How to Find the Right Salesman
The right salesman for your company is the one who you feel can adapt to your organization, be successful in your industry and sell your products as though he invented them. Any good salesperson can sell you on their abilities; that is what they do. But it is up to the potential employer to develop a profile of a successful salesperson for the organization and work to find a candidate that fits that profile.
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Instructions
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Make a list of the traits that other successful salespeople in your organization have had. If you have a sales staff, take some time to talk to your top earner and find out what habits he has that helps him succeed. Find out what his educational and vocational background is, and use that as a guideline to finding the right salesperson.
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Reach out to recruiters within your industry and pass along the profile you have developed of the perfect sales candidate for your organization. Using a series of recruiters will help you save money on classified advertising, but more importantly, it will help to reduce the amount of time you use on having to go through resumes of salespeople that do not fit the mold you are looking for.
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Give your recruiters a set of standards to use to weed out potential candidates. These should be years of experience in the industry, the need for pertinent experience and a minimum educational background. These are questions you would ask anyway.
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At each personal interview with potential candidates, take notes on the way they approach the interview. Note whether they seemed confident, whether they researched your company before they came to speak to you and how they answered questions that they did not know the answer to. These are all very important traits of successful salespeople.
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Narrow down your list to two or three candidates and conduct a second round of interviews that would include people on your sales staff, a sales support manager and someone from engineering. To find the right salesperson, you must get the opinions of the major people that the sales candidate would come into contact with every day if they got the job.
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Tips & Warnings
Second interviews are important. A second interview can be like a second meeting with a tough client you are trying to close. In this atmosphere you get to see the candidates under pressure, which is important to gauge for any successful sales professional.
