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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Every now and then I get a call from one of my consulting clients who is all excited because he thinks he’s found the ideal salesperson. “Brian,” he’ll tell me excitedly, “This guy is great with people. He’s a really good talker.” And I’ll respond with: “I’ve no doubt he’s a good talker, but can…
You’re probably wondering exactly what is a no-see’em? These are salespeople that your customers don’t see. Usually they don’t see them because their only contact is by telephone.
Now here’s a problem most sales managers and HR professionals would kill for — two equally qualified sales candidates. Assuming that both candidates scored equally on our Sales Temperament Assessment and that they are pretty well matched against your mandatory and desirable criteria list, which one do you choose? You want to choose the person who…
In my early years of selling, whenever I got an objection, my heart would sink, my stomach would go into turmoil, and my mind would shift into overdrive trying to figure out how to deal with it. All my early sales training and all the sales books I’d ever read made a big deal about…
Often when I suggest to salespeople that they do some telephone selling, a panicky look comes over their faces and you’d think that I’d suggested they pick up a hot poker and put it to their ear! Part of this fear and disdain comes from exposure to extremely poor telemarketers who are blight on professional…
During our recent TeleSeminar on Handling the (Dreaded) Price Objection, I was asked a really good question by one of the attendees — How do you handle situations where your main competitor is always undercutting you by 20 percent or more? It was a dynamite question and one that might be asked by many salespeople…
No one likes sticker shock, not you and certainly not your prospect. The last thing you want when you mention your final price is for the prospect to gasp, clutch his heart and keel over. That’s why it’s wise to prepare your prospect for what’s to come in terms of the financial investment he will…
Any marketing person will tell you that sex sells. Well, I’m here to tell you that sex doesn’t sell; sex simply gets your attention. After your attention has been aroused, it’s one of the other two primary motivators, or dominant buying motives, that drives you to buy. Those two dominant buying motives are desire for…
This article is for those of you who have been in sales for some time. Those of you for whom the glow of the job is beginning to dim a bit. Some non-salespeople think that salespeople lead an incredibly busy social life, full of free meals and days on the golf course. That we get…
Why in the world would you want to take your prospect’s temperature? You’re not a doctor. Well, it’s not your prospect’s body temperature I’m suggesting you take. It’s your prospect’s buying temperature. Testing the Water Just like you might test the water before you jump into a swimming pool to see if the water temperature…
Do you know the major reason why prospects don’t buy? They were never asked! That’s right, no one asked them for the business. Strange as it seems, salespeople use all their superior selling skills to get in front of a prospect, qualify him, uncover his needs, match their product or service to those needs, and…