Hiring The Right Salespeople - Recruiting & Retaining Sales Champions

Your sales candidate has a values conflict with the sales role.
You may have what you consider to be the best sales candidate. They look the part, have a great resume, possess an engaging style and say all the right things in the interviews. Everyone that has met them in your organization loves them and can’t wait for you to hire them.

3 Months Later - Failure
You new sales recruit has turned out to be a failure. They don’t prospect for new business, they fail miserably in the sales process, they lack motivation and they won’t follow-up and follow through on the few leads that they do have. They attempt to drop the price at the first sign of an objection and can’t seem to drive the sales to a close.

Why Did This Happen?
After Resolution Systems performs an analysis using our Sales Champion Battery™ sales assessment, you discover that your salespersons value structure was in direct opposition to what the job required for success. (Values are the motives that drive an individual to perform or not perform) In this case, they did not value what your sales role rewarded. More information about this can be learned from the book – Blueprint of a Sales Champion.

If you used the Sales Champion Battery™ sales assessment during the hiring process, you would have learned this from one of our Certified Assessment Consultants during the telephone interpretation which is in included with every assessment you purchase. You would have been advised that this would be a “high-risk” sales candidate and to continue reviewing additional candidates.

How to Prevent This from Happening to You
During the hiring process, after you’ve narrowed your search down to several top candidates, utilize our Sales Champion Battery™ to discover which candidate truly has the value structure that aligns with your sales role.

Your sales candidate has a cognitive conflict with your sales role.
Again, you may have what you think is a great sales candidate. However, what’s going on inside their brain and how they process information will significantly affect their performance. Unfortunately, you can’t usually identify this in an interview or a résumé.

What is Cognitive Structure and Why is it Important?
Cognitive structure relates to the clarity of a salesperson's thinking – what they focus on and “see clearly”. Many times a high-energy, Type-A personality sales candidate will get a sales job, but then fail miserably. That’s because they might have had a cognitive conflict with the sales role.

Example
Have you ever had a salesperson who was direct, assertive and aggressive, yet wilted like a flower at the first sign of rejection? They became call reluctant and their prospecting effort never took off? That’s because they didn’t see clearly the cognitive attribute we call “handling rejection” – the ability to not internalize rejection and handle it in an overly personal way. When your Type-A personality salesperson, who lacks clarity in handling rejection actually faces rejection, then they become fearful of receiving more rejection. Therefore, their prospecting effort is significantly diminished and their sales never grow.

This simple attribute is hidden deep within a human being and cannot be identified in an interview. It requires a sophisticated sales assessment tool like our Sales Champion Battery™ and a thorough analysis with an experienced Certified Assessment Consultant in order to find this out. It’s better to discover this BEFORE you hire them.

Learn more about how you can prevent cognitive conflicts with your sales candidates by contacting Resolution Systems today and discovering the powerful Sales Champion Battery™.