Hiring The Right Salespeople: Try This

I’ve written a lot about hiring sales people and sales managers on this blog.   ESR knows that the epidemic of ineffective hiring is one of the reasons that sales performance has been so dismal over the years, even before the current economic situation.
The best sales methodology, training, tools, technology, coaching, and reinforcement doesn’t have much [...]

Should You Spend Your Money On Sales 2.0 Or Sales Training?

Sales training is more than 100 years old.  With few exceptions, it’s not very sexy.  Many salespeople believe (PDF) they’ve been through enough of it to last a lifetime.  For many reasons, most of their managers don’t see any value, so they take a tactical, event-based approach just to check the “trained my people this [...]

Sales Hiring From a Recruiter’s Perspective

As ESR continues to assess our clients’ sales challenges, we maintain that having the wrong people in the sales jobs is, in many cases, the biggest inhibitor to the success of a training intervention.  My interview with Todd Harris of PI Worldwide highlighted one of the tools available for sales leaders to get an objective [...]

New Year Resolutions For Sales Leaders

Pick one or more of the resolutions below.  Commit, execute, enjoy the results.

I’ll never hire another sales rep who can’t get the sales job done. First, completely understand the position and the skills and traits required to be successful.  Evaluating whether a candidate meets those requirements requires [...]

11 Timeless Tips for Interviewing a Sales Candidate

When I was a VP of sales, I had no training in hiring.  I was lucky enough to hire some winners who contributed to my company’s (and my) success.  But I also hired too many of those reps who were good enough to sell me during the interview but couldn’t sell enough of our software to make their numbers.
Here are [...]

Hiring, Compensation and Qualification

I’ll be headed back to Ireland next month to facilitate two one-day workshops as part of the CEO Series for the Dublin Institute of Technology and Enterprise Ireland’s International Selling Programme.  I’ll be working with 60 CEOs and managing directors over the two days.
The topics require a bit of explanation.  Each is a critical capability for a CEO [...]

Sales: Is it Art or Is it Science?

That’s a question I’m often asked about business-to-business selling.
I define science (in this application of the word) as the ability and willingness of a person to follow a set of processes in order to carry on the business of day-to-day selling. Examples would be formal planning, the use of checklists, dependence upon research, vigilant qualification, [...]

Hiring Salespeople: Reference Checking

Eliot Burdett posted a comment on my post about lying on resumes.  His own blog has a terrific list of challenges for those hiring sales people.  Here is his seventh point:  “Performing reference checks on someone who is employed is challenging due to confidentiality. (There are always managerial contacts that can be approached, although you may have [...]

Lying on Resumes

I’m still in Ireland. Back in Dublin after a few days of R&R in West Cork and County Kerry. Beautiful country and great people. We even had four days of terrific weather, which is a bit unusual here.
One of the topics of we discussed in today’s session of the DIT International Selling Programme, where I [...]

The Sales Hiring Epidemic

As I mentioned in my earlier Springsteen post, I’m in Ireland, “on tour” delivering a series of workshops for sales executives.  One module covers hiring sales people.
Directly responsible for hiring the wrong sales people are the sales leaders who haven’t developed that skill and don’t have a process. At the root of the problem, however, [...]