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 11 timeless tips I wish I’d had twenty years ago.  These will enable you to improve your interviewing effectiveness, resulting in fewer mis-hires:

1. Make sure you know what you are looking for.  Create a profile.  First, you’ll need to evaluate the requirements for that position. What are the market, customer, and competitive pressures? What skills (e.g. communication, business, industry knowledge, prospecting, competitive) and personal traits (e.g. intelligence, integrity, tenacity, optimism) are required for success in that specific job? Put time into this.  Getting the profile right is the most important step.
   

   ---

2. Prepare your questions in advance. If you’ve followed tip #1, you’ll know what skills and personal traits are required for success in this job at this time. The questions you design should result in the candidate recounting their actual behavior and thoughts during selling situations rather than surreptitiously relating concepts, theories, or what they wished they would have said and done. You must include questions for every critical skill and trait.
   

   ---

3. Remain objective during the interview.  This is hard for most of us. To interview effectively you’ll need to stay dispassionate the way a doctor might when reading your EKG or taking your medical history. One mistake many interviewers make is getting emotionally involved with the candidate, overlooking even the most blatant weaknesses.
   

   ---

4. Trust but verify. By the time the candidate is in front of you they should have been screened by a recruiter, an admin or HR person, and had their resume vetted. Perhaps they’ve even been interviewed on the phone. Major incompatibilities and issues will have been identified. So there has to be a basic level of trust by this point, or you’d be wasting your time.  With that being said, you’ll need to verify that what the candidate is telling you is the truth.  
   

   ---

5. Don’t lead the candidate.  Another mistake interviewers make is to telegraph or lead the candidate in the direction they expect the answers to go. For example, I can ask a candidate what sales process they prefer. I can also ask them how they go about pursuing an opportunity. The questions will likely result in two different answers. If I want to know if a candidate uses a sales process, the first question is useless. They’ll say yes. If I ask the second question and they respond, “…and I use a formal planning process…” it’s likely they do. See the difference?
   

   ---

6. Push back. Don’t just nod and agree. Choose something the candidate says and respond with, “I don’t know if I agree with that,” and see what happens. Do they back down? Get aggressive? Or professionally ask specifically what did you disagree with. This is a very telling technique.
   

   ---

7. Take notes. The dullest of pencils is far better than the sharpest of memories. Don’t worry about what the candidate thinks when you say, “Hold on a second, I just want to jot down a few notes.” Capture things like demeanor, communication skills, physical tendencies (like nervousness), eye contact, and sincerity. A few minutes of silence here and there isn’t wasted time if you are recording your thoughts, observations, and even specifically what the candidate said.
   

   ---

8. Solicit peoples’ names. When a candidate describes how they sold seven million dollars worth of widgets to the Acme Company, ask who the real buyer was. There are a number of reasons I do this, but the most important is so later, when it’s time to check references, you can ask for permission to call those people.  If it turns out that you know someone the candidate mentions, keep it to yourself. Later you can decide if you want to call that person as a “blind” reference.
   

   ---

9. Deliver powerful messages. You’re not only “buying” when interviewing, but you need to do some selling as well, especially with those great sales reps you’d love to hire.  Make certain you have spent time in advance on how to effectively positioning your company, the opportunity, the candidate’s responsibilities, the upside and the challenges. Also make sure you have prepared compelling responses to potential objections.  And by the way, the positioning and messages from everyone on your team should be the same.
   

   ---

10. Practice. You should always be interviewing prospective candidates, even if you don’t have an open headcount. You’ll meet people at meetings, trade shows, conferences, social situations, bidders conferences, job fairs, in customers’ reception areas, and in the hotel fitness room.  Work on your interviewing skills so that when you manage to get a real winner into your office to fill a critical sales position, you’ll be at your best.
    

    ---

11. Give the candidate feedback. If the candidate asks for feedback, don’t hesitate to tell them how they did. (If they don’t ask, that’s a bad sign.)  If they did well, but there are more steps to your process, share that with them.   If you intend to interview a candidate again, don’t share with them what you considered to be weak areas.  They’ll spend time creating the illusion that they aren’t weak in those areas for the next interview and you won’t be able to get an accurate assessment of their capabilities in those areas.

Interviewing is a skill.  Take the time to learn to be a great interviewer.  If you are anything less, your company, your position, your reputation, and your net worth are at risk.

The Sales Manager’s Mentor

My friend Jeff Lehman has a new book coming out.  I’ve read a preview copy.  It’s entirely different from his last one, The Sales Manager’s Mentor (Second Edition).  

I met Jeff at the National Collegiate Sales Competition a few years ago, where we were both judges. He was just finishing the second edition of Mentor. I read through every page of the first edition, only wishing I had this sage advice when I was a young, inexperienced sales manager.  In fact, The Sales Manager’s Mentor is my all-time favorite book on the subject of sales management.  I recommend it to sales managers all the time.

The only regret I have about The Sales Manager’s Mentor is that it never received the accolades it deserves.

I’ll write about Jeff’s new book in two weeks, when it’s published.  Stay tuned.

Assigning Sales Territories by Personality Traits?

One of our clients from Minnesota told me about a fascinating Wall Street Journal article about regional personality traits across America.   From the article:

“Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.”

Minnesota, for example, ranks 5th in extroversion, 2nd in agreeableness, 22nd in conscientiousness, 41st in neuroticism, and 40th in openness.  New York, where I lived until 2006, ranks 37th in extraversion, 5th in agreeableness, 42nd in conscientiousness, 3rd in neuroticism, and 2nd in openness.  (Aha! This explains a lot!)

What bearing might this have on how effective a salesperson is who sells in a state where buyers’ characteristics are considerably different from their own?  I don’t know of anyone who has studied this.  If you have, please let me know.  But I can tell you that in my early days of selling, some customers in the deep south didn’t like my New York style.  (Some still don’t!)  Two CEOs even asked the CEO of my company to “send someone else down here.” 

Over the years I learned to better understand regional, national and other personality and cultural differences. But I never thought about it in the way the WSJ presented it.  Should this analysis be taken into account when hiring?  When assigning geographic territories?  I curious about those of you in other parts of the world as well.  Please let me know your thoughts.

Irish International Selling CEO Workshops

I finished up my second CEO workshop this afternoon in Limerick as part of The Dublin Institute of Technology/Enterprise Ireland International Selling Programme.  We covered three critical success factors for building and scaling a sales capability for international trade: Hiring, Compensation, and Qualification and Prioritization (as it applies to the pipeline and forecast at the CEO-level).

The high point of the yesterday’s workshop event in Dublin was the CEO Forum.  My guests were (left to right) Gerard Keenan (Keenan Systems), Bernie Cullinan (Clarigen) and Dermot Farrell (Lakeland Dairies).

They each shared with the group their unique challenges with respect to exporting their products internationally.  Some areas covered were credit management (Ireland experiences most of what the U.S. does, and not long after), the challenges of employing both a direct and reseller channel, and the cultural challenges related to selling into other countries.

Today’s CEO forum included (left to right), my guests, Helen Ryan (Creganna), Gerry Raftery (Dawn Farm Foods) and Ian Bolger (Bolger).

There were a host of take-aways for the other CEOs attending the event.  Here are a few examples:

Q:  How do you adopt your sales process internationally?

A:  Helen Ryan: We modify it to align with how the customer segments or types buy (that’s large versus small entities, regardless of the deal size).  It has much more to do with how they operate as a business than their geography.

Q: As you expand into each new country to use local salespeople or relocate Irish salespeople.

A: Gerry Raftery: Local people are the answer.

Q: Has the employment of the sales process you developed from the International Selling Programme enabled you to sell more effectively with respect to corporate buyers?

A:  Ian Bolger:  With all the training, strategies and tactics employed by big U.S. multinationals, our process has enabled us to stay even.  Those buyers get tougher and tougher each year.

The sales executives reporting to these CEOs are concluding an eight two-day module program.  The 2009 series begins in January.

Many thanks to hosts Claire McBride (DIT) and Eileen Banks (Enterprise Ireland).

What’s Really Going On With Sales?

I’ve had the opportunity, over the years, to provide my opinion to CEOs, CFOs, boards of directors, investors, and venture capitalists about what was really going on with their companies’ dysfunctional sales departments.

Got a minute? I have a quick question or two...

Considering the average tenure of sales VPs these days—less than two years—one can create a timeline for a newly-hired VP that isn’t going to work out long-term:

• Months 1-3:  On-boarding.  VP learns about the company, salespeople, colleagues in marketing, services, customers, competitors, etc.  Asks a lot of questions.
• Months 4-6: VP makes changes in approach, terminology, territories, business partners, marketing materials, routine (sales meetings, forecast calls, etc.)  VP may bring in former salespeople that worked for them in the past.  
• Months 7-9: Little to no performance improvement.  VP says that new mechanisms haven’t “gained traction.”  Or that their new reps “need a little more time.”  VP suggests that there have been changes in the market/economy/environment since they joined.  Assures executive team a little more time will do the trick.
• Months 10-12: An occasional success!  The heat is off for a time, until the CEO realizes that “one big win does not a trend make.” (Dave Hathaway, partner, now retired, from prestigious VC firm Venrock Associates said that to me in a board meeting when I was an inexperienced VP of sales and bragged about a big deal we had just won.)
• Month 13: Consultant or board member or expert is brought in to assess the situation. Meetings, reports, discussions, back and forth.
• Months 14-16: VP and CEO see the handwriting on the wall, but keep it to themselves, hoping that the situation will magically approve.
• Months 17-20: CEO covertly searches for new VP.  VP covertly taps into his/her network while updating their resume with the appropriate spin on this latest position.
• Month 21 (or The New Month 1):  New VP of sales arrives…  On-boarding…

In cases like this, it’s around month 13 that I’ve been called in.  It doesn’t take me long to figure out what’s really going on.  I know what questions to ask and what the answers should be. 

Here is how I start:  I’ll ask the VP of sales to talk to me, in depth, about a few selected critical opportunities their team is pursuing—deals forecasted to close within the next two months.  The VP’s response should convey a comprehensive and objective assessment of those situations, not gut feel or wishful thinking. A strong VP will know, at a minimum, (1) when the customer (I want to know the name of the decision-maker) will buy, (2) what products or services they will buy, (3) what business issues or opportunities are causing them to buy, (4) how much they will spend, (5) what could prevent them from buying, and (6) precisely what will compel the customer to buy from that VP’s company.

How do I know whether they’re telling the truth?  Experience, very careful listening, and having been on the wrong side of that discussion.

There is a wheelbarrow full of other questions—questions about process, qualification, measurement, competitive intelligence, strategies and tactics, territory assignments and management, tools, coaching, alignment with other corporate functions, and so on…  But if a sales VP in their job for a year doesn’t know, without notes, what I consider to be vital information about their two most important deals, they fail the test.

You might wonder who is responsible for this all-too-common, Groundhog Day situation. It’s the person who continues to hire the wrong VPs of sales.

Hiring, Compensation and Qualification

The Gap of Dunloe (Photo: Dave Stein)

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 of a small to mid-size company.

In 2002 I was hired to deliver a speech to 300 technology executives in Dublin.  The subject was qualification.  The person who hired me was an executive at Enterprise Ireland—the Irish government agency responsible for the development and promotion of the indigenous business sector. He told me that one of the biggest challenges for CEOs of Irish companies was to NOT get on a plane to America every time their phone rang with an inquiry from a large U.S. corporation. (This executive shared with me that I was hired for this speech because I was the only one of several well-known sales experts that actually qualified him before agreeing to meet with him face-to-face.)  He told me that the lack of qualification was an epidemic.  Fortunately that situation has improved considerably over the last six years.  With that being said, even CEOs need to be able to prioritize their companies’ portfolios of business opportunities, especially in mid- to smaller-size companies.

Hiring of sales executives is critical as well.  Too many Irish companies, in their quest to expand to the U.S. and other countries, hired what seemed to be a strong salesperson/manager.  Many of them didn’t work out.  This has been a significant problem.  Typical: A Dublin-based telecomms company hires a person to commence operations the U.S.  Six months later, after the person has been fired, the company is at least €100k poorer, has lost a year in the international business development component of their business plan, and has probably damaged their reputation for years to come.  Again, I can report real improvement on this front as well.  CEOs in general, have become more discerning, patient, and unwilling to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Back in 2003 I asked a room full of Irish CEOs if they would feel comfortable writing a check to a salesperson for €1 million.  (It’s a standard, unscientific test I give to get a sense of how CEOs measure the importance of the sales function within their organizations.)  I was almost ejected from the room.  The Irish business community then looked at selling very differently than we do here in the U.S.  I asked the same question to last year’s group.  Only one out of 25 CEOs had a problem with it.  More progress.

I’m delighted to be on the faculty of the Dublin Institute of Technology and thoroughly enjoy my professional and personal relationships with my relatively new and growing network of Irish business associates.  I was thrilled when the former New York Consul General for Ireland, with that appealing Irish sense of humor, introduced me to the Irish Minister of Education as “Dave O’Steen.”

What’s really fun is to see these CEOs and the sales executives that work for them, hungry for knowledge, exceedingly coachable, and genuinely passionate about growing their businesses internationally.

If you have an opportunity to buy from, or do business with, an Irish company, please share your experience with me.  I’m really interested, and they’d really like the feedback.

Do Your Salesreps’ Presentations Deliver?

Your friendly blogger having a great time in front of 1,000 sales reps at a kick-off meeting at the Adam's Mark in Denver.

I’m lucky when it comes to presenting.  I started playing the trumpet in front of audiences in the sixth grade.  At that point I realized that grabbing an audience’s attention give me a thrill. Once I got into the software business, during customer presentations my instrument was the keyboard.  Demos were my music.  Later on, I delivered presentations, then speeches to audiences of all sizes in more states and and in more countries than I can remember. 

My enthusiasm for working with audiences was a major asset when I was a sales trainer.  (No matter how strong your content is, and how many interactive exercises you include in a program, an enthusiastic and skilled presenter will enable more learning than a lackluster one. )  I’ve read all the books about presenting and speaking, listened to all the experts, attended lots of seminars, joined the National Speakers Association, hired a speaking coach, and on and on…  So, that’s a sampling of the platform from which I’m going to voice a few opinions.

Hiring Inexperienced Sales Reps

Will the seasoned CEO buy from the new salesrep? Are you willing to bet your job on the answer?

I came upon a terrific blog post a while back written by Martice Nicks.  That post followed an earlier one Martice wrote.  They both discuss a very important and always relevant question: Should I hire experienced or inexperienced sales reps?

Without stealing all of Martice’s thunder, I want to hit you hard with something from his post I found compelling:

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Short post today.  We’ve got a few clients who are pedaling hard (perhaps peddling hard as well), trying to wrap up Q2, and I’ve been on the phone… BTW If you’re a sales leader and reading this today, June 30, you either work for a privately-held company, are way ahead of your targets for the quarter or… we’ll leave it at that.

I read my first book about body language in 1991, when I was living in Europe.  To say it opened my mind is an understatement.  (Didn’t Woody Allen say that it’s great to have an open mind so long as your brain doesn’t fall out?)  In any case, I’ve been studying body language and other non-verbal cues ever since.  That skill has really paid off when it comes to assessing whether someone is being truthful or not (prospects, our clients’ sales VPs, my airplane mechanic, etc.). 

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.  Being a strong left-brainer, I wanted to understand why he asserted that it was the right-brainers that would thrive in the next decade.  He makes a strong case.

Among the many advantages of right-brainers, Pink writes, is being able to discern the real meaning behind facial expressions.  So I studied up a bit on real versus fake smiles.  Hint:  It’s in the eyes.  Then I took this test.  Pink was right.  It worked!  I scored 18 out of 20 on my first try.

When Salespeople Leave Their Jobs

Approximately 40% of sales people leave their jobs each year, either willfully, or involuntarily.   There are a number of factors that contribute to this terrible situation.  I’ve talked about a number of them on this blog.  ESR has some very strong recommendations, as well, based upon our research.  But that’s an issue for another day.

What I’d like to discuss is what happens to those people when they leave. 

Derrick Moe wrote a post about “Garden-Leave Clauses.”  Evidently he picked up this phrase from a CNNMoney article: