In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on How to Hire Salespeople, we discussed why hiring salespeople is so difficult, and what to look for when reviewing a sales resume. Here, I’ll share with you the “rubber meeting the road” part of the process – the interview.
Sales interviews are a challenge to run if you’re not sure what to ask. That’s why I recommend coming armed with a pre-defined interview script that lays out everything that you’ll want to ask prior to sitting down with your candidate. It’ll keep you on track, ensure you don’t skip critical items, and enable you to relax and focus on listening to what’s being said.
So what do you need to focus on to run a great in-person sales interview?
Focus on the candidate’s job environment. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed that great salespeople are a product of their environment as much as they are a product of great selling skills. In other words, “Great sales skills + bad environment = a big performance handicap.” If you’re interviewing a salesperson who is making their numbers but is doing so despite a sub-par work environment, you’re looking at a truly great candidate. On the other hand, if your company has weak sales and marketing support and very little process, then the candidate who has succeeded in a company with a solid support system will probably struggle mightily when working for you.
That’s why our product teaches managers to focus on the “how” more than the “what” when it comes to interviewing candidates. How did they get their job done? How did they overcome obstacles? The answers to these questions will give you the context needed to make a smart hiring choice.
Compare the candidate to their peers. Your candidate has just told you that they were the top salesperson at their company. Ok, fantastic. “How many salespeople were on your team?” Two? Not as strong a statement. 300? Now that’s impressive.
Make sure you’re getting the context of this candidate’s results in conjunction with the data. Being the top salesperson on a two-person team is not very predictive of future performance. As interviewers, we’re trying to build a narrative about each candidate so that we can determine whether or not their story can fit into our hiring needs. Can a top software salesperson from IBM succeed at your start-up? Can a salesperson who’s never worked within a big company structure be successful at a company like Oracle? While both answers can be ‘yes,’ you’re taking huge risks, in my opinion, trying to cross-pollinate sales resources without some serious in-house sales management.
It’s not enough to know the data. You have to get the context, because it’s the context of a candidate’s success that matters.
Understand the nature of sales activity. Behind any salesperson’s performance history is a matrix of sales activity. The number of calls made each day. The number of appointments set and kept each week. The number of proposals sent out the door each month. Any revenue generated is a product of these activities.
In B2B selling, it all starts with a call, and, generally speaking, the more calls a salesperson makes, the more sales they have. If your company has no marketing support, no inside sales team, and no appointment-setting support, then hiring a salesperson who hasn’t made cold calls in the last three years will result in your wasting a ton of money and time on someone who never should have been hired.
One thing I look for when interviewing sales candidates: do they know their numbers at a high level of detail?
[Read the rest of this post at Better Hiring Today]
