It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse anything but the best, you very often get it.
Based on experience, I have identified 10 different elements that need to be considered when hiring a successful salesperson, sales manager, or anybody for that matter. Most of my first interviews last either 30 minutes or two hours. Before I hire a salesperson or principal for our firm, I meet with him or her for at least eight hours—two of which are outside the office at dinner.
In the United States, HR managers are very nervous about the types of questions asked in interviews for fear of litigation. In reality, lawsuits probably are cheaper than bad hires. (A statement such as this usually sends HR managers right through the roof.) The problem is that the cost of bad hires is invisible and the cost of litigation is very visible. The truth is that bad hire costs, as we have discussed, are very expensive.
Each one of these elements has a number of questions that will help you to drill down past the standard questions to find the right things you’re looking for. We have to get through what they’ve done and what they seem to be to who they really are.
Personal Accountability
As you would blame others, blame yourself; As you would forgive yourself, forgive others.
This may be the single most important element in hiring successful people. Some people would rather fix the blame than fix the problem. How do you uncover this tendency? First, it’s always “them,” never “me.” “It’s the product”; “It’s my manager”; “It’s support resources”; and so on. In all behavior modification—from 12-stepping to weight loss—you have to own the problem. Some people find an excuse, whereas others find a way.
Life is a grindstone. Whether it sharpens you up or wears you down depends on what you are made of.
One researcher asked a set of twins—one a successful physician and the other a derelict—the same question: “What contributed most to where you are in life?”
Both answered,“Well, what would you expect from the son of an alcoholic?”
One used his background as an excuse.The other used it as a driver.
Life is a grindstone. Whether it sharpens you up or wears you down depends on what you are made of.
My favorite interview question is, “When did you become an adult and how did you know?” This will tell you when the person took personal accountability for their life.
Most successful people have an answer for this question. For some, it was a memorable event, such as the death of a parent. For others, it was a series of events, such as when they went away to college, when they got married, or when they had their first child. Or it may have been when they got their first job or when they took charge of their spiritual life.
Joe Terry is one of our principals and one of the top 10 salespeople I have ever known. I interviewed him for over eight hours, including dinner. About halfway through a bottle of wine, I asked him the “when did you become an adult” question.
He knew the answer very clearly.
He said, “I was orphaned at an early age and was raised by an aunt and uncle. They sent me off to military school when I was a teenager. The first night there, the other kids ganged up on me and beat me with ramrods. I knew then and there that I could only look to myself.”
My friend, Rusty Gordon, CEO of Knowlagent, grew up in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. He was so poor that they didn’t even have a well for drinking water.
While bailing hay for horses with his father one day, his dad said, “You know, son, our plan has always been to pay for your upbringing, pay for your college, and then you would be on your own for a while and eventually we would probably have to count on you when we are older.”
“Yes Dad.”
“Well, son, your part of the plan is going to need to kick in a little earlier than we thought.”
That meant not only was Rusty to go to college, but he had to support himself while there and prepare to help others.
He got himself into the Naval Academy and has since started — and run — several successful hightech companies, never forgetting that personal accountability is a requirement for personal success.
Purpose
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
Some people are driven by sibling rivalry, others by the threat of poverty, and others by achievement. Still others are seeking a parent’s approval or are driven by their own insecurity or self-image. What does this individual consider to be his purpose in life? How does this individual’s purpose align with the goals of the organization? What plans has he made to accomplish these goals and fulfill this purpose? Or is the person drifting through life like the feather in the movie Forrest Gump?
The point is that successful people are driven by something. And it’s usually not just the money — it’s what the money brings. The point is that they are driven by a purpose and that it aligns with the job.
Principles
In matters of principle, stand like a rock. In matters of taste, swim with the current.
Principles are values acted on. They are shaped by an individual’s personal and professional experiences. You need to know the unwritten rules that drive an individual’s behavior so that you’ll have an idea what they will do when you aren’t watching. Does the person have a moral compass? Circumstances and temptations reveal a person’s character. Is the person consistently trustworthy or completely situational? This also helps you to understand how the person wants to be managed.
This is a good place to ask the person an ethical situation question to see how they would respond. Another good question is how the person responds to problem-solving situations. What internal rules guide the person’s decisionmaking process?
Plan
It’s not the plan that is important; it’s the planning.
Some people live life; others let life live them. To achieve sustainable success, attention to detail and a high activity level must be personal habits. Are your candidates consistent in their work habits? How organized are they? Can they handle multiple tasks at a high rate of speed?
Do they know where they want to be? Do they know where they are today on that plan? Can they articulate their plans to get to where they want to be?
It has been said that “if they are failing to plan, they are planning to fail.” Plans change, but how will they manage their territory and their accounts if they have no plan for themselves?
Preparation
The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.
Preparation includes education and past employment from the candidate’s résumé. When I ask candidates, “What have you done to prepare yourself for leadership?” I often get a blank stare. Sales is a leadership job: you have to be able to get people who don’t work for you to follow you.
How well your candidates have researched and prepared for the interview is one of the best indicators of how well they research and prepare for sales calls. Do they know your company’s history, culture, financials, and issues? Did they at least read your website?
Passion
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.
Passion represents enthusiasm for the work itself, for service, or for the people or organization and its vision. The first sale must be in the salesperson’s heart. If they don’t buy it, they can’t sell it. If they don’t have a contagious conviction about what they are selling, neither will the buyer.
At some point candidates need to pick up the special nature of your company and turn from buyer to seller. If they don’t, they are not passionate about working for your company or not passionate at all. “If you think this is just another place to work, you should just work at another place.”
Performance
The closest a person comes to perfection is when he fills out a job application.
No one works in isolation in today’s business environment. Ask about the source of the candidate’s past sales success. How important was the product? Was the market hot or not? Did the candidate rely on other members of their team to carry them? Are they used to one big deal or several small ones? How closely did they work with their manager? Was the candidate a team leader or a loner? Some people are better at different types of sales. This is why a salesperson can be good in one company and not another.
For salespeople, quota performance is an arbitrary measure. Two questions to help put this in perspective are
1. What percentage of the sales force made quota every year?
2. How do you compare with the rest of the sales force? Top half? Top 10 percent?
Personality
Be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people.
People buy from people they like and people they trust. Will their interpersonal skills and chemistry wear well over time in your industry and with your clients? Are they sincere? Empathy is a necessary component of consultative selling. The people they interact with over time will be able to tell if they are sincere.
Will they fit in with your team culture? Ask yourself, “Would I like working with them?” Also consider their presence, image, and the way they dress. We make choices when we put on different clothes. It is important that they know how to dress when dealing with clients in different industries — especially if they are going to be selling to executives.
Ken Cornelius, president of Siemens One, says that he and his executive team have a simple test that many prospective hires who did well in the initial interviews fail in the end:
“After the interview rounds, we ask each other:
1. Would you like to be stuck on a deserted island with this person?
2. Would you leave this person alone with your CEO for an hour?
If the answer to either of these is ‘No,’ we don’t hire them.”
Clients and prospects can discriminate for whatever reason they choose, and they’ll never tell you the reason. Remember that most candidates can sell a one-hour interview. Look past the charm to the character.
Several years ago, we were thinking about adding a new principal to our firm and had zeroed-in on one particular candidate.
Everything checked out. He had a great résumé and a great personality, but one of our principals — Liz McCune — sensed something “phony” about him, though she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Our president, Brad Childress, and I decided to have a get-together by playing golf with this guy all afternoon. We had a wonderful time.
But afterwards, at dinner, his personality changed dramatically. He was abusive to the wait staff, being very short and rude when he spoke to them.
We realized that—in a social setting — this particular candidate had a hard time getting along with people he considered to be lower on the totem pole. The only way we could find this out was to get him in a situation where his guard was down.
He passed all of the one-hour interviews. He was very good at peer-to-peer relationships. But only in a social setting did we see that he was unable to interact with people lower in the organization than he was.
And in a complex selling environment, you have to be able to get along with everyone.
Practical Intelligence
To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
Howard Gardner, who developed theories on multiple intelligences, says that there are at least seven kinds of smart. Practical intelligence extends beyond the amount of education and training the candidate has. Although knowledge is important, being able to apply it — through mental quickness, political savvy, and common sense — is essential.
Cultural literacy — knowing a little about a lot — is also necessary to be able to communicate with all types of people with varying interests. A critical type of intelligence for salespeople is discernment — the ability to assess multiple complex situations and determine priorities of action. Like the old vaudeville routine, can they keep multiple plates spinning in the air without dropping any?
Several years ago, Carolyn, the wife of one of our principals, Joe Terry, was studying to learn American Sign Language (ASL). One night, Joe was helping her review by calling out words for her to sign. When he called out the word smart, she signed several words. When Joe asked why there were so many signs for this one word, she explained, “In sign language, smart is actually three different words.”
The amount of education or training someone has, or book smarts, is represented by one sign. Street smarts, which indicates that someone has common sense and can build relationships with a wide range of people, is represented by a different sign. And the word wisdom is a third, completely different sign.
Different roles require people to be different kinds of “smart.” A good accountant, for example, needs “book smarts” but doesn’t necessarily need “street smarts” or “wisdom” to be successful. But good salespeople, on the other hand, have to be all three kinds of “smart.” They have to be well trained and educated, be able to read their surroundings and relate to people, and have the wisdom to apply this knowledge to be successful in complex situations.
Perseverance
I remember thinking. about the story of Thomas Edison’s early attempts to come up with the right material for a light bulb. He had tried a thousand different elements, and all had failed. A colleague asked him if he felt his time had been wasted, since he had discovered nothing. “Hardly,” Edison is said to have retorted briskly. “I have discovered a thousand things that don’t work.”
Successful people don’t run from challenges — they redouble their efforts. If the door is closed, they find another door. Does the candidate have the ability to stay the course despite unexpected obstacles? What obstacles have they overcome in the past? If they haven’t had any failure to date, how will you know how they will respond when they inevitably experience some?
The challenge here is that perseverance can actually work against successful salespeople in the area of qualification. No one wants to be seen as a quitter, but the best practice for individual salespeople is to choose the right battles and to qualify out of lost causes early. The question is, “Do you have a defined set of criteria for knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em?”
A useful exercise that we use in our management classes is to take each of the 10 P’s and rate your top three performers and your bottom three performers in a job category to see the relative importance of each attribute to that specific job.
Start Performance Management in the Interview
How long does it take to do a performance review? The answer is six months to a year because the first step in managing performance is to set the standards, values, tolerances, and expectations. You should give your candidates the performance review form and set their expectations as part of the interview process.
New hires are like wet cement. You can mold them and shape them early, but as time passes, habits form — both good and bad. After 90 days or so, their attitudes begin to calcify to the point where it may take a jackhammer to change their bad habits.
But how is the performance review actually handled in most cases? Performance reviews are seen as a necessary evil from HR, often written by HR, and often don’t include the behaviors, skills, and competencies needed to perform the adopted sales methodology. They are often seen as just checkboxes to get the HR people off your back.
If the performance review doesn’t include the sales methodology, then perhaps it should be ignored. However, if performance management is driven by the ideal sales cycle, it can be a very constructive performance coaching tool that actually should be reviewed on a quarterly basis rather than annually. This allows sales managers to coach not just deal competence, but the other factors of overall performance such as character, chemistry, competence, commitment, communication, and cognitive skills.
The time to start this process is in the interview itself, where expectations about how you want things done in your organization can be set early.
| Talent Scorecard | |||||
| Best Practice, Talent | Importance | Execution | |||
| Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) | Agree but we never do this | We sometimes do this | We often do this | We do this consistently | |
| Individual | |||||
| We have written, tested profiles for each sales position. | |||||
| We have questions, assessments, and an interview process that produce consistent performers. | |||||
| We generally have the sales talent in the right roles. | |||||
| We have sales performance reviews that include our sales methodology and are introduced during the interview process. | |||||
| New managers are trained how to hire effectively. | |||||
| We have a training curriculum, built on our best practices, that includes skills, opportunity strategies, and account management. | |||||
| Opportunity Management | |||||
| We have junior salespeople ready for territories when they open up. | |||||
| We have a pool of candidates in our industry on which we can draw when we have an opening. | |||||
| We have full-time internal recruiters. | |||||
| We have a high win ratio in head-to-head competitions. | |||||
| Account Management | |||||
| Our customer service people consider themselves part of the account sales team. | |||||
| We have sales reps and managers who have earned trusted advisor status with their clients. | |||||
| Industry/Market | |||||
| We have industry knowledgeable sales consultants available to our sales team. | |||||
| We are recognized thought leaders by the customers in our industry. | |||||