Increasing Selection Success

Selecting the wrong sales representative can easily cost your company many tens of thousands of dollars. It is critical that you hire people who can perform well and who can continue to perform well over time.

A poor sales hire hits a company where it hurts most: lost market opportunity.

Research shows that the predictability of making a selection decision through unsound selection practices can be as low as 30%. When you compare this with the predictability of making a decision by tossing a coin (50%), it shows just how easy it is to hire the wrong person.

This program is created to help sales management recruit and select sales people who are most likely to succeed as top level sales performers. It addresses critical and key aspects of recruiting the “right” sales candidate: from defining the position, to attracting the right candidate; planning the interview, to objective evaluation.

Rushing the hiring process is a common and costly mistake, yet many sales managers spend more time, for example, in deciding just which car to buy than on the important task of selecting people for their sales team.

Common mistakes such as basing selection criteria on personal biases or stereotypes; believing that the best sales representative will be the person who sells in the same way as you did when you managed a territory. Assuming that a candidate's product knowledge on its own is sufficient; falling for a sales person's “gift of the gab".

Selection of high performing sales people is most successful when a candidate's background is explored systematically and compared to the real requirements of the job. The fundamental premises on which our selection process is based are:

· A systematic process produces superior results.

· Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. Through the use of a proven Objective Based Interview Process which focuses on experience and criteria based fundamentals to ensure superior sales selection decisions.

Benefits of the Objective Based Interview Process:

It is a dynamic process that will help:

- Your selection process will be based on an organized and methodical system.

- You will have established and defined objective yardsticks for evaluating candidates.

- Your selection process will provide evidence of a candidate's real behaviour; helping you to avoid inferences and subjective assessments.

- While biases and stereotypes can never be eliminated, you will reduce their impact through increased objectivity.

- Your selection decisions will be more accurate through delaying candidate evaluation until after the conclusion of the interview.

- Evaluations are based on predetermined sales job performance factors rather than unstructured explorations of the candidate’s past