Salespeople are expensive, especially when they don’t perform up to expectations, so one wants to hire the right person the first time.
Unfortunately, Drew Hanson has written an article on sales force performance that has again demonstrated why Forbes should stick to financial articles.
We have a completely different approach, which profiles the rep based on past successful persons in the job, weights each of the attributes and evaluates each of the candidates. Highest score gets an interview with the rest of the staff in the department or the company in which he/she works.
Our six tips, therefore, change from job to job.
Our approach has about an 80% success rate. Unfortunately, the Caliper personality profile system that Drew advocates, in our experience, has no better than a 50% success rate. We’d love to have a person from Caliper write a rejoinder of the 50%
We know that Caliper’s results are heavily skewed by the insurance and banking industries, which are their major users, while our results are weighted towards small business, which is our target clientele.
Of course, we have a course where we teach this: E01 and E02, at www.theasoe.com. E02 is the hiring course, where the profile is developed, and E01 is the evaluation tool.
However, in the interest of fairness, if you want to read Drew’s article, you can find it at http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2012/19/16/6-tips-for-hiring-your-next-sales-all-star