The Challenge of Recruiting for Sales Reps

I firmly believe that recruiting is something that is in your blood. You cannot be a halfhearted recruiter and be successful in the role. If you are passionate about recruitment and love to help others, you will be successful in this career by default. I firmly believe that I fall into the latter category. I love working in recruitment EXCEPT when I am tasked to recruit sales reps, or any sales professionals, for that matter.

My reasons for this pet hate of mine are as follows:

Sales reps always oversell themselves during the interview: As good as sales reps are at selling their products, they are equally as good at marketing themselves. This can result in salespeople overselling themselves during the interview process and then underdelivering during their probation period. Even though seasoned recruiters have a well-developed “balderdash” filter, some sales reps still manage to sneak through our radars. I try to circumvent this situation by doing thorough referencing from the candidate’s previous sales managers; this regularly goes a long way to undercover the truth about a sales reps’ past performance.
Sales reps are usually overly confident people: Let’s face it, sales reps have to be fearless, and they have to display excellent people skills. This also makes them difficult to recruit as their defiance, and often brash personalities, make it difficult to assess their real cultural fit for the existing sales team. I find that I always get to know the ‘real person’ behind the bravado if I take the interview into a more informal setting. I try to meet sales reps for lunch or even better; I try to join them after hours for a beer and see if the bravado fades or if it is enhanced with alcohol.
Sales reps are naturally good presenters: Every sales rep that we recruit has to do some sales presentation to a hand-selected panel of senior members of our staff. Most sales reps are born with the “gift of the gab”, so they normally sail through the presentation part of this interview with ease. The real test however comes during the post presentation Q & A session. This is where we get to test the depth of the sales reps’ knowledge and see how well they would do when conducting a sales pitch to a subject matter expert. This is where we find that most sales reps fall short which makes me think that we should start the interview process with this step as it would save a lot of people, a lot of precious time, in the long run.
Sales reps do not always have the evidence to back up their sales achievements: As we know, sales reps are like fishermen, they always seem to inflate their sales successes to such an extent that it sounds like they have the best track record in the history of sales. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Luckily in this day and age we can always ask for evidence of these amazing, record breaking sales that have been made. The way that I do this is to ask for the candidate’s last six to 12 months’ worth of pay slips. This will soon give you a very clear indication about how successful this sales rep really is! Surely, if their salary is pretty much the same every month, they are not really doing as well as they profess to be. However, if there are consistently high payouts, over and above their basic salary, they are clearly reaching and exceeding their sales targets.
Sales reps always profess not to mind cold calling until they have to do it: Sales reps periodically pretend not to be too concerned about cold calling but this I think is part of their previously mentioned bravado. Unfortunately, the majority of sales roles require people to do a certain number of cold calls. When the pressure is on and sales reps have already contacted everyone in their network, the time has come to start making some new connections. This is when the proverbial wheels fall off for a lot of sales reps. To try to prevent this from happening, as part of the interview process, I like to get people to randomly call me and try to sell me their existing product or solution. I play the role of the difficult customer who really does not appreciate this ‘out of the blue’ sales pitch. This is always a good way for me to test the sales rep’s tenacity and telephonic sales ability.

I hope that blog has given you some food for thought to consider when it comes to recruiting the notoriously difficult sales reps. I believe that if you manage to implement some the measures that I have put in place into your sales rep interview process, you will be able to separate the mediocre sales reps from the exceptional sales reps.