Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again with Chris Croner #210

In this episode we meet Dr. Chris Croner author of the book, Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again. In his book Chris shares his psychological research and practice in identifying the non-teachable personality traits common to top producing salespeople. Chris has identified this problem by focusing on personality traits. He found that the most important factor for success in sales is a person’s Drive – the inner fire that ultimately determines if he or she will thrive or fail. Chris and I discuss his system for identifying salespeople with the Drive to success, helping businesses improve their sales teams while avoid underperformers.

Have a Structure When You Hire

It’s important to be process driven in your hiring procedure.Too often hiring managers go with their gut vs a methodical process. The interviewer should be the one to take over the conversation. To make sure you never hire a bad salesperson again, do the following:

Effective assessment – Focused on persuasion, relationship-skills, organization skills
- 3 non-teachable skills Chris looks for he calls Drive
  - Need for Achievement – Win for winning sakes
  - Competitiveness
  - Optimism
- During the resume review – ask the critical questions:
  1. job description,
  2. your rank on a sales team,
  3. what got you to move on to the next position,
  4. if you could have changed 3 things in your past (magic wand) to have motivated you to stay, what would that be?
Past sales metrics – how much did you sell, how did you compare with your peers

Assessment Questions

One way of finding the true values of a candidate is to force them to pick one attribute over another. Consider the following assessment:

Rank these most like you , somewhat like you and least like you

I consider myself a leader
I have great relationship skills
I am very organized

Other questions that further identifies their character include:

What kind of sacrifices have you made?
When were you the most competitive?
When you you the most upbeat when everyone around you lost hope?

Remember candidates are on the best behavior. If you see ANYTHING wrong, this is bad. DON”T HIRE THEM!

Note people from big companies have infrastructure to help them succeed. Look for sellers of a similar sized company past.

Flatliners: People merely motivated by Money. It doesn’t last like those with a Need for Achievement

Looking for a Sales Job?

Be prepared. Make a list of behaviours sales managers would appreciate. Next to each item write down an example of where you’ve done that in the past. During the interview, use this list to drive the conversation. Make it clear, to your future boss, you have what it takes to knock it out of the park.