Behavioral and Performance Interviewing for Sales Achievers

If you are a CEO or a sales manager and you're in the process of interviewing top sales talent, you probably have been trained on standard behavioral interviewing techniques which are used to make sure that you are getting to the heart of a candidates past behaviors as to predicting future performance. The other critical component that's probably even more important is to make sure that in your behavioral interviewing process, you're integrating performance based interviewing questions that really get to the heart of whether or not a candidate has the track record of consistent achievement that is an accurate predictor of their ability to achieve their sales goals once they come to work for you.

Performance based interviewing means that you need to integrate a number of specific measurements of metrics into the actual questions that you ask to a sales interviewee. Those include providing a summary of sales achievements by year against their actual quota, and then moving upstream from there to look at their activities in terms of daily and weekly customer visits, call counts proposals delivers, face to face customer visits, percentage time spent at the sea level versus at the front line decision maker level, etc. A good sales candidate should be able to rattle off these types of measures from previous positions.

Performance based interviewing also means that you're going beyond just asking a person how they faced and won in a difficult sales challenge. What it translates to is asking the candidate how they've consistently beat their sales goals. Those are the kind of people that you're looking to hire anyway, and by asking performance based questions, you'll have a much better chance of weeding through a pile of resumes and a pile of potential candidates to get to those true top performers. After all, the true top sales producers, those who are in the top five percent of their class, can outsell the next ten to twenty percent of sales people by a factor of two fold. So why wouldn't you invest in hiring only the best?

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

There is Still a Role for Farmers in Your Sales Organization

I have a sales person who I've been working very hard on coaching to improve her ability to get new business for our company. After investing lots of time and energy, what I've really come to as a final decision is that this individual is not going to make it as a hunter. Now the question is, what do I do about it? Well, one of the things I believe in is always looking for the best in people and looking to play to their strengths. This particular sales person is an outstanding troubleshooter, problem solver, and a champion to the customer. She is also a very good relationship builder and has an uncanny ability to help our organization to mobilize itself in order to solve customer problems when they do arise. What better role for this person than a job as an account manager, straddling the fence of sales and customer service? I'm redeploying this person into this position, knowing full well that she's not going to do a great job of finding new business, but will accomplish a very important task for us, which is to manage our current accounts and to maximize our customer retention.

If your organization isn't expending some of its resources on customer retention, there's a good chance that you're digging new pits to fill old ones. What do I mean by this? Well, your organization could be spending time acquiring new customers to replace the ones that you're losing. For this reason, an account management or customer service function is extremely important to the overall mix of your sales organization and to your customer facing operations in general.

Some people would choose to terminate this type of non-performer, but I believe that everybody has their utility and in our particular organization, we have lots of need to make sure that we are working to retain our current customers, so it's very easy for me to move this person into an account management role and thereby improve our overall ability to satisfy our existing business as a foundation for more growth.

If you have a sales rep who is not making it in his/her job, sure that you don't decide to terminate without at least figuring out if there's another role for that kind of person in your company. What you'll find is that the DNA of a relationship builder or account manager can be very useful to your overall organizational success.
sales
marketing
executive search