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Recruiting Top Sales Talent: What are the 3 top traits your look for when hiring a sales rep?
Sales seems to be a people-business. Recruiting and hiring is a mission-critical part of a sales manager’s job. What do you look for in a potential sales person? What in your past experiences influenced your current filters?
Please provide 3 traits when answering this question.
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5 Answers
Ultimately, you want one thing and one thing only when hiring great salespeople.
DRIVE! But Drive is broken out into three main components. Read on for an explanation of those traits.
I'm looking for salespeople with Drive. I don't typically hire salespeople that have a wealth of experience in my industry. Why? Because experience with no drive is a waste of a hire. Instead, I'd rather hire somebody who is "green" or has very little experience who has tons of Drive. To me, that's a winning combination. What is drive?
Thanks to the very enlightening book Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again by Dr. Chris Croner (who is a great author and one heck of a stand up guy by the way), I now have a good grasp of what Drive means. Straight from SalesDrive.info, Drive is composed of 3 parts:
Need for Achievment: The intense desire to attain excellence and accomplish challenging goals, found in athletes like Tiger Woods.
Competitiveness: The unquenchable thirst to outperform one's peers, and win the customer over to your point of viw, found in athletes like Michael Jordan (of course, Chris is from Chicago. I would say athletes like Jerry Rice or Joe Montana if I had my choice) and
Optimism: The certainty and resiliency that will not be denied, found in athletes like Lance Armstrong. Boy oh boy have I learned the importance of this one recently when hiring salespeople. Having a high need for achievement, high competitiveness but low optimism can be really tough to manage and can lead to failure.
I'll take a team of highly driven individuals with no experience and stack them up, toe to toe with highly experienced (read "I'll bring a huge Rolodex of contact and customers to your company) salespeople and I'm confident the highly driven individuals will beat them out over the long term. No question.
Dan –
A “top traits” list is relative to the demands of the sales role and among employers. The common traits among my various hiring criteria include nothing that would surprise you (I’d hope). You want salespeople who understand the demands of the job, who you believe would be good representative of the company, and who are competent (relative to the functions they would be asked to serve). Beyond this, specific experience, responses of references, attitude / demeanor, breadth and depth of skills, willingness to travel, etc., etc. are of relative value to the specific sales position.
Steve | The Sales Standard
What you need to look for depends on many factors including the role, the company and selling environment. For instance "hunters" and "farmers" typically require completely different traits (and, as Kevin mentions above, Chris Croner's book is bang on for evaluating hunters). We also find that the "hunter" role (aka Account Exec, Sales Rep) can vary widely in different companies, due to differences in company maturity, market position, and culture, selling approach, product mix, etc. For these reasons, we often find that someone who is a top producer in one environment may not be superior in another company even if it is a direct competitor.
Eliot Burdett
www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/blog
I have a local outside salesteam. When I look for sales eople I need them to possess a strong outgoing personality, a strong drive to progress professionally and personally and he/she should have a big heart (he/she really cares about helping the customer).
I usually filter out the "macho", the too sales togh people, they can perform well but not in the long run. These are my thoughts and beliefs.
It is critical to find experience that matches the role. I've seen far too many instances where small, underdog startups are seduced by the name of a former employer and hire based on "experience." They've successfully recruited a salesperson from their largest (and well-funded, fully-resourced) competitor, and thought the skills would translate. They typically don't as it is much easier to sell for a known entity, than the underdog or a pioneer in a new industry.
Matching the salesperson to your sales cycle is critical. Successful sales people come in many packages. One trait that is common for all is having the ability to build rapport, listen and ask questions. Confidence, and the ability to take rejection are obvious traits.
It is really critical to match your organization's personality and market position to the role. Underdogs need creative thinkers who are convincing and can sell vision. And create their own materials and start conversations. For a longer sales cycle you need someone focused, well organized and good at multi-tasking. If you are an established market leader, you need someone with the right contacts.
Good luck!
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