Something to consider. When you're recruiting a sales team, the natural tendency is to give a lot of weight to how candidates present themselves in an interview. While good communication skills are undeniably important in sales, relying solely or largely on interview performance can lead to many issues. In 20 years, we’ve talked to more than 5,000 sales managers about their hiring practices.
Here are a few real life scenarios we’ve coached:
Largest construction equipment sales and service company in top 10 market. Had hired a team that excelled in the interview but lacked other essential skills, like tenacity or coachability. The result? A team that couldn't meet sales targets despite making a great first impression.
Charisma can be deceptive. This client, a large insurance company with over 2000 agents had been recruiting salespeople who had the charm to win them over in an interview but lacked the persistence, empathy, or analytical skills to actually close deals and maintain customer relationships.
This large call center was focusing on phone interview first impressions which meant they were not putting enough emphasis on other important factors like their ValuesMatrix(tm) and StylesMatrix(tm) scores, past sales performance, references, or situational judgement tests that could be more predictive of job performance.
An industrial plastic mold manufacturer had hired their team based on having an engineering degree and, then, purely on how well they answer questions and present themselves. And was making that decision after less than three separate interviews. Three months down the line, finding that their hires were great at starting the conversation, but can't keep it going into the third or fourth meeting with the prospect. Talking is not selling. Which means they had to start the recruitment process all over again.
Let's say you hire a team that seems to have great interpersonal skills, based on their interviews. However, you later find out they're not adaptable, and they struggle to sell a new product line that the company launches.
In the rush to assemble a team, you lean heavily on interview assessments. Unfortunately, you come to realize that some of your new hires exaggerated their sales achievements, and they can't deliver the results they promised.
Interviews can be practiced and rehearsed. Even if candidates perform well during the interview, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll perform well under the pressures of a sales environment, which could lead to disappointment and turnover.
The candidates may ace behavioral questions but may lack industry knowledge or technical skills that are crucial for your particular sales environment.
You discover that some of your best-performing salespeople were actually quite reserved in their interviews. They might not have excelled in an interview setting, but they excel where it counts—on the sales floor.
You may find out too late that some of your hires lack the teamwork skills needed to collaborate with the rest of the team, which can create internal issues and affect overall performance.
In each of these examples, the issue arises when the process of recruiting a sales team relies too much on how candidates handle themselves in interviews, instead of a holistic view that includes multiple criteria.
