How to Rule Out Poor Sales Candidates

So you’ve hired a new salesperson. Their CV showed sales and industry experience, they build good rapport in the interview, talked about how they hunted for new clients and sounded super motivated. Within six months they weren’t cutting it, and we ask ourselves; ‘how did this happen’?

Salespeople are not like any other group in your workplace. Every day they face and must overcome competition, rejection and sometimes even hostility from prospective customers. Even when they’ve done everything right, they sometimes have to accept a lack of control over the sales process. For this reason, mindset is crucial in sales and needs to be screened for in your recruitment process. There are a number of areas of mindset you can screen for, such as:

• Do they have a strong desire to be liked by customers (a need for approval) which inhibits their ability to ask the tough questions, create insight, assertively gain commitment or handle pushback?
• Do they have social beliefs around money that make them uncomfortable talking price (discounting) or building value?
• Do they project their buying preferences onto customers – I shop around and like to research, so let me talk about everything and let you go away to think about it?
• Can they handle and recover from rejection?

Behavioural based interviewing does not get to the heart of mindset, but experiential interviewing (where the candidate needs to demonstrate their skill) does. For example, salespeople need to win over challenging customers; break rapport somewhat in the interview and see how they respond to this. The good ones have the self-awareness to recognise and respond to this.

We have also found that a simple sales role play early in the screening process can help your rule out poor salespeople but also saves you significant money in mis-hires.

If you want to know more about sales mindset, click here to download a free sales sample sales profile that defines what to screen for in sales interviews.