Why don’t we make it easy to:
- Get into medical school?
- Obtain a pilot’s license?
- Visit our nuclear sites?
As a company, shouldn’t there be some barriers to admission when turnover costs are so high? Or is the candidate experience more important than a rigorous review of a person’s mental state, cognitive capabilities, personality, and character before they come to work for our company?
Great Sales Leaders Qualify Their Applicants
I want you to think of a candidate for the NFL. If they don’t have the right profile, strength, and physical characteristics, they will die. Have you ever seen the size of an NFL lineman? If you make it easy for anyone to get into the NFL, people will die.
Yet, that’s what many companies do all the time by making it easy to get the sales job. They don’t value their position, and their new hires get crushed in a high-pressure and high-activity sales role. They quit, ghost them, or fumble at the slightest hint of an NFL level sales requirement like prospecting, setting appointments, or handling rejection.
Sales requires a tough person—one that has what it takes to keep on keeping on no matter the size of the obstacle. Interestingly, those people are hard to find and are more picky about what they choose to do and who they work for.
Your Sales Positions Are Valuable
If a company has such a great culture and employee experience, why isn’t it hard to get into the company? Why aren’t they looking for and hiring the very best? Why aren’t there people in line wanting a shot at winning, yes winning, the position?
The other day, we shared with a company what they must do to reduce their turnover, which was costing them at least 1.6 million per year. They responded by saying it was too intrusive (found out too much about an applicant) and the candidate hiring process took the applicant too much time to work through.
They had a premium sales position with outstanding benefits and monthly payouts, but they didn’t choose to protect the benefits they were offering by using a more selective set of qualifying recruiting steps—even though they were losing 1.6 million per year in turnover costs.
Balance Relational With Productive
Imagine that today, you’re one of those thousands of small businesses hiring salespeople. In the last several years, employment has been very high, and smart, hard-working people that excel at sales are currently working. The people applying for your sales position are relational, diplomatic, low-ego people who love to nurture and serve others.
For some of these applicants, they believe a sales position, especially those jobs with titles like “marketing associate” or “customer success manager,” are chances for moderately high incomes and low stress positions.
You probably like most of these relationship-centered people, and yet when you choose one to hire, you find it’s like putting a young high school football player in the NFL. They just don’t fit. They’re nice but they’re not strong enough in their personality and character to handle the chaos, high-activity, and high-rejection.
We have to find goal-oriented, hard working, and resilient people that can thrive in the best sales cultures—especially ones that require prospecting and finding leads as a requirement. Because that’s the other side of the recruiting coin; one side is relational, but the other side is tough, resilient, optimistic, and determined to win for the highest income possible from sales.
Thorough Recruiting Benefits the Candidate
When recruiting from within a candidate pool, we must collect enough data to override our predisposition to hire and to understand a person from a wide perspective—one that we see with screening tools, assessment testing, and structured interviews which identify character, attitudes, motivations, personality, and cognitive strength as matched with best performers.
In the end, this is best for them and for us. We don’t want to:
- Waste several months of their life.
- Put them in a position that they will not be able to handle.
- Stress them with situations they cannot navigate well.
- Place the wrong people in our sales culture.
For these reasons, we don’t want to make it easy to join our sales team, especially if our best people make high incomes inside a dynamic, goal-oriented sales culture. It’s the same for our children. We want someone to help them find the right place in society for their gifts, talents and cognitive strengths.
That’s why it’s best for the candidates, for us, and the customers we serve that we place the right person in our sales position and that we use a rigorous and scientific recruiting system that looks at their character, attitudes, motivations, personality, skills and cognitive strength. In doing this, we value our candidates and their precious time. We value our company’s profits and sales team. We value our customers.