LOOKING FOR MR./MS. RIGHT

Hiring a good sales rep is never easy.

Here's how to find the 'sales natural'.

"It's like getting elephants to climb trees," the Vice President of sales said. "Maybe we should have hired squirrels instead."

The company had just gone through another round of "sales force re-engineering", moving sales reps to home offices and stripping away account maintenance tasks, giving them to customer service. The only problem was they didn't anticipate how the sales force would respond. Some resigned, while others had to be let go. When the Vice President ran an ad to look for replacements, everybody looked so good. Professionally prepared resumes boasted "results-oriented, aggressive self-starters". In interview situations, all candidates seemed to have the same canned responses to his questions. Sales candidates often perform well in job interviews but then fail to deliver once on the job. It is difficult to ascertain in a short period of time whether people have the right natural behavior patterns for selling. As a result, many companies are becoming increasingly reliant on behavioral assessments to assess sales candidates. A behavioral assessment is a web or computer based self-assessment that may take any where from a few minutes to several hours. It measures how someone reacts to pressure, handles rejection, builds relationships, or persists despite obstacles.

These assessments have become prevalent in the last few years for a number of reasons. Two of these are:

- Continual waves of downsizing have spawned a whole industry focused on teaching people how to prepare resumes and answer interview questions. The proliferation of the web has made this information available to all candidates, free of charge. No wonder hiring managers sometimes feel that they have been out maneuvered in an interview. - With the advent of ISO 9000, companies have developed processes that give them detailed information on the cost of hiring. Prudential Securities estimates that the first-year cost of a commissioned sales rep, after training and hiring costs are factored in, is $100.000. With that type of investment involved, sales managers want to ensure that the enthusiastic self-starters who show up to the interview will remain that way once they are settled into their daily prospecting routine.

Of the companies who use behavioral assessments, many espouse the belief that success in selling has more to do with "personality" than, say, success in software engineering. There seems to be no shortage of stories of "born" salespeople with any prior selling experience that outperforms their veteran co-workers within months on the job. Companies that use behavioural assessments are trying to find that elusive sales "natural" - or at least define what factors are essential to becoming number one in their company.

So, what is it that differentiates the top performers from the rest of the pack? Answers vary. Sales managers talk about the desire to succeed. Jack H. McQuaig, a pioneering Psychologist who spent four decades delivering seminars on how to hire salespeople, claims that one defining factor is persistence - the determination to achieve something. Researchers have posed the same question to customers. Their responses have to do with empathy - the ability to develop a solution verses present a product. What about the top guns? They couldn't be bothered with such questions; they just want to sell.

Over the years, a number of clients have asked my employer, The McQuaig Institute, to help them establish what it is that makes their top performers different. We found that the answer was a person's natural temperament. Qualities like competitiveness, sense of urgency and independence have the greatest impact on success.

Companies often misunderstand the factors that lead to success in selling. In one case, an insurance company that believed previous sales experience was the key to success in their business found that this had no impact whatsoever. In another case, a company that sought the "gift of gab" when hiring inbound telemarketers, found that their telemarketers who were naturally talkative were the least likely to be successful.

Other organizations turn to behavioral assessments to curb turnover. Some companies seem resigned to the fact that they will have high turnover in telesales or straight commission sales. However, the effective use of behavioral assessments can help predict the likelihood that a candidate will be able to cope or even thrive in the difficult environments that often accompany these positions. One client in the mailing systems industry more than doubled the average tenure of their sales reps by measuring qualities like independence and determination.

So how will current business trends impact the use of assessment tools in hiring sales people? As companies move toward more elaborate contact management and customer tracking systems (46% of all companies use some form of Sales Force Automation), sales managers can differentiate between "farmers" and "hunters". It is difficult to measure this difference in a 45-minute interview but behavioral assessments can usually pin-point the difference straight away.

Author Tom Peters, says that companies will not only have to think "outside of the box", but hire outside of the box if they are to survive. Hiring based on prior industry experience, limits the company's ability to operate outside the box, especially in industries where products, services and distribution channels change at break-neck speed. As Shari Caudron stated in a recent issue of Workforce Magazine, "Hiring people based only on skill sets is engaging in planned obsolescence. Companies that understand and embrace the importance of behavioral competencies in making hiring decisions are eating the lunch of their competitors who don't."

As the War for Talent continues, the impact of good hiring decision becomes more critical than ever before. Managers will continue to look for added insight that can help them tell the difference between an elephant and a squirrel.

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