The percentage of sales reps at quota on many sales teams implies a serious struggle with sales hiring efficiency. According to the 2013 CSO Insights Report entitled “Optimizing Hiring Effectiveness, Getting the Right Players on the Field”, the average percentage of reps making quota was 62%. When the participants in the study were asked to rate their
I heard this joke a couple of days ago and thought it was worth passing along: HR Rep: Here is a stack of resumes for your open sales position. Hiring Manager: Can you please show me the good resumes. HR Rep: Here you go. [hands over a dozen resumes] Hiring Manager: [Takes the resumes and throws six
Spend some time with high achieving sales people and it quickly becomes obvious that they share some key personality traits. Evidence of common attributes amongst top sales people comes from many high profile studies. Some of these are particularly notable in terms of the specific traits of top sales performers. Dr. Christopher Croner, Ph.D, who himself has
In a perfect world, appearances don’t have an impact on business, but in the real world, unfortunately, looks seem to matter. Studies have shown that people considered to be attractive earn more money and generate higher sales results. The studies aren’t necessarily conclusive, but I know this from being in sales for many years: buyers
We previously wrote about Hiring Your Competitor’s Sales Reps and whether this is a good or bad idea. We have several reservations about this as a hiring strategy owing to the limits it places on getting exposed to right reps and/or the best, and can require the disclosure of confidential information to engage the person,
We wrote about cold call reluctance earlier this week (see My New Hire Won’t Make Cold Calls). Qualifying a prospect is one of the most critical phases in the sales cycle is another area where we see reps exhibiting reluctance. After the initial call is made, qualifying is one of the most feared phases in
We hear this story a lot. I recently hired a new sales person. During the interview process they seemed like a great hunter. They pursued me during the hiring process and actively closed me during our final interview. Now that the rep is on-board, it seems they won’t pick up the phone to save their
There are countless articles on how to build a high performance sales team (including ours: How To Create A High-Performance Sales Culture), so we decided to take a lighthearted look at how not to build a sales team. Only look for talent when you need to hire – If a hiring manager looks for talent
Reference Checks Reference checks are one of the most critical ways to validate the traits and performance abilities of a potential sales hire (see The Importance of Reference Checks in Sales Hiring). Unfortunately many companies make up their mind to hire someone and then perform only cursory reference checks or, surprisingly often, none at all.
Anyone who has spent time running sales teams and hiring sales people knows that there are certain personality traits that must exist in a sales person in order for them to be successful. At Peak, we call these traits sales DNA and we place a large emphasis on them because the supporting stats are so
