hiring salespeople
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Top 5 Keys to Hire Ideal Sales Candidates at Your Company
- September 11, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There’s no time like the present to hire salespeople but your sales recruiting strategy must consider the ever changing ebb and flow of the candidate pool. This article explains the five keys to hiring ideal salespeople for your company and has lots of data to back it up.
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Can Malcom Gladwell Explain the Sales Hiring Problem?
- January 4, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For the sales leaders who claim they trust their gut, this book and its many examples demonstrates that there is no such thing as accurate gut instinct. Like a coin flip, you’ll be right half the time. So what can companies do to improve on these odds? Assessments.
Consider these statistics from several sources:
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Is 28 Years Long Enough for a Sales Assessment Trial ?
- September 19, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Isn’t 28 years long enough for us to prove ourselves?
Clearly OMG is not for everyone. Companies that sell at the lowest price, companies that are the brand leaders, and companies that have a transactional sale don’t need to hire good salespeople because their salespeople are order-takers. But what about everyone else?
After consistently proving its legendary predictive accuracy making it a no-brainer to use OMG, there are five possible reasons why companies didn’t use OMG to assess their sales candidates over the past 28 years:
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Must Read – How a 15% Corporate Minimum Tax Will Impact Companies and Sales Teams
- August 10, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The primary point of today’s article is to point out the irony of hiring 80,000 agents but you’ll have to read a bit of background before I can point out the irony.
So why are they hiring 80,000 IRS agents?
They want the rich to pay their fair share and that sounds fair, but let’s go beyond the headline and general talking point. There are 724 billionaires in the US (of 2,775 worldwide) and it’s not that hard to find a millionaire because there are 20 million of them in the US (50 million worldwide). If they target billionaires it would work out to 110 new agents per billionaire. Sounds like overkill. They also want to make sure that corporations pay their fair share so this legislation imposes a minimum 15% tax on corporations.
Let’s focus on the 15% tax for a moment. I can think of only three ways for corporations to deal with that surcharge:
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Understanding Competency Based Assessments – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!
- June 24, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
As an example, let’s say you were seeking to hire a ditch digger. While you must identify someone who is strong, can use tools and dig holes, the width and depth of the hole, as well as the difficulty of the digging is more important. Will this individual dig in sand, screened loom, compacted soil, clay, gravel, or rock? If an assessment, even one that was specific to ditch-digging, only looked at the tools they had available and their ability to dig in general, it would not necessarily identify someone who could dig monumentally huge holes in soil with large rocks.
It’s the same with a sales assessment.
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Can You Find The Perfect Sales Candidates for Your Sales Team?
- December 1, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I am helping one company find a single needle-in-a-haystack sales leadership candidate and it has taken nearly six months. I am helping another company find 3 sales leaders and received 3,765 applications. What’s the difference?
For the answer to be meaningful, we have to look at the entire job market, not just sales candidates.
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The Chainsaw Massacre and Building Sales Teams
- September 14, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Despite the existence of both a science and a process for hiring salespeople, most efforts also tend to be hit or miss and the emphasis always seems to be on miss. There are plenty of reasons why, and we can discuss some of them, but the biggest and most insane reason is…
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A Home Run – How the Right Data Can Help You Hire Your Ideal Salespeople
- July 13, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
From time to time I’ve posted some compelling top/bottom sales team analyses using sales assessment data from Objective Management Group (OMG). From nearly 250 data points in 21 Sales Core Competencies, we identify the specific findings and scores that differentiate a company’s top 3 performers from their bottom 3 non-performers.
There are several reasons for doing this:
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Why More Salespeople Are Being Recommended for Difficult Selling Roles
- June 24, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Something else we haven’t done for quite a while is revisit Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales selection statistics on the percentage of people that are recommended for various selling and sales management roles.
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Startups Almost Always Get The Sales Thing Wrong
- March 19, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Typically, founders of start ups put it all on the line – everything – their house, savings, loans from friends and family and perhaps bank loans, angel investments and more. As brilliant as they are, in most cases, sales is not one of their strengths and it’s not until the business has a logo and a website when they realize that success won’t come until somebody sells something. Oh-oh, now what?
