Posted by Tom Rothrock on Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 01:56 PM
Given the current reality of an "employer's market" you thought it was going to be easy to hire a new sales rep.
You and your recruiting team spent hours scanning resumes. For a few days, you were getting around 100 a day in response to your online posting.
Undaunted, you plowed through them to select ones for initial phone and later face-to-face interviews.
The interview process was lengthy and time consuming and your hire decision was challenging. You had to choose between several strong candidates who had winning track records in sales as well as glowing references. You wanted to hire them all.
Finally, you chose one who you believed had the smarts, energy, skills and drive to be your next "A Player." In the following weeks, your new rep was put through the paces learning the 4 "P's" - process, product, procedures and practices - in your new hire training program. After that, your new rep will be equipped and ready to hit the ground running and start bringing in the sales.
This period, the timeframe following when a new sales rep has completed their training and starts calling on accounts, is generally referred to as the "ramp-up time," where they're still finding their way around. It is a crucial transition period when your new rep is absorbing and mastering your sales practices, environment and culture, all of which will impact the rep's future success or failure.
It's also a timeframe requiring as much of your time, if not more, than the recruiting effort did. You will need to be observing and coaching your new rep as closely and frequently as possible.
Where do you get the time to do that? You can't be on every call but want to be sure your new rep maintains the momentum toward attaining their sales goals.
You may be thinking about using one of your top "A Players" to mentor your new hire, but that unfortunately takes them away from their primary objective of making sales.
A very strong and time-effective solution is to instill pre-call planning throughout your sales organization. Your pre-call planning effort should incorporate the "best practices" of your sales process and identify all of the steps and activities that will furnish your new rep with a road map to success.
Your first step in accomplishing that is to download our free Guide to Pre-Call Planning which will introduce the benefits of pre-call planning across your sales organization.
Photo Credit: Jack Rothrock
Posted by Tom Rothrock on Tue, Sep 08, 2009 @ 10:27 AM
Do They Measure Up?
In two of our earlier blogs we spoke about
identifying and
interviewing top performers for your sales team. We now want to expand that discussion toward how you can use assessments to strengthen your sales hiring process.
So, let's roll up our sleeves and get to work!
Your next move is to acquire the tools to enable you to do that. What you need is a tool that will measure the behavioral characteristics of your sales rep candidates and your existing top performers.
"Wait a minute," you say. "I understand the candidates, but why do I have to measure the characteristics of my top performers, too?"
Good question! That's how you establish the foundation for building your team of top performers. Once you've identified your top performers, your goal is to find more just like them. You want to duplicate your successes and avoid repeating costly hiring mistakes. By developing your "top performer benchmark" you'll be doing just that to measure future candidates.
That's where we'll return to the tool that measures behavioral characteristics mentioned above. Since the late 1980's, there's been a boom in the availability and the accuracy of behavioral assessments. That growth was enabled by the widespread use of the personal computer and Internet access, all of which have greatly reduced the time to complete, evaluate and generate assessment reports.
Today, there are hundreds of companies who can provide assessment services for you - a simple Google search using "assessments" will yield you a number of possibilities.
But that's where the hard work comes in. While there are a lot of firms who can provide assessments on your candidates, you must insist on the following from any firm you're considering:
Once you've located a reliable source for your assessment needs, you'll have the process in place for building your top performing team! If you have a HR department or specialist on staff, that’s a good place to start.
If I can aid you in your effort to incorporate assessments for your sales team hiring process, please do contact me at
precallpro.com.
Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet
Posted by Tom Rothrock on Wed, Aug 12, 2009 @ 06:06 PM
How Do You Know Who's Really Behind The Mask?
In our earlier discussion, we pointed out the predominant characteristics of top performing salespeople. Of course we know there are others which positively contribute to a rep's performance not mentioned here. For now, we're focusing on 3 key characteristics which appear below with a brief description:
Enterprising: Independently competitive, takes on initiative and risk, has personal ownership or "stake" in outcomes. Tends to "ask for forgiveness instead of approval."
Sociable: Conversant and comfortable across a broad array of business and social settings; easily builds rapport and readily interacts with all types of people.
Assertive: Leads more than follows; is confident, comfortable and competant in directing people as well as the course of events. In the sales environment it's mandatory in any sales professional's ability to advance their sales cycle.Now equipped with these characteristics, you're certainly wondering...
"How do I know the candidates I'm talking to have them...or don't?"
That's the easy part - just like good sales professionals, we ask! Listed below are some interview questions to help you do that:
Enterprising:
- While on a sales call with a prospect, you encounter an issue that's outside of your authority but must be addressed to close the sale. Do you: a) execute to advance the sale or b), wait for approval from higher authority?
- When in competition, what lengths do you go to to win?
- When sales goals are not achieved, who's responsible?
Sociable:
- Describe the relationship building skills you have used to successfully achieve your sales goals.
- How would you build rapport with a remote, indifferent prospect on a initial call?
- What types of things have you done in the past to retain and expand business from existing accounts?
Assertive:
- Describe an example when you closed a particularly difficult sale by using your persuasion skills.
- Using examples from your experience, explain how a salesperson’s tenacity impacts the outcome of the sales process.
- When in the sales environment and while engaging a prospective customer, tell me how you a sense of urgency.
- Demonstrate for me how you'd handle a indecisive prospect who is stalling your sales cycle. Specifically, I’m interested in the approaches and the words you’d use to move them forward.
By carefully gauging your candidates' responses to these questions, you'll be better prepared to tell if they're the "real thing" or merely saying "what they think you want to hear."
Armed with the answers to your questions and then comparing them to the experience and accomplishments cited on their resumes, you'll be well on your way to hiring your next "top performer - not just another "great pretender!"
We'll be talking about other tools available to you in order to accomplish this - and more - in a future blog. Stay tuned!
Photo Credit: esper.art.br
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xper/3350897632/