sales recruiting

  • Sales Selection Tools: Do You Get What You Pay For?

    • December 9, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you have used Indeed to hire salespeople, they will offer to have your candidates take a free sales assessment.  Doesn’t that sound great?  It is great if the assessment is helpful but it happens to be a useless piece of crap.  Why would anyone think, for even a moment, that there is any value in their lame, assessment-in-name-only test?

    In this article we’ll explore how Indeed’s sales assessment compares to the gold standard in sales candidate assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG).

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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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  • Most Salespeople are Underdogs Like the Boston Red Sox

    • October 13, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If your company is not the brand leader, market leader, or price leader; if you have a complex sale, a story to tell, a new technology, a new brand, a new product, a much higher price or a much tougher sale, then you are an underdog too.

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  • Key to Successfully Hiring Salespeople: Getting it Right Versus Getting it Over With

    • December 21, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Recruiting salespeople doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated, but it is a process and needs to be completed thoroughly and correctly.  Ask yourself this question: eighteen months from now, would you prefer to have spent five months to get it right and have a productive new salesperson, or three months getting it over with, only to have to do it again four months later, and again four months after that. 

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  • New Data Shows an Overlooked Finding Correlates to Sales Effectiveness

    • October 15, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Compatibility is not only important, it could be one of the most overlooked criteria in hiring sales candidates.  Let’s do a deep dive! 

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  • Top 10 Reasons Not to Test Your Sales Candidates

    • October 5, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Testing is not only normal, it’s expected.

    So why in the world is it so difficult to get Sales Leaders and HR professionals to test sales candidates?

    We hear everything, including this week’s top 10 reasons for not assessing:

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  • Masks and Sales Assessments – You Lose a Little Freedom and Control for Safety and Confidence

    • September 18, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The same thing happens when clients use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) accurate and predictive sales candidate assessments.  They lose a little freedom because they no longer arbitrarily interview salespeople who they feel like interviewing, and refrain from simply offering positions to people because they have a gut feeling about a candidate.   However, they lose some control because one half to two-thirds of the candidates will not be recommended when they aren’t great fits for the particular sales role for which the company is hiring, or simply aren’t very good salespeople – period.

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  • Using the Power of a Duracell to Help You Hire Perfect Salespeople

    • April 25, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Apparently, Duracell 9 volt batteries are the picture of consistency. 

    Last night, all 7 of our upstairs smoke detecters starting squawking within about 30 minutes of each other to indicate that their batteries needed to be replaced.  Given that the Duracells were installed in those units on the same day 4 years ago, one would hope that there are more things that we could rely upon to be as consistent and predictable.

    One of those things is Objective Management Group’s sales candidate assessments.

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  • Six Overlooked Factors When Hiring Salespeople

    • April 11, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’ve been sick with my annual bout of asthmatic bronchitis – fun stuff – and the question I’ve been asking myself is, “how long will it last this year?”  Historically, it’s takes 2-4 weeks for this to subside and it sucks big time during that 2-4 weeks.  But thinking about time frames got me thinking about one of the universal timelines and challenges facing companies everywhere.

    How long should it take for a new salesperson to become successful and why do so many of them fail?

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  • Hiring Salespeople Should Not be Like a Coin Flip

    • February 6, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Hiring salespeople does not have to be like a pot luck supper or a coin flip.  If you are selective instead of impulsive, good things will happen.  Take a look at the image below.

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