When looking for brand-new, right-out-of-the-box, untrained-but-trainable salespeople don’t look on the horizon. Depending upon the size of your company, you could have a number of people who might be suitable for sales but who simply never considered it. These are people who would never apply for a sales job. They would run in the opposite…
Category Archives: Recruiting
Hire Outside the Box
When looking for technical salespeople, there is a tendency to always hire from within the industry. While there’s nothing wrong with taking this approach, don’t cast aside potentially good candidates simply because they don’t have industry experience. Look for people who have experience in sub-trades or allied fields as well. Technically astute people, or those…
Good Sales Candidates Are Everywhere
You are surrounded by lots of salespeople every day, some good, many poor. Most of you walk around with your industry blinders on and that causes you to miss out on some potentially good salespeople. Good salespeople, those who are wired for sales, can often be trained in the intricacies of your business with a…
Mandatory and Desirable Criteria for Hiring Salespeople
When you’re actively looking for a new salesperson, not everyone who passes over your electronic threshold is a prime candidate for the job of sales professional. To eliminate obvious misfits from the pile of responses you hope to get from your recruiting efforts, you need to have a filter through which you will pass the…
Sales Training as a Hiring Criterion
If someone is serious about being in sales, I expect them to have had some sort of formal sales training over the time they’ve been in sales. By sales training I don’t mean the type of product knowledge training that too often passes for sales training. I want to know that the person knows how…
It’s Prudent to Always Be Recruiting
Those of us who are long in the tooth remember the old ABC of selling — Always Be Closing. When you’re a sales manager, it’s ABR — Always Be Recruiting. You never know when you’re going to lose a good salesperson, or a bad one for that matter, and the toughest time to find a salesperson is…
Get Sales Candidates to Check You Out
Smart salespeople will do their due diligence when they’re looking for a sales job, but it doesn’t hurt to present the less-than-smart ones with a bit of a challenge. Here’s what you can do. In your recruiting ad, briefly describe your company’s work environment. Suggest that salespeople visit your web site to check you out…
Always Be Looking For Good Salespeople
The time to start looking for a new salesperson isn’t when you’ve just lost one. That’s the time that’s set aside to panic because you have a critical territory unmanned and vulnerable. The astute sales manager is always on the lookout for possible candidates. Keep a “Resume/Prospective Salespeople” file folder close by. Put into it…
Good Sources of Salespeople
As sales managers, we’re always, or should always be, on the lookout for new salespeople. Here is a sorely neglected source of potential salespeople — your top performers. Ask them if they know anyone. Birds of a feather flock together and it’s quite likely that your existing people may know someone who could be a…
Define the Job
A good and thorough job description is one of the major keys to making sure you hire the right person. If you don’t know what you want someone to do, then anyone can do it! A good job description is not only a primary hiring tool but it can become the performance standard by which…
