An Ironclad Process for Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Top Sales Talent
Most sales leaders either don’t have a defined hiring process or worse, let Human Resources dictate the process. Hiring sales people is tricky because they ALL know exactly what to say in the interview. As a result, leaders hire on personal biases or “gut feel” and are devastated when the hire doesn’t work out in a few months.
After interviewing 4,000 professionals for a variety of roles, for companies ranging from small family businesses to private equity backed companies, and even Fortune 500 firms, I’ve learned that an ideal hiring process exists and should be used to ensure hiring success. Every sales leader will make hiring mistakes, and that’s unavoidable. But this process will drastically reduce the number of hiring mistakes in your career.
There’s plenty of data to support what a bad sales hire can cost a company. The damage isn’t just financial. Bad sales hires damage good team culture, can distract top performers, and might even cost you your job.
You need a proven hiring process for building your sales team.
When you adopt this six-step hiring process, you can expect to:
Hire sales talent based on merit, not gut feel
Greatly reduce the number of bad hires
Confidently build a best-in-class sales team
Sample from the Résumé Review section of the guide:
A good résumé doesn’t read like this: Managed the largest territory for the genetics division.
It reads like this: Grew sales by 135% in assigned genetics accounts from 2017–2019, or Voted 2019 Sales Professional of the Year for best sales results on the team.
Sample question from the Written Assessment section of the guide:
What is the most outside-the-box idea you have had in your professional career? What were the results?
Tell me about a time when you were in over your head on a project. How did you handle it?
A SALES LEADER’S GUIDE TO HIRING
