Maybe, the one you just let go couldn’t cut it…

Or maybe your company is going through an expansion and you have to hire an entire sales force at once…

Or perhaps your best rep just got promoted (congratulations by the way – even though it does kinda suck for you) and you have to hire quick…

So what do you do?

When you’re under pressure, the tendency is to do a “one and done” interview and hire. These are the “one interview – one offer” kind of sales hires. If you go this route, you’ll regret this later…trust me, Ive done it and it’s the worst thing you can do.

What you need is a strategy to screen resumes, determine which ones you want to either phone screen or interview, then interview, then hire.

You’ve go a lot to do…but you’re busy trying to get sales going in the right direction.

Well for the next few posts, we will be gong through this entire process step-by-step so you make the right decision, minimize the chances of making the wrong decisions, and hire the next sales superstar for your team.

So let’s get into the first step in the entire process of interviewing: resume screening.

Step 1: Examine your hiring criteria

The first real step is to identify what your hiring criteria really is.

Like many companies, you most likely have a job posting somewhere on your company’s website for all to view to the world. It may go a little something like this:

• A Bachelors degree in Business, Marketing or the Life Sciences
• 5 years successful front line sales experience including strong “closing” skills
• Knowledge of the healthcare industry and the general economics of business
• Ability to develop and sustain strong customer relationships
• Strong business planning and organizational skills
• Excellent oral and written communication and presentation skills
• Solid PC skills including knowledge of Microsoft software
• A valid driver’s license

Well there you go, all you need to do is find all that and you’re on your way to hiring a sales superstar!

Hardly. I’m guessing that this is not the exact candidate you’re looking for….

The problem is that with most postings looking like this, there is really nothing in the posting that will help you to screen out the resumes you don’t want and help you bring in the ones you do want. Nor does it give you any indication of the types of talents that you are actually looking for.

However, at this point, its okay because all you want to do is just have the bare minimum requirements of the job laid out.

Remember, this isn’t the core characteristics you are looking for…we get into that later. All you want to write down is the job description and the bare minimum qualifications you need to hire.

Write out the complete job description. For example, put in writing the following:

• The leg work that must be done prior to making a sales call
• What kind of sale is it: transactional vs. consultative
• How you expect existing customers to be serviced
• What essential personality traits are required
• How you expect records to be maintained
• How many calls should be made in a week
• Talents needed to be successful in the role
• Determine if industry experience is essential
• How many years of experience is absolutely required
• Education level

Think through the entire sales process and detail how you want it to be done, what tools will be used, and your expectations for their results.

This exercise should include not only what you want sales reps or account managers to do, but how you want them to approach it. Think about the style of selling you want them to use.

The profile and ad you create may change over time – that’s okay because its sole purpose is to screen out and attract in, at a very rudimentary level, the candidates that could be most well-suited for the job. All it really is a first step in a lengthy process.

With all the work you have to do…you’re gonna need to get some help sifting through the bad resumes so you can focus on the good ones.

And to save you TONS of time, we’ll give you a big clue how to get someone else besides you to do this for you – so you can stay focused on other things, like sales…in our next post.

In the meantime, get writing.

To learn even more about sales training, get our free ebook.

Do you have your own hiring criteria? Please leave a comment after this post.

They notice stuff.

They notice what their salespeople are good at…as well as what they’re not so good at. They then leverage the stuff they are good at to coax even greater performance out of their salespeople. They largely minimize the weaknesses.

The average sales managers sees those same weaknesses and thinks that he can fix them. He spends all his time doing just that.

That’s why he’s an average sales manager.

Let’s show an example…

Here we have two top performing salespeople, both having achieved the highest sales awards in their companies:

Jane

Jane has has an incredible talent for building rapport, easily weaving pleasant conversation with the true sales pitch. Her manner is easygoing and laid-back, but hides a profound inner drive.

She’s completely in control of the situation at all times and asks many layered questions of the prospect to uncover their needs. Instead of being “all business”, she talks about jewelry, kids and other non-business activities; easily mixing in rapport building with selling through out the process.

She doesn’t take herself too seriously, taking time for some self-deprecating asides, but constantly driving towards the sale. She uses no real reference pieces, instead relies on her easy, trustworthy manner to build credibility. When it comes to the end, she doesn’t really “close” per se as much as she just assumes they will be moving on to the next step.

Tom

In contrast, “Tom” is incredibly persistent, although a little bit awkward in his approach, people respect him due to his aggressiveness and “never taking no” mentality.

When he is in a sales call, he’s all business, no rapport building whatsoever, but asks few precisely worded questions to uncover his client’s needs.

When he hears objections, he aggressively asks the reasons behind the objections. He then pulls out reference materials to overcome the objections and validate his claims. At the end of the sale, he asks “alternate close questions”, awaits responses before proceeding and aggressively pushes for the next step, and is very successful in doing so.

In our little hypothetical scenario, let’s say Tom and Jane report to you. Would they look at the above scenarios and think: “If I could just get Jane to use more reference materials and ask more hard close questions and Tom to just lighten up and build some more rapport, both of them would be even better!”

In both cases, the sales manager would be falling into the most common, yet well-meaning trap that average sales managers make. They would be trying to perfect them both.

I have news for you…they’ll never do it.

Instead, get more out of your salespeople by harnessing their strengths and minimizing their weaknesses.

Not only is it a far easier (and more fun) way to mange…but its a far more effective one too.

Post a comment below and tell me what you think.

There are a lot of nice things you could say…

“He’s a real nice guy”
“She’s very kind”
“He’s really funny”

The list goes on and on.

But when you speak of the people who are closest to you, maybe your best friend you’ve known for 20 years, the most important one is:

“I trust him”

What if all your company’s sales reps were asked the same question about you…and they answered the same way?

How powerful do you think that would that be?

How much more powerful leaders and motivators would you be?

Because once a sales manager establishes or re-establishes trust with their salespeople, then and only then can they start to optimally lead and motivate them…but not one second earlier.

Without that foundation of trust, the job of “sales leader” is twenty times more difficult.

At every turn, every possible moment, a sales manager needs to look for ways to strengthen their sales reps trust in them.

Far too many average sales managers try to lead first, but never bother to establish trust with their reps at any level.

Although unfortunate for their sales reps, this is very good for you and your company. Because if ALL sales managers led their troops this way, it would be far more difficult for your teams to surpass them.

To optimally lead sales reps and unleash explosive sales results, you need to be on the same page as your sales reps. They need to speak their language, and the only way they will listen is if they implicitly trust what they have to say.

What you need to do is make regular deposits in “The Trust Account”. This is our foundational concept for sales managers who read this blog, as well as for those who are members of the Sales Management Mastery Academy.

To learn even more about sales training, get our free ebook.

Post a comment and tell me how do you get your sales reps to trust you?

The best, high-performing sales managers observe their salespeople.

They notice that there are certain core talents each individual has. They make mental notes of their salespeople’s strengths as well as their weaknesses. They know that they can leverage their talents as a launching point to coax even greater performance out of their salespeople.

For example, lets compare two top performing salespeople, both having achieved the highest sales awards in their companies with great track records of success.

• “Jane” has an incredible talent for building rapport, easily weaving pleasant conversation with the true sales pitch. Jane’s manner is easygoing and laid-back, but hides a profound inner drive. She is completely in control of the situation at all times and asks many layered questions of the prospect to uncover their needs. Instead of being “all business”, she talks about jewelry, kids and other non-business activities; easily mixing in rapport building with selling through out the process. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, taking time for some self-deprecating asides, but constantly driving towards the sale. She uses no real reference pieces, instead relies on her easy, trustworthy manner to build credibility. When it comes to the end, she doesn’t really “close” per se as much as she just assumes they will be moving on to the next step.

• In contrast, “Tom” is incredibly persistent, he is a little bit awkward in his approach, but people respect him due to his aggressiveness and “never taking no” mentality. When he is in a sales call, he’s all business, no rapport building whatsoever, but asks few precisely worded questions to uncover his client’s needs. Just like his initial approach, when he hears objections, he aggressively asks the reasons behind the objections, then pulls out reference materials to overcome the objections and validate his claims. At the end of the sale, he asks “alternate close questions”, awaits responses before proceeding and aggressively pushes for the next step, and is very successful in doing so.

Would you as the sales manager for both Jane and Tom look at the above scenarios and think to yourself: “If I could just get Jane to use more reference materials and ask more hard close questions, she would really be even better!”

Or would you think: “Tom’s just too rough, I need to get him to soften up his hard edge and build more rapport. He also needs to ask more questions to uncover needs.”

In both cases, you would be falling into the most common, yet well-meaning trap that average sales managers make. You would be trying to perfect them, and I have news for you…your efforts will be futile.

The path to true sales motivation is not perfecting…rather its accepting. Accept Jane for who she is and accept Tom for who he is and dont try to change either one…rather harness and bring out more of each one and harness that talent.

In the process you’ll motivate them both…and you’ll succeed fabulously as well.

To learn even more about sales training, get our free ebook.

Post a comment below and tell me how YOU motivate your sale reps.

And OK, if you do that, then there’s a whole lot in it for your as well….big bonus checks, top rankings, bragging rights to your peers and maybe even a shot at a promotion…

But here’s the dilemma…..there’s no way to achieve all this by just learning one or two individual things. You can learn a few tips and techniques from a bunch of different and varied sources and cobble together your own idea of how to achieve big things as a sales manager.

This is probably what you were doing before you stumbled on this blog.

This “fragmented” approach to improving your sales management effectiveness is doomed for failure because it’s so hard to form a cohesive style and approach, then try all the techniques and figure out which ones work and which ones don’t, this takes time. As you may have already guessed, if you wanted to find all the answers yourself, that taking the time to find all the answers to the sales management questions you are so interested in getting answered would take an enormous amount of time, not to mention a ton of money…

The things is that if you can’t learn all the top sales management training techniques you need to learn IN ISOLATION of each other knowing full well that it will only give you moderately successful outcome but you need each component to be organized IN RELATION TO how it fits in to an overall program.

This is the reason why after years of training individual sales managers, we decided to put together The Sales Management Mastery Academy – so that you can get all the elements of top sales management training in one singular, cohesive program – with each element INTERDEPEDENT with the other….

So now there’s one place that you can go to get exactly the kind of help you need at the click of your mouse, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that gives you all the resources you need (as well as a lot of ones you never even thought of) to propel your team’s sales to unheard of heights. And it’s all at the Sales Management Mastery Academy.

If you want to get free taste of what the Academy’s all about, just click here to get our best selling course on “How to Motivate Your Sales Reps in 5 Days” using our proven motivational sales management training methods that only a select few sales managers have had the privilege of getting thier hands on.

You can get the entire motivational course on us for free. And if you want to test drive the Academy, you can do that for 30 days on us. Get “How to Motivate Your Sales Reps in 5 Days” and click here.

We won’t be offering the “How to Motivate” eBook for free for long, so get yours now!

To learn even more about sales management training, get our free ebook.

To figure out how you and your product possibly could be, “the best in the world at” and become “more Walgreen than Eckerd”, lets go through a hypothetical analysis of your sales product or service line.

Lets say your sales reps sell a wide variety of software for businesses of all sizes (in complete and full disclosure, I have never sold software before so bear with me, however I have sold connectivity solutions). One particular kind of software package your salespeople sell is a Customer Relations Management software package. Even though your product is not the best in its class, its not the worst either.

This package (we’ll call it CRM 3.2) has certain query features that the competition does not have. Aside from a few of these features, your product is pretty much the same as the competitions. But you, as the ever observant sales manager notice a few things about CRM 3.2 and they are:

• The marketing pieces from corporate tout CRM 3.2 as “best in class” based upon some obscure study done back when this type of software was first being developed. According to the “Eckerd-like” marketing piece, it proudly brags that “CRM 3.2 is the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes across all product service groups who need a customer relations management software solution”.

• Although, you’ve never witnessed a sales prospect talk glowing in these terms about 3.2, but you have noticed that your sales team hasbeen selling an increased amount of this version alongside all the other packages they are commissioned to sell.

• Upon further observation, and through some in-depth analysis of your sales tracking reports, you notice that one particular version of that package has been that showing steady, yet unremarkable sales growth to consumer product-oriented, medium sized businesses with 10 to 40 employees.

• One of your reps, who recently has really started to close some steady business has sold more of this version than any other CRM and operating softwares in your group. Moreover, of all the software packages your reps sell, this package is about in the mid range for pricing and operating margin.

• In the sales calls you’ve attend with your best sales rep, you’ve noticed a consistent trend with some of the decision makers he meets with. You observe that they particularly like two features of CRM 3.2 that you know the competition does not have. They are an automatic report generator that tracks incoming query calls, then correlates that information with sales rep outgoing call activity for consumer product sales.

• The decision makers also really like the fact that the software can be uploaded in under ten minutes with a call to your customer service department so it can be loaded onto mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones. As a sales manager, you know that saving time on IT calls are essential to sales productivity. Further you know that this mobility feature is especially important to salespeople so that they have instant access to contacts and sales trends when in the field.

• Through your observation (and largely due to the recent success of your one sales representative), you get the sense that there is an opportunity here to attack the competition. And because you spend more time with that sales person than any other rep, you’re in touch with what trends you can exploit and preach to the rest of the sales team.

• You quickly peruse all the company marketing brochures and handouts again, and to your surprise, there is no mention of these two features embedded in CRM 3.2. This is typical you think, corporate has no idea what is really going on in your market anyway. And like most companies, they want you as the sales manger to sell to ALL markets, not one single market. This is classic big company thinking – dilute your sales team’s efforts by having your reps head in multiple directions at the same time (just like Eckerd). You as a top-performing sales manager and thinking more like Cork Walgreen than Eckerd, know that this strategy is a recipe for mediocrity.

• You know that you have twelve different products to sell across three very diverse markets. CRM 3.2 is just one of the twelve products. The markets include small businesses of 1-9 people, mid sized businesses of 10-50 employees and large businesses sized above 50 employees. You run reports on the mid-sized market to check for financial viability and market health. You then run a separate sales query on the mid-sized businesses that sell consumer products only. The queries reinforce your thinking: both markets are healthy and robust.

You come to the conclusion:

If you focused your sales reps energies on the mid-sized businesses that exclusively sell consumer-related products, there are plenty of sales prospects in your district to fill your pipeline. More importantly, you determine that if you only focused your sales representatives energies on that one market, then they would have more than enough sales prospects. Further, this would place them in excellent position to hit their year-end sales number. You’re starting to get excited.

You do a little more data-gathering:

• You next check with your customer service department and you ask them to run you a report on all the mid-sized customers who has purchased your CRM 3.2 product in the past six months. You first check their satisfaction scores. When you get the report, you see the “sat” scores are very impressive. Not only are customers in this category satisfied, but the number of customers in this bracket has increased dramatically over the course of the past few months, especially in your geographic sales market. This data further supports your hypothesis.

• You then talk to the controller in your branch and he confirms that in fact, if this mid-sized package were sold at X price, without a too steep of a discount, the overall unit corporate profit margin threshold would be upheld. Profit margin analysis is good.

• Lastly, ou then take a long, hard look at the sales representative compensation plan. After thorough investigation, you find out that as long as your sales reps sell X number of units at X profit margin, they will all be eligible for quota attainment. You also check your sales manager compensation plan to make sure that all this jives there as well. Fortunatley, it does. You conclude that if you reorganized your sales reps main selling efforts and focused on this particular business niche, both you and them would make plenty of commission dollars when successful. You start to get the feeling that all the stars are aligning.

You feel ready to roll out your plan to the sales team.

So let’s review what we have here. You have the following:

1. A robust market, subdivided from an even larger market, which is ripe for product nicheing
2. Two “game changing” features of your CRM 3.2 product that customers rave about
3. Little if any competition for that particular feature in this sub-market space
4. Healthy company approved profit margins for the product
5. Quota-friendly compensation plan alignment for both sales rep and sales manager that allows for focus on niche targets markets and products
6. High customer satisfaction ratings and overall excellent customer retention within new sales of this product in this sub-market space
7. Good potential for referrals and recommendations from past satisfied customers
8. And from the success of your one sales rep, excellent opportunity to increase employee morale due to recent successes

Bottom line: you’ve found your “Walgreen’s concept” – one that you can be “the best in the world at”.

We’ll show you how to sell it in our next post…

Post a comment below and tell us how you get your salespeople to sell so well that THEY are the best in the world.

To learn more about sales training, get our free motivational video on the sidebar of this post or by clicking here.

In our continuing series on how to screen a sales resume, today we touch on:

Does there seem to be a logical progression of promotions throughout the salesperson’s resume?

Most companies, after a set period of years, will typically enhance a salesperson’s title to reflect increased stature and seniority. This is usually awarded in concert with achievements at the “lower” level, but not always.

If you see this logical progression, this simply tells you that the candidate is well-regarded, but will not necessarily tell you that they can sell at a high level.

If they have solid achievements alongside steady advances in promoted titles, then this is certainly a positive.  Accolades, as we’ve discussed before are the hallmark of a great sales resume and are an absolute “”must have” in order for you to even consider them for a live interview.

However, if the salesperson has been at the company for five or ten years and their title never changes from “sales executive” to “senior sales executive” or another some such thing, this may be an indicator that you have an underperformer on your hands. This is especially true if the sales achievements in the time period mentioned are sparse or worse yet, non-existent.

However, if you see a strong progression of title changes, as well as diverse job experiences such as promotion to a specialty sales role along the course of their time at a particular company, then you’ll probably want to interview them. This is especially true if this progression of promotions is in your company’s industry.

Remember at this stage of the interview process, you’re only at the  second step of the whole hiring process, what we call the “Six Step Hiring System” which we do teach to our Academy students.

Your main goal at this stage is just to do one thing: determine if they are worthy of your time in a live interview…nothing more and nothing less.

Bottom line here is this: if you see a logical progression of steady promotions, mixed with top accolades, get ‘em in for a live interview. This sales rep could be a keeper.

To learn more about sales management training, get our free motivational video on the sidebar of this post or by clicking here.

What do you think? We want to know, don’t be shy. Post a comment below.

In today’s post, we touch on:

Where and in what geographic areas have they worked?

When screening new interview applicants, the best case scenario is if they have current experience in the market and the geography that you are hiring for. This isn’t essential, but very nice to have. So this is a plus.

However, another more important factor to consider is, if they are working for your direct competitor and have been calling on the same market and the same geography, then you and the candidate may have some serious credibility issues with former customers of theirs.

So be careful here. You’ll want to consider this in your resume screening, as the right answer will largely depend on your industry and market dynamics.

Does there seem to be a logical progression of promotions throughout their resume?

Most companies, after a set period of years, will enhance a salesperson’s title to reflect increased stature and seniority. This is typically awarded in concert with achievements at the “lower” level. If you see this logical progression, this simply tells you that the candidate is well-regarded, but will not necessarily tell you that they can sell at a high level.

If they have solid achievements alongside steady advances in promoted titles, then this is positive.  However, if they are at a company for five or ten years and their title never changes from “sales executive” to “senior sales executive” or another some such thing, this may be an indicator that you have an underperformer on your hands. This is especially true if the sales achievements in the time period mentioned are sparse or worse yet, non-existent.

To learn more about sales management training, get our free video on the sidebar of this post or by clicking here.

Post a comment below and tell me your insights in screening a sales resume.

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The best part is that its easy…and it only takes ten minutes to do it.

Remember that the goal here is to filter out the less than worthy candidates, before you take the time to do live interviews.

How many jobs has your sales applicant had…and for how long?

You can reference age on this one because this one is a biggie. If you see them changing jobs every two years, why would you think this applicant would stay working for you any longer?

They may have a fear of commitment or they may just get easily distracted. Either one is not so attractive to you.

The truth is that they may just wear out their welcome after a certain point in time. This will most likely be the case if they come to work for you. What you are really looking for here is what kind of person are they and time spent at previous employers tells you a lot about them and could mean any of those things previously mentioned.

To be fair, many salespeople get laid off, downsized or outsourced, so don’t necessarily jump to any firm conclusions here, but if you do choose to interview, this point should be addressed when you meet them face to face.

How long have they stayed at each position or company?

This is similar to the point above, but slightly different. The longer the candidate stays at any one given job, gives you an indication that either they were making such great money that they could never leave, they flew beneath the radar and were never found out that they were sleeping under their desk, or they really liked working there. I’d be willing to bet it’s the last one.

Look carefully at the job duties of the job they spent the longest time at. Their job duties and performance gives you a good indication of what they are about. If they were there for eight years and have no accolades in that time, then forget it – dump that resume.

Additionally, if there is a good track record, that longest stretch of employment tells you a lot about what they like and what drives them, whether its good or bad. Regardless, this is something you would need to ask them about by asking them: “you were selling for Crazy Coffins, Inc. for eight years, you must have really liked it there – what did you like so much about it”.

To learn more about motivating your sales team, get our free video on the sidebar of this post or by clicking here.

Tell me your ideas on how you screen sales resumes by posting a comment below.

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