Recruiting and interviewing are two of the most valuable investments sales managers can make of their time. But it has to be proactive, and it has to be in advance of an open territory or you will end up settling for someone who is adequate rather than being able to wait for somebody who is exceptional.

A colleague of ours, Rob Jeppsen, tells a story of when he was the CEO of a young technology company:

Proactive Sourcing

Another way to be proactive and get ahead of the curve is to nurture your network—take care of your people — and keep in contact with the salespeople who have been successful for you in the past. When you get your next sales management job, those people could be your pool. I know a lot of sales managers who have put themselves out of business because they not only didn’t nurture the network, they burned bridges.

Another source is to cultivate professional organizations. That dead time during trade shows and conferences can be well spent getting to know the competitive salespeople who always assemble there.

It can be dangerous to recruit from clients, but there are times when clients can be a good source of candidates without destroying the relationship. You also can consider rehires—good people who have left you. Maybe the grass is greener for a reason; maybe it’s the stuff they are spreading around over there. Good people can come back if you keep the door open.

Most managers, in their interviewing process, consider only two dimensions—performance and personality. If this is as deep as you look, you’re not going deep enough.

There are a number of reasons salespeople fail and one of the biggest ones isn’t a lack of confidence or commitment. It’s character. And most interviewers fail to ask enough questions in this area.

In our management training course, we teach people how to drill down to character issues in addition to performance. We teach them to ask questions they wouldn’t normally ask otherwise.

During one of our management training classes, one manager said, “I’m not comfortable asking these personal questions.” The most recent exercise we had done in class was to study why employees fail. When we looked at the chart paper around the room, the irony was that 80 percent of their failures had to do with character issues, yet they weren’t interviewing in that area.

What skills, experience, intelligence level, behavior traits, etc. will predict success? The answer is unique to you and your organization.

Your Sales Process Should Drive Your Talent Profile

The first step is to define your best-practices sales cycle— the template for an ideal sale in your industry segment. Then the next step is to work backwards to the activities, information, and strategies needed for each phase of your sales cycle.

FIGURE 4–1 Best-practice sales cycle competency model.

Then work into the skills, competencies, behaviors, and experience needed to effectively execute each of these activities for each of the roles on your sales team (see Figure 4–1). The last step is to create the interview questions that help you to discover these traits—or their absence—and compare them to your profile.

One of the best books in this area is Don Clifton and Marcus Buckingham’s book «Now, Discover Your Strengths». This is an excellent approach to identifying the characteristics that predict success.

When we used Don’s company in the past, we did a study of our most successful reps — hunters in the high-tech software industry — and were able to identify the most important traits to look for. In our profile, the “must haves” were that sales reps be competitive, have big egos that result in drive and ambition, and have the courage to overcome obstacles and initiate action from a blank piece of paper every day. We found that being smart also was critical. Such people make things happen rather than watch and wonder.

Other traits were either “like to haves” or fell in the category of “compensating strengths and weaknesses.” However, if we didn’t have the four “must haves,” we knew that the person probably was not going to be successful and that the cost of hiring such a person was going to be high. We have found this to be true, by the way, of most hunters in most organizations. The four “must have” traits are necessary for competitive evaluation hunters, as we described in Hope Is Not A Strategy.

Hiring Assessments

To find out whether or not people have these traits, a number of companies offer assessments or surveys. Basic intelligence tests and personality style assessments are fundamental and inexpensive for first-tier screening. For complex sales of big-ticket items to committees in competitive situations, however, much more is needed.

One of the best people at defining selection profiles is Ross Rich of Chicago-based Selection Strategies, Inc. He not only knows what to look for, but he also has created a structured two-hour phone interview that listens to what the candidate says and also to what he or she doesn’t say. Although these processes are not 100 percent perfect, they do help to raise red flags for your finalists. This phone interview and interpretation are fairly extensive, so most companies use them for finalists only, but they will show you the weak spots—where you should drill down deeper—before you make the expensive decision to hire a candidate.

As we mentioned, most people look at personality and performance, but there are potential flaws in both these areas. First of all, it’s hard to judge past performance. How quotas are set differs from company to company. Thus, when a résumé says, “I made quota at this other company,” what does that really mean?

One of our principals, Joe Southworth, tells a story of when he was a sales manager at a large software company: