The Gulas Group provides proven and reliable assessments, coaching, training and development processes that provide significant and measurable improvements in performance and a solid path toward achieving your goals.

Clients seek us out to help them achieve their strategic goals; close sales quickly, resolve internal and external conflicts, reduce falling margins, and smooth communications.

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Implementing a Sales Super Star Recruiting Process

The process of recruiting sales people is like no other process in your organization. Traditionally, someone who has been successful in the industry is matched with your sales position. While the candidate's sales record may give your organization some insight into his or her past it provides no clue to their potential sales performance at your specific organization. Sales history is like the disclaimer on stocks: "Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance." That is why you must implement a systematic recruiting process to fill the most mission-critical positions in your organization.

An organization must do five things to execute a systematic recruiting process and successfully recruit sales superstars.

1. Identify
2. Test
3. Qualify
4. Search
5. Interview

These steps are often not executed effectively in most organizations today. The cost in wasted time and resources for this process to be out of control is estimated to be $450,000 for organizations and $150,000 per sales candidate. To determine the specific cost of not having a systematic recruiting process for your organization, fill out the, "Cost of Hiring and Recruiting", worksheet.

Identifying the best sales candidate, the first step, is the most important of the five steps. This step in the process can be further divided into four areas as follows:

1. Compatibility with the way you compensate, manage and go to market
2. A close match with your organization’s culture
3. Inventory the past, present and future flaws and challenges in your recruiting, the ramp up program and subsequent hiring results
4. Ensure you understand each candidate’s selling strengths, skills and weaknesses.      Knowing these qualities provides a complete picture of the candidate and allows your organization to determine what type of sales candidate to whom you are talking. Do you want to hire a hunter, qualifier and closer or account manager who is timid but intellectual?

Area one, reviewing a candidate’s compatibility with your organization begins from a structured list of questions preferably delivered via an EEOC- compatible sales candidate assessment before the interview. Questions such as who does the closing: the percentage of time selling “new” versus selling “old”: amount of pressure on sales performance: pricing: people the sales person should call: and other specific areas of compatibility must be answered before an interview. The Gulas Group provides 19 such questions as part of our systematic recruiting process and compares each candidate’s answers to the organization’s profile. We advise caution if compatibility is less than 65% match, particularly on the top five issues.

Next on the list of criteria to identify a sales super star is organization culture. The best way to achieve this objective is to benchmark the behavior, values and attributes the position requires. You are essentially asking: “If this sales position could talk what would it say about the values necessary to stay motivated in your organization, what communication styles does the candidate need to bring to the job and what talents or attributes are necessary for superior performance in this particular sales role?” Your organization can then compare the candidate qualities to this baseline and determine how closely the match. For this portion of the process, The Gulas Group uses the TriMetrix tool by Target Training International which has proven to be the most valuable tool for this type of evaluation. You can read more about this tool by following this link .

The most difficult part of recruiting for most organizations is conducting an honest self-assessment of its flaws, both current and past, plus challenges related to things such as hiring, ramping up, and developing sales potential. The organization needs to create a checklist of issues addressing:

1. what titles in an organization must they visit,
2. support sales people will receive,
3. type of sales whether conceptual or complex,
4. sales plans,
5. learning the market,
6. training during the first 90 days and one of the most critical
7. accountability.

Once you build a checklist, you must honestly assess what flaws & challenges are below mastery for the organization. Justifying your answer becomes the next column in your checklist. For instance, if training during the first thirty days is not an issue, you need to evaluate why not, if it is an issue, and why it is an issue. Everyone from the CEO to Human Resource professionals and the VP of Sales should complete their checklist individually, then come together as a group, discuss each item, and agree upon results. At the Gulas Group we use a 42 point checklist titled “Identifying Past Flaws”. This checklist identifies the type of sales person an organization should look for as well as what the organization can learn from past hires and current underperformers. This will prevent the organization from repeating past mistakes.

The last area to review is ensuring the organization has researched what level of sales experience it required for success. For example, will you need an entry-level sales person, some experience, an experienced sales person, senior level, or executive? Each level of candidate will possess a certain combination of selling strengths, skills and weaknesses. Each candidate will have severity attached to each of their major sales weaknesses indicating that certain combinations may prevent development or may not even be trainable. The best practice to accomplish this objectively is to contract with a company that provides this information for your organization. The Gulas Group uses a no- nonsense assessment from the Objective Management Group, which is proven to provide the severity of sales weaknesses as well as a candidate’s sales strengths and selling skill sets. This information can then become a road map for a shortened ramp up time, sales development and coaching by your sales leaders after they are hired.

This last criterion in the process naturally leads to the second most important issue you must consider when hiring a sales superstar. The second issue in hiring a sales superstar is to test each candidate via a simple licensing agreement against what the organization identified to be successful. The most successful organizations conduct this testing before they waste time sorting through polished resumes and staged interviews. Details of how to establish this process with an easy- to- use licensing agreement will be reviewed in a future article.

In closing, it is crucial to remember this: do not leave any of these four areas within the identifying process to chance. To do so will result in high turnover, a complacent sales team, longer ramp up time, and underperforming recruits.