You know you can’t succeed without plenty of talent on your sales team. Extremely talented sales people who are ready to put in the effort required can be hard to come by; but once you find them, they’re invaluable to your organisation.
So what should you look for to predict sales performance?
At Self Management Group, we have over 35 years of experience and research into what it takes to be successful in a sales role. We use a simple equation to determine the suitability of a candidate:
Talent x Habits x Fit
Related: The Best Ways to Hire Sales People
1. Talent
Can the candidate do the job?
When assessing a candidate’s talent, you should look at two distinct aspects:
1. Potential
We call a candidate’s potential their ‘DNA’. It’s the stuff you can’t train; the candidate either has the potential to be an effective sales person or they do not.
You must make sure your sales people have the right DNA to do the job. The biggest waste of resources is trying to train people who don’t have the potential to do the tasks you’re asking of them. Without the DNA, they won’t have the ability to learn the skills necessary for them to be effective.
A psychometric profile is your most useful tool for measuring a candidate’s DNA.
2. Training, Competencies, and Skills
A candidate’s training, competencies, and skills are the things you can train. You must find out what training the candidate currently has and what training they will need to be effective in your company.
If your organisation has a training programme, you can consider hiring good candidates without this aspect of talent, and then teaching them the skills they need.
If your organisation doesn’t have a training programme, you’ll want to hire people who come already equipped with the necessary skills.
Related: Interview Questions That Result In Great Hires
2. Habits
Will the candidate do the job?
A candidate’s habits have two dimensions that hiring managers should assess:
1. Habit of Thought
Habit of thought is the candidate’s attitude.
Even candidates with the right DNA and training (i.e. talent) for the position may not have the right attitudes. And although a good attitude doesn’t predict good performance, a bad attitude does predict bad performance.
Candidates with bad habits of thought are to be avoided. Negative attitudes will interfere with good DNA and these candidates will struggle to live up to their potential.
You want to hire sales people who have a tendency to look on the upside. You can get an idea of a candidate’s attitude (and how it compares to other candidates) in a structured interview. Assess whether the candidate answers your questions with a focus first on the positive or the negative.
For example, ask your candidate what they think of their current manager. Do they start with the positives or immediately begin talking about the negatives?
2. Habit of Behaviour
Habit of behaviour is the candidate’s effort.
Like habit of thought, a candidate with a poor level of effort will not live up to their sales potential, regardless of how great their DNA results are. In fact, someone with limited potential but a great work ethic can be a better choice than someone with incredible potential who is a lazy worker.
Look for evidence that the candidate is a hard worker. Do they have a pattern of high effort? Note that this is not a matter of whether they’ve been successful in the past or not – lack of success may be unrelated to their level of effort. For example, it could be due to a bad corporate culture.
Much like the way you go about understanding the candidate’s attitudes, you can use a structured interview to get insight into their habit of behaviour. If you ask all of your candidates the same questions, you will begin to hear consistent differences in the answers of those who are high effort and those who are low effort.
Related: The Top 3 Characteristics of Successful Competitive Sales Professionals
3. Fit
Will the candidate do the job with me?
Finally, the candidate must be the right fit for both your corporate culture and the specific manager they will be working under.
If someone fits with your corporate culture, they are much more likely to stay and perform well. However, candidates who are a bad fit are likely to leave sooner, even if they are star sales people. Fit is the biggest predictor of retention.
In the unstructured interview, get a feel for the candidate’s personality and fit. Do you like them? Do you think you can work with them? Are you willing to invest in them?
