How To Hire Salespeople In An Effecient Manner

The ability to hire salespeople in a quick, dependable, and efficient manner is one of the skills every entrepreneur needs to succeed in their business. Even if it’s just your first time hiring anybody, you should know the basics of how to screen for the drive, commitment, and overall expertise of your salespeople. Today, I’m going to give you a few tips on how to weed out the best salespeople in an interview in a fast way, so as to not waste your (or their) time.

Why Is Hiring Salespeople So Important?

Early on in your business, you’re probably doing all of your sales on the phone or through some other form of manually personal work. This takes high expenditures of time and focused attention for you. As your company grows in revenue and influence, your time may be better suited for other operational duties.

When that occurs, it’s probably the moment you want to hire a salesperson. Other than perhaps a customer service representative, the first person you want to hire is a salesperson. Many businesses utilize this early on in their growth.

The Purpose of a Salesperson

The salesperson’s main objective is to take over a lot of the day-to-day grinding out of sales calls for your business. They may do some of the initial closes for you. This frees up a large amount of your schedule for you to handle your other duties within your business.

Think of it as its own form of a funnel – you begin generating revenue, which allows you to have enough money to get a salesperson on payroll. With the time freed up by having an extra employee, you can find new leads that lead to more revenue. The other way to do this would be the opposite of someone doing the calls for you: hire someone to generate leads while you spend your time closing. This similarly will save the time that in the past you would have to use in order to generate leads.

Hire Salespeople To Save YOU Time

So for example, if you have a list of phone numbers, you may want a salesperson who is going to just call them and see if the customers are even interested in being sold to. Then, you can either have the same person actually try to close them, or you can hire an additional sales assistant to fill the promising leads into your schedule.

Your job then remains to close the sale, but you don’t have to spend half of the day screening all those phone numbers or filling in the data need for the sale. This will save you massive amounts of time. And, believe it or not, it’s really cheap – you can pay someone to sales list you for $3-$8 depending their level of English proficiency, or another language. For me, American English $6-8 the maximum pricing to pay a sales representative, and they do a very good job… so that’s around the ballpark figure you want to be aiming at.

How To Interview When Hiring Salespeople

So when you’re hiring someone, how does the whole hiring process go? I have another video explaining the entire process from top-to-bottom, but let me go into more details for salespeople specifically.

For salespeople, you need to make it a very, very hard interview where you’re leading the conversation. It’s got to be difficult for them to take over the flow of the discussion. This is because you want a salespeople who can take over a conversation. If they can’t do this, customers are going to walk all over them and nothing will get done.

A salesperson who can’t dominate a conversation is no salesperson at all. If you can interrupt them very easily and break their train of thought… do you still trust them with doing sales with your company? Probably not.

Test If They Can Keep Their Cool

There are several ways to test the potential hire’s conversational skills. You can just start talking to the person next to you in the office while performing the interview, even if it’s just on Skype, just to see how much BS the interviewee is willing to cope with. Customers may perform similar social faux-pas while a sale is going on. Test your interviewee – will they just let you ramble, or will they respectfully (but firmly) fire back – “Excuse me, this is an interview – treat me with respect, please”

In real life, if your salespeople are calling potential business connections and they keep getting secretaries on the line and can’t get a hold of the boss or person in power, they’re going to have to lay down the law a bit and get your company noticed. And they have to do it in a way that doesn’t scare away customers. So you can screen for all of this in a very short conversation by being a bit of a difficult person during the interview.

See If They Can Handle Unexpected

Another thing you can do is give them 10 minutes to read your website in the middle of your interview, and basically interrupt them at around the 3rd minute of their reading. Then, you get them to try to sell YOUR product to YOU, with their limited knowledge and the shock of having just been interrupted.

By then, they barely know anything, so they’ll have to improvise. And this is no easy feat, mind you. The basic point of this is that you don’t want a person who just follows a script. You want someone who can use their brain as well, think on the fly, that sort of thing.

This is a particularly excellent test because a lot of these sales guys are used to following a script. You’ll get to see if they get nervous by the changing expectations of the conversation or if they can successful handle the ambiguity.

An additional tactic I like to use in a sales interview is 15 second pauses. I’ll say something, just stop at a random point, and pause for 15 seconds. I’ll even turn off my microphone. It’s super awkward for them. They just kind of sit there wondering, “Well, what’s going to happen now? What am I supposed to do?” Depending how they handle it, you can be a judge of their future effectiveness.

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What this comes down to is testing for a salespersons drive, hunger, and coolness under pressure. If they can’t cut it with you, they likely won’t be able to do so with a customer, especially as you become more successful and the sales are more expensive for your audience. Find someone with the eye of the tiger and you’ll be well on your way.