Interviewing Sales Professionals

This is a tricky subject.

When you are interviewing a sales professional, they are going to be selling to you - right? That is their job, to sell. Not just products or services but themselves.

Far too often, I have seen sales managers make bad decisions and regret it later, when the sales professional does not meet the mark.

I said it was tricky - why?

Simply put, it is not always down to the sales professional as to why they are not selling as much as you want. It is estimated by Harvard Business Review that only 1 in 250 sales professionals hit their target. I have seen onboarding programmes that don't support sales professionals getting up to speed and unrealistic short ramp-up times. Then you have to consider lead generation.

What I do know is that when you are interviewing sales professionals, you need to know they will sell to you, bend the truth a little or even worse, blatantly lie to you. So you need to put in measures to counter this and have truth traps.

Just like when you are selling your products and services, you may put traps in your proposals or presentations for your competition. The same applies to interviews.

I am not saying you call them out directly, but you need to think about the questions and whether they are going to call out concerns. Here is one example.

I used to ask a candidate, "Every sales professional has a contact, either a prospect or a customer contact, who they sold to, who would that be for you?". Typically, they would provide a name: "Oh yes, I worked with James Black, and we are still in contact". Then you ask them to elaborate on why it would be 'James Black', hoping to get the company name and when, but if not, you follow up with "How long ago was this and what was the company?".

The point of this example is that through conversation, you now have three data points to check. I would then check on LinkedIn the person, company and when they worked there. If all three aligned, then great, but even if one was missing, it would make me question why.

Another example is when I see they have made 'Presidents Club', I ask them about their experience and how they felt. I would ask them about the place and even the details. I remember once interviewing someone who had gone to the Dominican Republic on a club trip, and they mentioned an amazing water park, so I said, "I am planning to go there next year, I have kids who love water parks - what's the name? I got an answer, looked it up, and it did not exist. Small but little details can say a lot.

I have used many other techniques to flush out who may not be right or worse, lying about their position, results and relationships!

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