Book shelf

“What was the last book you read?”

When I was hiring sales people in the corporate world, I always asked the candidate three related questions. The goal was to see the character behind the facade, and as an indicator as to whether the person in question was likely to be in the 80% or the 20% group. The questions were:

First Question:

“What was the last sales book you read?”

This would eliminate about half the candidates as they would fidget and straighten themselves uncomfortably trying to come up with a name, before finally admitting that they had either not read one at all, or it has been a long time since they thumbed through Tom Hopkins classic How To Master The Art Of Selling.

Question two:

“Why that one?”

Straight forward, allowed me know if it was part of their routine to focus on self development or it was an anomaly. A lot people ask candidates about self development and they get the standard blurb, I wanted to see it in action. This usually pruned another 20% or so of the heard.

Last question:

“What did you learn from it?”

They were able to impress me with almost anything here, especially if I hadn’t read the book. Of course the ones that said “nothing, I knew most of it already”, went no further.

To this day it strikes me odd that so few sales people actually read sales books regularly. In fact how few embark on a program continuous of self development. Sure there are those that are required to accumulate continuous education credits to maintain their licence. Real estate, insurance, financial advisors, but even these are not all sales courses, many are just product related courses provided by vendors, thinly disguised product pitches. What’s even funnier is when they refer to sales training as soft skills, ha, don’t these people realize sales is a contact sport!

Even in those instances where a book does not present anything new, it still is a positive experience to read it. Last year I was invited to attend a Brian Tracy presentation. When I came back my wife asked me if I had learned anything new. I said no not new, but I remembered a whole bunch of things I stopped doing that I should start doing again. So I did and it made a difference.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto