The Training Myth

Talent-based hiring is a far superior way to recruit salespeople. The talent interview more accurately reveals the presence—or absence—of the talents you need to hire, and we know that talent is the only reliable predictor of future performance. Your candidate’s learned skills are not reliable predictors; nor is past sales experience, industry experience, education or training! Only natural born talent—and talent cannot be taught; it must be hired.

This last paragraph should be quite disturbing to most of you. Most companies after all cite industry experience, sales experience, a certain level of education, etc. as minimum requirements for their sales job postings. But The Gallup Organization’s 30 year study of top performers proved beyond any doubt that natural-born talent is the only reliable predictor of future performance.

Okay. Easy enough. So what talents should I look for in my sales candidates then?

Throughout the nineties, I asked that very question to a great many recruiting consultants and sales experts and every one would list for me the “qualities of a good salesperson”—without any acknowledgement of the many different types of sales there are! This means I was being told to find the same talents whether hiring a salesperson to sell private jets to oil sheiks or ink cartridges to small businesses. I began to understand why I so often seemed to hire salespeople that I knew were solid or even outstanding performers at their last job, only to watch as they completely flopped at the new sale.

Better talent-casting for sales begins by acknowledging how completely different one sales job can be from the next in terms of the talents needed. Some are more customer service than selling. Some require a lot of prospecting while others require none at all. Some sales cycles are one day, others can be years. Some products or services require deep, complicated explanations where others come with straightforward, unchanging features and benefits. Some salespeople have to impact C-level executives while others deal with maintenance managers. Or consumers.

On top of that, top producing salespeople are “specialists”; they excel not only at certain sale types that perfectly match their talent sets, but also at particular stages of those sale types. For instance, the talents that make someone great at selling actually have nothing whatsoever to do with the talents that make someone great at prospecting. And the talents that make a dynamite prospector have little to do with ongoing customer service. From a perspective of the talent sets needed, these are actually very different jobs.

The first step to hiring better salespeople is to acknowledge that:

• Talent cannot be taught; it must be hired.
• The talents must be specific to your exact sale type, and there are many sale types.
• Wherever possible, assign different sales stages to different people (different talents), instead of asking the same salespeople to sell multiple stages.

Isolating talent in this way is the first step I observed when studying what the world’s best sales teams do so differently. They have learned that it is easier and more realistic to learn to hire more accurately, that to try to teach (train) top sales performance.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.