How To Select The Right People For Competitive Sales Environments
thinksales|February - April 2017

Finding and identifying high effort sales people from within the available candidates is one of the most important parts of building a top performing sales team.

John Marshall
How To Select The Right People For Competitive Sales Environments

You know you can’t succeed without plenty of talent on your sales team. Extremely talented sales people who are ready to put in the effort required can be hard to come by; but once you find them, they’re invaluable to your organisation.

So what should you look for to predict sales performance?

At Self Management Group, we have over 35 years of experience and research into what it takes to be successful in a sales role. We use a simple equation to determine the suitability of a candidate:

TALENT X HABITS X FIT

1 TALENT

Can the candidate do the job?

When assessing a candidate’s talent, you should look at two distinct aspects:

1. Potential

We call a candidate’s potential their ‘DNA’. It’s the stuff you can’t train; the candidate either has the potential to be an effective sales person or they do not.

You must make sure your sales people have the right DNA to do the job. The biggest waste of resources is trying to train people who don’t have the potential to do the tasks you’re asking of them. Without the DNA, they won’t have the ability to learn the skills necessary for them to be effective.

A psychometric profile is your most useful tool for measuring a candidate’s DNA.

2. Training, Competencies, and Skills

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