Leader's Beacon

Details are the finishing touch that bring back your customers for future business.  A colleague of mine manages nearly forty commission sales people.  The “best of the best” make huge income and are revered in the top 100 of a large, multinational company. What is their secret? Make the customer feel special – like they [...]

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One of the hiring traps many companies fall into is letting HR hire salespeople. I apologize if this blog annoys HR practitioners but the simple truth is that most (not all) HR people are unqualified to hire salespeople. What they are extremely good at is managing the hiring process and understanding the legal aspects of [...]

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I’m usually not a big fan of asking leading questions of a referee. But when I’m doing reference checks for sales candidates, I’m all for priming the “witness” before conducting the interrogation. Why? Because it helps avoid getting those sometimes ill-deserved, glowing reports during your reference-checking process. Other articles you might like:Transparent or need to [...]

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Every great author has a trilogy and this is mine. Well actually I’m not really a great author, but this is part of a trilogy. This is the third article on the topic of onboarding salespeople. For the uninitiated, “onboarding” is what happens after you successfully complete the arduous process of hiring a new salesperson. [...]

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Seasoning is great “on” food and “in” people! One of the things employers often look for in a sales candidate is past sales experience and “seasoning.” However, sometimes when you hire one of these seasoned pros, they come complete with complacency. In sales, like in many things, attitude counts. I don’t ever discount a salesperson’s [...]

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Getting your new salesperson started off on the right foot is an important part of them having fun and you making even more profit. I recently did another of my gems of wisdom titled The New Hire – Doing It Right where I provided an outline of the sales-related items that a new hire needs [...]

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Too many companies still insist on pumping their new hires full of product knowledge and then dumping them on unsuspecting prospects, fully expecting the new salesperson to sell up a storm. These “talking catalogues” start running around “telling” instead of “selling” and the expected storm decays to a light drizzle. The salespeople get depressed at [...]

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I’ve blogged in the past about sales candidates who have a propensity to be verbose and why you may want to avoid them (huge timewasters). Whenever I’m tasked to do an interview with someone who our Sales Temperament Assessment has flagged as being over-social, I use the following technique to see if the person has [...]

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You’re hiring salespeople, right? So, at a minimum, the sales candidate should know how to sell himself. That’s why, when you’ve completed all the rest of the interview and testing process, you should ask what I call the last question, “Why should we hire you?” This gives the salesperson one last opportunity to sell himself [...]

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According to an article in the Harvard Business review, 33% of all hiring decisions are decided on appearance alone. This is great for people who use this technique as all they need is a photo or video of the candidate to make their decision on. Other articles you might like:Hasty Hiring Decisions Can Be CostlyTwo [...]

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This hiring tip may seem counter intuitive but it has a lot of merit. Many companies still choose industry experience over sales skills because of the potentially faster ramp-up time and potential business that an industry-seasoned candidate brings to the table. While this is a reasonable assumption, you may be passing up the opportunity to [...]

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No sales candidate is going to tell you that he doesn’t know how to sell, even when he doesn’t know how. That’s because he thinks he does know. So it’s up to you to figure out if he really does. I know that it sounds a bit corny to ask a sales candidate to sell [...]

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There are a couple of situations when it makes good sense to include an interview with a sales candidate’s spouse. The first situation is when you’re seriously considering hiring a salesperson from a competitor.  The salesperson may be playing you off against his current employer for a raise. Asking to include the spouse in the [...]

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In part one I expressed my despair that companies don’t do a more thorough job of selecting salespeople. My concerns stem from my years in the sales training business where I was too often brought into a company and asked to basically train pigs to fly. They wanted to train salespeople who, at best, should [...]

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When hiring for a position as critical as sales, I’m always surprised that companies don’t take the time to test candidates better than they do. I recognize that the HR department is ill equipped to test salespeople beyond the standard personality or temperament assessment but, even then, most seem loath to use these tools. It’s [...]

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When you’re actively looking for a new salesperson, not everyone who passes over your electronic threshold is a prime candidate for the job of sales professional. To eliminate obvious misfits from the pile of responses you hope to get from your recruiting efforts, you need to have a filter through which you will pass the [...]

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