In writing my new white paper, the Definitive Guide to Making Quota, I had the good fortune to interview five of top sales experts:
1. Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies
2. Kendra Lee of The KLA Group
3. Kevin Temple of Enterprise Selling
4. Jim Dickie of CSO Insights
5. Dave Stein of ES Research
One conclusion became clear from my research. Companies are doing a terrible job of selecting salespeople — as quota achievement continues to plummet. Let’s examine why.
More and more companies look for people with industry experience and vertical knowledge. But as the book, Made to Stick, points out, this leads to the Curse of Knowledge — you know the subject so well, that you cannot imagine what it’s like not to have the knowledge. As a result, salespeople do not talk in the customer’s language and the Company loses product differentiation.
In reality, great salespeople are great story-tellers. They are great listeners. They take a complex topic and relate it in simple, customer-centric language.
Do businesses look for great story-tellers, great listeners and the ability to make the complex simple? No, they don’t. So we have massive turnover and poor results.
It’s time folks. Find the great story-tellers, the passionate ones, and the ability to make the complex simple. You’ll be glad you did.
P.S. We’ve lined up the very top expert in Content Marketing for a webinar on March 11th at Find New Customers. Go and sign up.
What do you think? What’s been your experience with hiring salespeople? We love comments and provide easy buttons for sharing.
Jeff is the President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” who has turned the website into the best source of free information on lead generation anywhere. His white paper, How to Find New Customers, has become the Bible of demand generation for many firms.
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Jeff Ogden
Excellent job of relating the book “Made to Stick” to salespeople. You hit the nail on the head and understand that the best skills of a good salesperson can’t be taught, but knowing an industry and/or products can. I see so many sales managers saying the typical “we only hire people with industry experience”, which really closes the door to opportunities of hiring high quality sales teams.
I have a 90%+ success rate for hiring successful salespeople and nothing in my process mentions prior experience in an industry or position.
Great post,
Scott Smeester
http://Scott.Smeester.com
Thanks for your note, Scott. But there are plenty of brain-dead CEOs out there that think to sell backup software, you need experience selling backup software.
I walked into a large BI software company with zero experience, took over their largest customer, and delivered a 282% revenue increase in one year. Two vastly “more qualified” salespeople could not touch those results.
The crux of the problem is that the things companies think they need in sales does not match the things buyers are looking for. If they focused on what buyers really want — stories, great listeners, etc. they’d hire very differently.
I’m certain your process is much different, Scott.
Jeff
Jeff,
In addition to hiring the right salespeople, I would suggest that having a well-designed sales process is critical to “making quota.” Your post prompted me to re-read a few pages of CSO Insights’ “2009 Sales Performance Optimization” report. CSO Insights found that companies that developed and used a formal sales process achieved higher “win” rates than companies with no process or an “informal” process. Since you interviewed Jim Dickie, you may address this point in your new white paper. I look forward to reading it.
David,
Could not agree with you more about the need for a well designed sales process. And yes, that is covered in my new white paper. But my goal in this post was to explore the misguided approach of most sales recruiting, where they look for industry knowledge, product knowledge, etc. A more interesting question would be “What do prospective buyers like to see in salespeople?” They would undoubtedly say things like:
1) Can explain in terms we understand
2) Listens to our needs
3) Understands OUR business
I’d bet a $20 bill right now that not one would say industry knowledge, product knowledge, etc. Yet that’s what most hiring managers look for.
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Jeff,
You bring up a great point in that we aren’t always hiring the right people today. But another factor also needs to be considered. We are also not properly supporting the new people we do hire.
Looking at the 2010 Sales Performance study data, we found that sales training budgets were down 13% per rep from a year ago (and the 2009 numbers were already lower that 2008).
With ramp-up times for new sales people continuing to lengthen, we have to reexamine the level of investments we are making in getting them prepared to sell our offerings as effectively as possible, as soon as possible.
Regards,
Jim
Good point, Jim. Companies do a poor job of select new salespeople, but as your data shows, they also do a poor job of supporting their existing salespeople. Sales training budgets cut by 13% is a bad sign indeed.