By Jeff Beals
The stakes are high when recruiting and hiring sales professionals for your company. Your reps will make or break you. Hiring the right ones will make you look like a hero. Hire the wrong ones and you’ll find yourself sitting in a conference room answering unpleasant questions.
Given the pressure on sales leaders to hire quality salespersons, many resort to complicated selection criteria which include tests, assessments and other tools. Many hiring tools are useful and can help a manager make a good decision, but there is one simple hiring criterion that might be more important than any other:
Frequent past behavior.
Nothing better predicts future behavior than frequent past behavior. Examine a sales rep’s background carefully. Ask pointed and investigative questions that uncover what kind of sales work he or she truly did in past positions. Find out how they overcame adversity and still closed deals. In previous jobs, did the rep have a tendency to be creative and come up with clever ways to save deals that were close to falling apart?
Ultimately, you must determine if the sales rep a “winner.” The sales profession is a competitive field, and success in that field requires many of the same attributes athletes must possess in order to become champions.
The deeper you examine a prospective salesperson’s frequent past behavior the more likely you are to make a good decision.
Jeff Beals is a professional speaker and award-winning author, who helps professionals enjoy greater success through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. He delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. To discuss booking a presentation, go to JeffBeals.com or email at info@jeffbeals.com or call us at (402) 637-9300.
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