyers is a great predictor.
They don’t know the job. Sales is a process that starts with lead generation and ends at closing. Certain aspects of the process are more critical than others. If a sales manager doesn’t know what these are, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to accurately assess them in the candidate. As a result, the sales manager shifts the decision criteria to first impressions and gut instinct.
They assume they’re great managers. Most great sales people aren’t great managers, yet this is the person most likely to get promoted. It takes a great deal of work to build, develop, and manage an effective sales team. As part of the assessment process, the sales manager has to assess the fit between her style of management and how each person on the team needs to be managed. This directly relates to Hershey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model.
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