Recruiting: Maybe Means No. Have you ever run up against the edge of a hard decision to hire a sales person or marketing person onto your team? They look great on paper, they interview well, and everybody likes them, but there's something in your gut that's telling you that you should be concerned about making this hire?
One of the most important things that we can rely on as we make good sales team hires is our intuition. When we're recruiting new sales people, it's very important that we take them through a rigorous recruiting and screening process that includes sales aptitude profiling, behavioral interviewing, gathering of sales achievement history and other items like that. But on top of all that, it's important that we use our intuition to know whether or not a person is just selling themselves well through the sales process or actually can and will sell well for our company. Is there a fundamental fit in values? Is there a fundament fit in chemistry? Is there experience that they bring to the table going to be a good fit with the company's culture? These are all soft issues that can sometimes fundamentally get in the way of the right hire.
You can have a top sales producer that comes from a certain environment that's different than yours and they can fail miserably by virtue of the fact that they don't fit well with your team and the methodologies and the culture that you've created in your company. It's really important when you go through the interviewing process, that at the end of that you decide whether or not there's a clear fit and there's a strong compelling reason to make a hire. Fifty-three percent of all sales people are all mishires and it's not because 53% of all sales people are all bad at their jobs. It's simply that not enough time has been spent through the recruiting process to really determine fit.
So the next time that you're about to hire a sales person but there's something in the back of your mind or in your gut that's asking you whether or not this is the right decision, and as a result you're lingering on a maybe as opposed to a clear yes, just remember, maybe means no. It's a hell of a lot easier to go find a clear yes, and make a strong hiring decision and move forward with all of the benefits that comes from that than it is to make a hire that turns into a mishire and spend precious months trying to recover from that. So remember, maybe means no.
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