Target Your Hiring To Reduce Hiring Costs. Testing Targets Sales Skills Before Hiring

Furniture World Magazine

"I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where." said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his often quoted poem. Doesn't that sound like the way many companies hire their sales staff? Employers respond to a great personality, then hire the applicant, trusting this choice to a 'gut feeling.' After several months they realize that Mr. Personality can't sell and the entire parade begins again, doubling and often tripling recruitment costs. Instead of shooting randomly, wouldn't it be saner to choose a target or at least a direction to aim your recruiting arrow? Targeted hiring may be the answer. By following principles similar to target marketing when you hire salespeople, you can define what qualities to look for in a sales team before you interview them. Candidates can then be tested for those abilities, enabling you to direct your hiring toward those who possess the skills necessary for sales success. You can also decide whether you want to invest in teaching those with deficient skills. The concept of targeting customers has permeated the sales and marketing industry for more than a decade. In advertising, this concept means reaching consumers who would be most likely to respond to your product for the lowest cost. This belief has persisted because it makes sense. You save time and money by avoiding those people unlikely to use your product and eschew the costly shotgun approach to advertising. Would it be sensible to publicize a corner grocery store on national television? It wouldn't unless there was something you could get there that you couldn't anywhere else in the country. That's a neighborhood business and advertising dollars would be better spent on marketing locally. A targeted approach to marketing has become the norm. Credit card companies keep track of buying habits, and even supermarkets have jumped on the bandwagon, offering discounts for using their "in-store" cards. There is also a non-traditional form of market research that reaches beyond simple demographics. It asks why people buy things the way they do and uses anthropologists and sociologists to analyze customer thoughts and behavior Yet, when it comes to hiring salespeople many of the same people who carefully analyze the market for cost efficiency, hire the first candidate who reasonably fills the position, without first defining what type of salesperson they truly need. For example, many telemarketers are hired for outside sales because of impressive track records in telephone sales, then fall flat on their faces when they try to sell. Why? Because they haven't learned the skills necessary to set appointments, call on clients or to give presentations. The converse is often true. Outside salespeople frequently encounter difficulty in phone sales because they are unfamiliar with the techniques required for telephone sales. They have come to rely on watching their prospects facial expressions for agreement as opposed to listening for auditory clues like voice inflection. Hiring mistakes usually occur because employers haven't defined what specific sales skills are important to their particular business. For many years hiring salespeople has been done on a personality basis. According to industrial psychologist, Gregory M. Lousig-Nont, Ph.D., this method doesn't work. "A person may have the personality of an airplane pilot but that doesn't mean they can fly a plane," he said. "In turn, a warm friendly personality doesn't mean a person has the ability to sell. Sales is a matter of skills .... period." Sales aptitude tests of the past have evaluated people according to subjective values such as motivation instead of the specific sales skills needed to close sales. "There are certain techniques that are universally used by successful salespeople in all walks of the sales profession," said Lousig-Nont, president of Lousig-Nont & Associates, a Nevada based human resource consulting firm. His written sales test, the Sales Success Profile, rates these tangible sales skills compared to a sampling of 350,000 salespeople. It assesses the salesperson's strengths and weaknesses in 13 critical areas including the ability to approach, involve and build rapport; the ability to identify a buyers needs and motivations; skill at overcoming objections; time management; and balanced aggressiveness when closing. The 50 multiple-choice questions have more than 360 possible answers with the pattern of responses revealing a salesperson's skill level. With the high cost of training new employees, targeting for the skills you want makes sense. Are you looking for a salesperson with a high level of aggressiveness? Maybe you need a balanced closer; a person who has just the right amount of aggressiveness tempered with warmth and friendliness. Are you worried that your best salespeople are suddenly not producing? Check them for burnout. When sales volume decreases salespeople often become frantic, causing sales to plummet. If they can't identify what skills made them successful, they can't recognize what is now missing. By using testing to ascertain and address weak selling areas in an existing sales team, companies can also tailor their training to fit the needs of each salesperson. Whether you are boosting up your present sales staff, or hiring new salespeople you need to define what is truly important in a sales candidate. Target for these qualities, then along with your other hiring methods, test candidates to insure that they truly possess these capabilities. Remember, a lot of salespeople are much better at touting themselves than your product. If you practice targeting for hiring skills you'll have a better chance of weeding out these self-promoters and getting exactly what you want in an employee, plus save a significant amount in training dollars. By targeting for skills when hiring, you can treat your sales team to a real bull's eye instead of letting your recruiting arrow fall to earth you know not where. Lousig-Nont and associates has compiled a free report entitled 'your sales destiny: success or burnout, 8 questions give you the clues." It is available at no charge by calling their toll free number, 1-800-477-3211, or by writing to Sid Robinson: Lousig-Nont and associates, 3740 S. Royal Crest Street, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89119. E-mail: helen-robinson@usa.net