How to Improve Your Hiring Process for Sales Positions [VIDEO]

Hiring for sales positions can be tough, especially for new sales managers. After all, you're trying to find someone who can be very persuasive, without being persuaded they can help you make more sales if they're just likeable, but can't close deals.

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In this video you'll learn the importance of:

1. Asking consistent questions
   
   • Start with a few high level questions and drill down
   • Use behavior-based questions to uncover specifics
2. Using a traits or personality survey
   
   • Understand what makes your best performers tick
   • Understand traits they share
   • Make those traits something you seek out in candidates
3. Diverse backgrounds of interviewers
   • Find out whether candidates have a good holistic understanding of sales
   • More perspectives means a more accurate assessment of the candidate
   • Helps remove likeability as an early filter, and allows you to focus on job skills

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Video Transcription

Hey, it's Dave Thomson over at List Partners, Inc. Today I want to focus specifically on a disconnect I see in the interview process - in the sales interview process - and a lot of this has to do with newly-minted sales managers that don't get the proper training and when it comes to the most important job that you have to do - either right out of the gate, or it will be six months from now - they're adequately prepared to do that and that's making the right hiring decisions.

So what I recommend is having a process in place right out of the gate for every single interview with you have with every single candidate. To make it really easy, what I recommend is - and I find that it gets that the most intel from you get the most from a candidate - is focusing on 3 to 4 core questions and really diving in deep.

Tell me an example from your last position where you showed high initiative. Let them obviously answer that and then dig in a little bit more and find out you know was anyone else involved; what was the overall impact; if you had to do it differently what would you do? Keep on drilling in and you'll uncover a lot more about that candidate than just asking your 10 or 15 surface-level questions, a lot of which you got from Google.

The other thing I recommend is investing in some type of personality or a trait survey, or something where you can provide that to your entire sales team, which #1 you're going to get a lot of good iIntel there, but provide to your sales team and get a good baseline and then provid to each candidate and see where they fall and especially compared to your top reps so if there's any specific disconnect with certain areas there, as part of the interview process you can hone in and ask questions from that candidate, specifically why maybe their deadline motivation isn't as high as it should be.

Another thing i highly recommend is getting a diverse group of people to interview the candidates as well, not only bringing in other people from your group, bringing in other people from different departments as well, for a lot of different reasons - one, for a cultural standpoint you want to make sure that the candidate's going to be a good fit for your entire company but also the reverse is true; so you want to give candidates a good idea of your culture, who's in it, and be able to meed a wide range, a diverse type of people. It will actually help in terms of being able to get the most qualified candidates on board.

So if you take anything at all from this video it's: #1 putting a system in place so you're asking the same question for every candidate; #2 investing in some type of trait survey so you can compare your candidates to top tier reps; and #3 getting a more diverse group in the interview process.


So if you have any questions for me, I tried a lot of the various surveys - trait surveys - in the past, please leave a comment below or hit me up directly email or on LinkedIn.