Stop Guessing and Start Accurately Predicting Sales Winners

How many times has this happened to you? You think you've found "the one" -- the new sales superstar -- and within a few weeks to a few months they just don't work out.

You're smart. You're successful. You know how to run a business. You hire people for other roles in your company all the time and it works out fine. So, what the heck is going on with these sales hires?

There are many reasons you're not accurately predicting the effectiveness of your sales hires and we will be covering all of them in our upcoming webinar on June 7th but let's take a look at a few of the biggest reasons you're betting on the wrong sales horses.

Reason #1 - You're Just Guessing

Would you buy a house or a piece of commercial property without an accurate inspection? Well chosen salespeople are at least as valuable to you as any other business asset. Inspect what you expect.

Can they do the job? In other words, you must test them for the specific set of skills they need to perform exceptionally in their role.

Will they do the job? Ability and willingness are very different things. You need only look at your teenager's bedroom to understand this. Before you hire a salesperson, you must know whether or not they have the will to sell and you have to understand how to tap into it.

Have they done the job? Have they successfully sold to the same type of customer, at the same price point, under the same market conditions, with the same sales cycle as you are asking them to? Tiger Woods is a professional athlete who swings a mean golf club but would he be able to do the same with a baseball bat? How about a tennis racquet?

Apply the science of predictive hiring to your sales recruitment and test candidates for the results you need from them. If they don't meet the requirements, don't hire them.

"Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."

Reason #2 - You May as Well Be Guessing

Let's circle back to the example I used in Reason #1: purchasing a piece of commercial property without an accurate inspection. As a buyer, you are responsible for due diligence. This includes surveys, environmental reports, rent rolls, covenants, and restrictions. You wouldn't use a home inspector for a commercial job because commercial property purchases are more complex than most home purchases. The same is true for due diligence on salespeople, especially when it comes to measuring actual and necessary sales-specific skills. 

Use a reliable and predictive assessment designed for sales that will give you scientifically accurate data relevant to the position you are filling. While it may seem like a good idea to understand whether a salesperson possesses something like Drive, it doesn't reveal anything about their sales abilities, yet this is a quality often mis-identified for real sales skills. It's not predictive of their skills or their sales DNA. What you absolutely must know is that a potential sales hire possess the Desire to be the best salesperson they can be and the Commitment to do whatever it takes to reach their sales targets and goals.

You also must know if they possess enough of the right Sales Competencies for the exact sales role you are hiring them to perform. The right test (we use this one) will allow you to specify exactly which sales skills, strengths, and DNA is ideal for each role you need filled.

Without all that you may as well just guess. Actually, you will be guessing, because the data from other assessments won't correlate to sales. I'm not knocking all other assessments here. We use several different types of assessments with our clients depending on what we are helping them accomplish. For sales hiring, we only use one because it's the only one built for sales by sales scientists with sales-specific findings; and because it is as accurate as a Swiss watch. And the results are guaranteed so you can stop with the bad predictions already.

Reason #3 - You're Afraid It's Going To Cost Too Much

This is probably the biggest reason otherwise smart, efficient, business executives keep getting sales hiring wrong. What they don't realize is the exact opposite is true. It is far more cost-effective to do it the right way.

Believe me when I tell you I know this from experience. One of the reasons I am so passionate about this topic is because I spent many years hiring sales traits instead of sales skills and wondering why it wasn't working. My quest for fixing this issue as well as other business growth issues led to my creating Align Strategic.

During my quest to fix my sales hiring problem I learned a fundamental truth: in order to hire winning salespeople, you have to fix your broken hiring process, assess each and every sales candidate with the best tool for the job, and use your gut instincts only after you have actual qualified sales candidates in the pipeline.

That means figuring out precisely what you need from a sales hire in a specific role, putting the right advertising in place to attract the best candidates, assessing each candidate for the exact skills and DNA they will need, weeding out those with weaknesses that override those strengths, interviewing the right way and asking the right questions at the right time, making compensation effective for both the short-term onboarding stage and for long-term performance, and creating an onboarding plan that helps great hires stick around.

If that sounds expensive to you, consider that the cost of missing the boat on great salespeople and hiring duds goes well beyond the 3X annual salary average because salespeople are responsible for increasing revenue, which is a problem when they don't work out. That means holding onto poor ones costs you opportunities and not finding and keeping good salespeople costs you even more dearly over time.

I help CEOs, presidents, and entrepreneurs grow their businesses. In addition to providing tools, and strategies, and consulting for growth, my company, Align Strategic, also recruits sales and sales leadership talent with guaranteed results. If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it. If you'd like to attend our next hiring webinar, register here. If you'd like to connect on Linkedin, please send me an invitation.

If you're ready to stop guessing and start predicting sales winners, click here to schedule your free Guaranteed Sales Hire demo.

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