Who should we NOT hire?<\/em><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nBuilt into these questions is an assumption: That it\u2019s all about hiring. Hiring decisions are vitally important, of course. But if you\u2019re asking yourself these questions, the odds are good that you will also want to consider closely evaluating those you\u2019ve hired already. In both situations, there\u2019s the potential for a behavioral and attitudinal mismatch \u2013 and wherever there\u2019s a mismatch with the attitude required to perform at a high level, your organization\u2019s revenue potential suffers. So: please consider what you\u2019re about to read as a simple set of guidelines you can use, not just to determine whether you should bring someone into your sales team, but also to help you decide whether you should consider reassigning <\/em>someone who\u2019s already there. If someone doesn’t meet the criteria you\u2019re about to read, they might be better suited to make a contribution elsewhere in the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHere\u2019s the answer to those questions. There are two critical criteria you will want to look for in identifying top-tier salespeople: Self-awareness <\/em>and drive. <\/em>Each can be confirmed in a simple conversation. If either trait is absent, it\u2019s not very likely that you are looking at someone you want on your sales team.<\/p>\n\n\n\nLet\u2019s talk about self-awareness first. Top-tier sales candidates are dramatically different in this regard than everyone else. These people have both the willingness and the ability to look inward when things go wrong. That\u2019s rare. The people who are least likely to become major contributors of revenue to your organization are the ones who make a habit of blaming externals. Ask them why something didn\u2019t go their way, and they will instantly point the finger of blame at some other person, some circumstance they had no control over, or that mysterious factor known as \u201cbad luck.\u201d By contrast, people who are high performers, or who have the potential to become high performers, will make a habit of looking internally. When they hit an obstacle, they will ask themselves, \u201cWhat is my role in this?\u201d Or: \u201cWhat can I learn from this?\u201d And when you talk to them about initiatives that didn\u2019t turn out the way they might have hoped, their responses will usually reflect this sense of personal accountability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second criterion is the attitude I call drive. <\/em>Another word for this is ambition<\/em>, but lots of salespeople and prospective salespeople will say they are ambitious, so I prefer the word drive <\/em>for the simple reason that it is easier to confirm. Salespeople who are driven, in the sense I am using this word, make things happen. They do not wait for things to happen. Just as important, they are goal-focused. They typically have spent a lot of time thinking about two or three critical personal goals (such as buying a new car or saving up enough money to afford a certain vacation) and two or three professional goals (such as becoming the #1 salesperson in a given area). Talk to a job candidate, or to someone already on staff, about what they want to achieve in life and why. If they don\u2019t <\/em>start talking about an important personal or professional goal that they\u2019ve given a lot of thought to achieving, you can be certain that you are not talking to a top-tier performer. You will find, as I have, that it\u2019s very easy to tell when people manufacture goals that are supposedly important to them, but that are actually created in the spur of the moment and are meant to impress someone else. They hesitate, are short on details, and get a kind of panicked look in their eye. When someone\u2019s talking about something important that they are personally committed to achieving, they don\u2019t look like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf you don\u2019t see both of these criteria, assume the person you\u2019re talking to is not the right person to drive revenue growth on your team. If you do <\/em>see these criteria, keep talking to the person so you can find out if there is a good fit. Remember: You can always train someone in technical skills and product knowledge \u2026 but you really can\u2019t expect to train someone to be self-aware and to be personally driven.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCheck out this blog post<\/strong><\/a> for more information on leading a revenue-generating team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two critical criteria you will want to look for in identifying top-tier salespeople: Self-awareness and drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":12799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1120],"tags":[1040,1496,1033,1035,1107],"class_list":["post-12798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-growth","tag-hiring-and-recruitment","tag-leadership","tag-management","tag-sales-team"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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