Stop Hiring Experienced People
I remember hiring Peter, an insurance veteran who had over 20 years of experience. He had a great CV, a strong book of business and he interviewed well. The indicators were good and I hired him.
He said he was eager to learn our system and build his career with our company. We invested in him with proper training and placed him under a very capable manager.
He started off with a couple of good months selling our products to his book of clients, but once the leads were spent, his poor work ethic was exposed and his sales dried up. It wasn’t long until Peter was let go and he went on to his next sales job.
The truth is that Peter never really wanted to change his ways and learn our system. What he wanted was a job to make money and to ply his trade the same way he’d always done it because that’s what he was comfortable doing.
Hiring experienced salespeople can be a real crapshoot.
It starts during the recruiting process. You contact salespeople with whom you’ve worked in the past. If they’re really good, they’re happy where they are. Maybe someone’s ready to jump ship or – best case – really looking forward to working with you again. Then you start remembering: were the ‘old days’ really that good?
You comb your network for referrals. That usually doesn’t produce many leads because all your peers are looking for experienced people as well, and they’re not about to pass along the really strong candidates.
Maybe your manager has been authorized to spend a boatload of money on a recruiting agency. The recruiter produces a list of candidates because producing a list is what you’re paying them to do. Then the fun begins.
Everybody’s CV looks perfect. (After all, they’re supposed to look perfect.)
Every candidate presents well during the interviews. (After all, they are in sales.)
Everyone looks pretty much the same during the pitch demonstrations. (There aren’t that many ways to do it.)
Probing questions are met with a logical answer, leaving you wondering about the real story.
You call their previous employer for a referral, which rarely yields the truth because they fear being sued if they say something critical.
You lay out more money for psychometric testing to try and get behind the story. Unfortunately, many test providers claim their instruments to be predictors of sales success.
Then you make your choice. Sometimes it works out, often it doesn’t, and it costs a lot of time and money.
But here’s the kicker. Even if you do succeed in hiring a hired gun, you’ve bought a serious problem: you’ve sent the message, ‘You already know how to sell.’
You’ve hired them to sell the way they’ve sold before and given away your right to shape how they will sell for you. You’re highly likely to wind up with a rep intent on doing things in his own way.
By repeating this approach to build your team, the likely result is a sales team that has no common framework for selling. And if you’re selling in a complex environment, you’ve multiplied the complexity of your team’s ability to harmonize their selling approach. If you don’t think this is happening, go out in the field and watch your team work. Ask them to explain what they are doing and the process of selling they are following. Watch to see if they actually do these things.
Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised. More likely, however, you may find:
Multiple styles of selling that make it difficult to assess, track, and train what your team is doing that works or doesn’t work.
People mostly doing what they are comfortable doing (this is understandable) and not attempting to stretch, grow, and try new things (this is stagnating).
Various approaches to working within company processes, procedures, and systems. This impedes the discipline required to minimize internal problems and maximize efficiency.
Multiple understandings of the steps a customer needs to take to buy well. You may well have salespeople who have never thought about this before.
This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, if you hired these people because they already knew how to sell, then they came to apply what they already knew, not to learn something different.
If you are suffering from this dynamic - either a little or a lot - try something like this:
Meet with each of your team individually, and enroll them into a process of defining your team’s way of selling.
Spend time learning how each person sells, especially your high-performers. Identify which practices succeed and which don’t. (Note: Don’t be surprised to find that some of your people don’t actually know what they do - you may have to watch them work and identify this for them.)
Spend team meeting time to present your findings, and, with your team:
Identify a selling process that develops your customers into intelligent buyers and develops your team into skilled sellers.
Identify a simple system to help everyone plan their selling activity according to this process and track the results.
Secure everyone’s commitment to master this system to sell more and make more money.
You’ll never have to invest the time and money again trying to hire the ‘proven’ ones. Instead, you’ll have a cohesive sales force who work together, sing off the same hymn sheet, and can – over time – become masters at selling for your business. Your selling methodology will change, improve, and your people will help you do that.