One of the most common mistakes that I see with employers and recruiters, is taking a person’s résumé at face value. This is particularly fatal when it comes to hiring sales people. Why? Sales people are masters of the spin. When I see a résumé that comes to me full such spin (for example increased pipeline by 82%, doubled bookings, tripled revenue, etc), and I don’t see absolute revenue or booking figures, I become highly suspicious. That’s why one of the first things I do when I interview a sales candidate is to ask them to put together a “sales achievement history”. This is a very simple spreadsheet that recaps a candidate’s actual achievement against goals over the previous number of years, in absolute dollar figures. It’s very easy to ask for, and most successful sales candidates are willing to produce it. Ask them to open up an excel spreadsheet and make a list and table with the year, their annual sales goal, and their actual achievement in columns. Ask them to go back about five years in their history.
As you can imagine, the good candidates are happy to produce this information for you and fully capable of doing it. Why? Because they have built and maintained a track record of success and they’ve tracked those numbers, because it’s part of the badge of honor that they wear as a top sales producer.
Salespeople who have not consistently hit their numbers are not capable of producing this kind of information for you, as a part of the interviewing process. They will usually make excuses and say “Well, I’m not sure if I remember those numbers, I’ll have to dig up and see whether or not I have that data. I didn’t keep those records.” Typically, what that means is that the sales rep who you are interviewing has not had the kind of track record that you’re looking for.
Make sure that you can pull a “sales achievement history” from the candidate as a part of the interviewing process. If you do this, you’ll quickly separate the performers from those people who claim to have performed and have embellished their résumé with lots of fancy sales speak but can’t produce the cold hard facts.
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Labels: recruiting