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…
DetailsThere 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…
DetailsIn 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…
DetailsWhen 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…
DetailsWhen 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…
DetailsAn article in the Harvard Business Review pointed out that 43% of hiring decisions are made within the first 4.8 minutes of the interview. Talk about the importance of a candidate creating a good first impression! If this is the case, why bother interviewing people for more than 5 minutes? The answer is because hasty…
DetailsEvery 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…
DetailsYou’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…
DetailsTo persuade, motivate and influence you need to use the right words in your presentation and your presentation materials. To maximize your impact, try adding these words the next time you have a presentation.
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…
DetailsOften 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…
DetailsIt’s been almost ten years since I last went on a rant about the sales “profession” and what we can do to make it even more professional. So, here I go again! First off, I want to say that I’ve been in sales for over thirty years and I’ve been proud to call myself a…
DetailsNo, I’m not referring to a prospect that buys long-distance telephone services. This is about the buyer who is out of reach, the one you can’t contact directly because he or she is too distant. Sometimes this distance is due to geography — the key decision maker is located in some other city or country.…
DetailsDuring 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…
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