Best-in-Class Hiring: Salespeople

The Sales Position Salespeople are the “life’s blood of the organization.” Hire a poor salesperson and you can lose market share, fail to make sales goals, waste time coaching the “uncoachable,” and lose some of your best customers to the competition. Most sales managers have highly selective memories. On the one hand, they will agree that 80% of their sales comes from 20% of their salespeople, while on the other they insist, “I know a good salesperson when I see one!” I always wondered what these managers would say if I asked, “If you always know ’em when you see ’em, did you intentionally hire the bottom 80% just to make the top 20% look good?” Give me a break! Hiring salespeople is not a place to rely on “gut feelings.” Good decisions require good data?? particularly when the job is as critical as sales. What about cost? If we used our sales manager’s 80%/20% productivity estimate, we could quickly compute that a salesperson in the top 20% produces about 400% more than a sales person in the bottom 80% (80/20 = 400%). Dare to put some dollars on that figure? Measuring Sales Competencies “Sell me this pencil,” is a favorite question asked of new salespeople. It tells you a lot about why salespeople tend to fail: they spend too much time listening to themselves and not enough time asking questions to discover the customer’s problems. Other reasons include lacking confidence to initiate sales calls, not asking the right questions, focusing on their own needs, being disorganized, belief they can persuade anybody to buy anything, or not learning about their product. The following section outlines a few common competencies for a salesperson (they may not be all inclusive for your positions, but that’s the reason why “job analyses” are necessary). You might also notice that competency names are similar to other jobs. That’s normal, because even though competency names may sound generic, they are always defined by specific job activities (e.g., “problem solving” for selling cars and “problem solving” selling IT products are significantly different):

- Ability to learn

Problem solving (client-based)
Industry knowledge
Strategic account planning
Prioritizing time
Persuasion
Formal presentation
Teamwork (internal)
Communication (oral and written)
Primacy of work
Learning attitude
Client focus
Product knowledge

Once again, it helps simplify things if we organize competencies by skill area. This way you can see the risk of not measuring a specific competency and identify tools that will provide the highest degree of predictive validity. As always, each tool should be either content (or criterion) validated before use.

1. Skill area: Ability to learn, solve problems, and make decisions.

Job risk	What to measure	Competency name
Not having sufficient knowledge to do the job	General knowledge of the business, industry, department, or technical subject	Industry knowledge Product knowledge
Not being able to learn new product or client information	Ability to quickly learn and apply information	Ability to learn
Making wrong decisions	Ability to overcome sales objections	Problem solving
Most effective hiring tools: Product knowledge tests; customized problem solving simulations; behavioral event interviews

2. Skill area: Ability to plan, organize and follow courses of action.

Job risk	What to measure	Competency name
Failure to meet deadlines or deliver projects	Ability to plan complex projects to achieve goals	Strategic account planning
Missing critical issues, project confusion, mixed messages	Ability to set priorities when presented with conflicting objectives	Prioritizing time
Most effective hiring tools: Project planning case studies; behavioral event interviews

3. Skill area: The ability to get things done through people.

Job risk	What to measure	Competency name
Not able to discover or expand client needs	Ability to develop trust or probe for information	Persuasion
Failure to close sales	Ability to persuade others to follow a course of action	Persuasion Formal presentation
Inability to communicate effectively	Ability to present ideas and write effectively	Oral and written communication
Inability to rally internal support	Ability to work effectively with co-workers	Teamwork
Most effective hiring tools: Project planning case studies; behavioral event interviews; teamwork problem simulation; presentation simulations; writing exercise.

4. Skill area: Specific attitudes, interests, and motivations associated with doing a job (these are really not “competencies,” but we will stick with the term to avoid confusion)

Job risk	What to measure	Competency name
Not productive unless closely supervised	Internal drive to succeed	Primacy of work
Poor attitude toward clients	General attitude toward work	Client focus
Unwillingness to learn new products or markets	Attitude toward learning	Learning attitude
Most effective hiring tools: Behavioral event interviews; tests of specific attitudes, interests, and motivations

You can also use this list as a sales diagnostic tool. Just look over some of the reasons why your salespeople tend to fail, and you will see which skill areas are not being measured. In the next article, we will describe competencies for hiring customer contact people. These folks are often overlooked because the position is taken for granted?? yet customer service is a key strategy to keeping all those hard-earned customers.