How To Recruit Top Sales People

Leadership training courses often highlight that victory in the market is wholly reliant upon the superiority of the sales staff. According to popular belief, successful sales people possess a personal aura and a sense of humour, they are forceful, unfeeling, outgoing, educated about their topic and customer-orientated.

Being conscious of the fundamentals for success is, conversely, of little use to the sales manager when he is trying to assemble his current staff into top-quality sales people or looking for first-rate sales people.

Do not become fixated upon a catalogue of formulaic perfect qualities. Concentrate on the actual skills possessed by your sales people, and the potential they have to offer. Often used successful companies the following assessment procedure based upon the answers to two key questions:

Who are the company’s exceptional sales people?

In order to discover this, the area manager must amass a list of those sales people, which he considers to be exceptional. He must also draw up a list, autonomously, of the top sales people in your company based on weekly turnover.

Finally, colleagues will be asked for their consideration. This will necessitate the sales people in each district naming the colleagues with whom they would most like to work. This important feature shows whether one person’s success has been at the expense of his/her colleagues; this is often the cause of variation problems.

The group of exceptional sales people will consist of those people whose names appear on all three lists. For example, those who achieve the highest turnover, as well as being nominated by both their superiors and their colleagues.

How do top sales people conduct themselves in sales situations?

A resolute interview answers this question, and shows what separates a first-class sales person from a run of the mill one. Conventional questions such as, why do you regard yourself to be well practised and suitable for this position? What are your three greatest strengths and three greatest weaknesses? Do not play a part in this.

Instead, the interviewer should ask the candidate to illustrate the high-points and low-points of his career during the last 12-36 months.  In doing so, the interviewer goes through a list of sales scenarios with the sales person and achieves a dialogue, which makes clear the latter’s feelings about and thoughts towards each of these sales situations.

The questions in the following table make up the main framework for this interview.
What about this situation, in particular, made an impression upon you and why?
What do you consider to be the particular features of this situation?
What actions led up to this situation?
Who were the people involved?
What was your objective?
What did you think about this affair at the time?
What did the customer have to say about this?
Why did you react in that way?
What happened then?

These interviews were carried out in a large business.  Both the company’s outstanding sales people were interviewed, as well as an equal number of sales people with average weekly turnover, who were neither nominated by their superiors nor by their colleagues. By comparing the results from the interviews of both groups, one can distinguish the difference between the outstanding and average sales people. Often considered a core topic on leadership training courses are Interviewing skills.

The Success Profile of a Top-class Sales person

An essential result first of all: successful sales people are not antagonistic with customers.  They actually act very energetically and single-mindedly, but cannot in any way be considered aggressive. Aggressive behaviour towards customers, on the other hand, was a characteristic shown by some of the run of the mill sales people - primarily, when it became clear they were not going to close the deal.

Top sales people can be distinguished from the rest using the qualities and characteristics, which the following table lists.

Success Profile of Top Salespeople

They act decisively and determinedly.
They are very concerned with what the customer actually wants and what he needs.
They are very conscious of time.
They set their own individual targets of achievement.
They use free time for sales activities.
They can assess quickly and precisely the prospect of a deal being closed.
They keep the promises they make to their customers.
They give their customer relationships a personal, friendly touch.

Putting concepts into practice

The applicant selection and the idea of further training for sales people takes on a new temperament when this knowledge is put into practice.

When holding an in-depth interview with an applicant, ask him to describe in detail the tasks he felt went well and, those he would have done differently. From the applicant’s narrative you can discover and register, at what point, the skills, which characterise a top sales person, were shown by the applicant. Would these come across in connection with a sales activity or in other situations?

If used constantly, this method will ensure that you employ those employees whose skills and behaviour present the best chance for sales success for your company. Finally, your sales staff can be trained, by teaching them the behaviour that makes top sales people so successful. Good leadership training courses cover the implementing of these points and how to demonstrate excellent management skills.

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