Like most things you do, recruiting works better when you have a plan. The first step in this plan has to include defining what type of candidate will be successful in your organization. This question isn’t as simple as it may seem. Simply hiring a high performing individual from a competitor will often not work unless your cultures, selling techniques and value proposition match that of the competitor. Inversely, often you can find diamonds in the rough that for some reason did not successfully ramp at a competitor. The best way to develop a profile for a sales interview is to look at the profiles of current top producers. This can be done through a combination of testing and observation of your top producers, and then tested in the interview. There are a number of sales testing services that will walk you through the process of developing a profile and then testing applicants for those traits.
Additionally, plan a series of behavior based questions to elicit how people have performed in similar situations in the past. Good behavioral questions will be open-ended and lead the candidate to tell you a story. You can then evaluate the story for the type of behavior you would like to see in the individual. Note a good behavior-based interview can take several hours to conduct, I was taught this technique by a former GE executive named Dick Morrissey, who conducted a 4 hour interview with each candidate he spoke with. The upshot is that performing this level of due diligence prior to hiring can significantly reduce the number of missteps made in the hiring process.
A couple of examples of good behavioral questions are:
Q – Tell me about the most difficult sale you ever made and how you ultimately closed the deal?
A – In this question you want to first make sure that the person is appropriately aggressive and has the dealt with truly difficult situations. Second you can gage their selling style and how it will fit within your organization.
Q – Tell me about the last 5 deals you lost and why.
A – No sales rep wins 100% of their deals. This question can show you if they learn from failure, if they blame others when they should blame themselves and how they deal with rejection.
There are dozens of books available at Amazon that further explore this topic in detail. In the next post of this series we will discuss identifying candidates.
