How to Hire Good Salespeople
Chris Mullins’ Nuggets® For Hiring Salespeople
“Your shortcut on how to hire good salespeople and a SURPRISE BONUS…
Chris Mullins reveals the absolute most important question you must ask every candidate.
It’s NOT what you think!”
Let’s begin…
A question I'm often asked, “Where are all the good salespeople?”
1. How to know what to look for in a good salesperson:
Evaluate the really good employees at your office.
Pay close attention to your top performing people, what personality traits do they have, where do they come from, what are their parents like, large family, small family, work history...
If you do this on a regular basis you'll have an exact ‘recruiting blueprint’ of the type of people you need to hire, to look for.
Ask your top performers questions like, how did they get all these good habits, what's their secret. Birds of a feather flock together, ask if they have friends like themselves who may be interested in sales work.
You’ll also want to keep an ongoing list of the personality traits in your lower performers. Again, if you're dedicated to this, just by documenting and tracking the facts you'll see a profile of the folks you should hire and the one's you need to stay away from.
2. Here's what some of our clients and colleagues have seen over the years.
Most of the really good salespeople have grown up in a family business.
Parents who ran some sort of business while the kids worked there after school in the summer.
Most seem to have experienced the restaurant business, bartenders, wait staff, THEY ARE THE BEST and you should build this into your advertising copy writing.
Other hard working environments to recruit candidates include:
Jobs where they would be dealing with the public and difficult unhappy customers. Most of these types of jobs have demanding bosses. Landscapers, cleaning companies, factory workers, retail, all with a proven history of working really hard.
Folks who play sports, are goal oriented and competitive.
Ask questions like what are you goals? Are you a team player? Great! Give me some examples. What’s the last goal you’ve achieved? How did you achieve it?
Believe it or not all of the above is even more important than any level of sales success or experience in any industry.
I do suggest investigating personality tests to measure if they can sell, will they sell, will they sell here with these clients, products, in this environment. I did use a predictive indexing tool several years ago while managing a team of salespeople with success. However, that being said. I’ve also had good results using my own blueprint method.
And now, I’m going to give you your SURPRISE BONUS! I'm going to share with you the single most important question that you must ask your interviewee. This is THE question that NO ONE ASKS! Not ever!
Here it is… “HOW DO YOU BUILD RELATIONSHIPS?” Me? Yes, you! Tell me how you start them and then, how you maintain them.
Ask them for three examples on how they build and maintain personal and professional relationships. If they have had past sales experience, ask them to share with you how they started relationships with clients and moved them into the sale.
Building and maintaining relationships, trust, knowing and understanding your clients and prospects and PEOPLE first, personally is more important than any sales experience. Ironically, this is the skill set that even many sales business owners don’t have.
Remember, SMILE! MAKE THE CALL! SELL SOMETHING!
Chris Mullins, The Phone Sales Doctor™, president of www.MullinsMediaGroup.com, is a sales and communication expert with a special love and focus on how to use the telephone to “sell and market you” for all business professionals. Chris personally listens to and critiques telephone sales calls (inbound/outbound), presentations, staff usage of the telephone, etiquette and offers role-playing time with careful examination and analysis of what you’re doing right, what you need to fix and how to fix it to improve your closure ratios, quickly. Chris is also the “Phone Script Doctor” that will review and/or rewrite your support staff and sales team’s scripts, outlines or call guides. For a FREE 3 Month Test drive of “Chris Mullins’ Nuggets® For Sales” print newsletter,email: chris@mullinsmediagroup.com and put “Test Drive” in the Subject Line or call 603-924-1640, you’ll also get a FREE invitation to attend Chris’ Weekly Off-The-Cuff 30 Minute TeleClinic.