The A-Team

One mediocre salesperson can destroy a successful sales team. It doesn’t matter how much training, coaching or counseling you apply or how many probationary periods you allow. Hiring the wrong salesperson can take an emotional toll on you as the sales manager and on the sales team, but more importantly, your company can take a financial hit in lost opportunity dollars and costs to replace that “wrong” person.

Unfortunately, most managers start recruiting when a salesperson is leaving. That often means they settle for someone just to fill a void. This can be a costly error: Think about the impact an incompetent rep can have on a territory. If they are burned by an unqualified rep, customers will find it hard to trust the next rep that makes a call. Instead, recruit constantly. You will have a file full of pre-qualified candidates you can call upon when needed.

If the recruiting and interview processes are done right, you can bring science to the art of hiring the right person. Be ready to reject stereotypes. The best salesperson you can hire is an aggressive extrovert who has been selling for 10 years, right? Not necessarily. Many clients have told me that they felt more comfortable with introverts, saying that they were more trustworthy, even if they were less experienced. Many inexperienced reps with a great desire to learn push themselves harder to succeed and do better on the job, exhibiting more loyalty and requiring less maintenance. How can you spot this type of talent? Try this five-step hiring system.

Step 1: Job Description

Break down the salesperson job description into three sections: responsibilities, accountabilities and reporting. Responsibilities describe the “doing” of the job. For example: You are responsible for making calls, conducting face-to-face sales calls, developing sales proposals and issuing quotes. The accountabilities section describes theexpected results. You are expected to meet or exceed your quarterly quota, maintain satisfied clients in your territory (as measured by our annual client survey) and develop and discuss a quarterly sales plan. The reporting section tells the sales reps what must be reported to their managers and when. You must submit a pipeline and activity report every Friday by 4 p.m. Bottom line, the job description identifies the qualities and behaviors that are essential to being effective in your sales organization.

Step 2: Job Posting

A job posting on Monster.com, Yahoo’s HotJobs.com or Careerbuilder.com can be an effective way of generating candidates. Consider alternatives like craigslist.org or college alumni boards. Other sources for new recruits can come from your own professional connections on networks like LinkedIn and Plaxo.

When you’re running a general ad, such as “Marketing rep wanted, potential for making lots of money, great opportunity for career advancement,” you run the risk of getting a high number of unqualified responses. I recommend an additional step: Give instructions to your candidates to submit a cover letter along with a résumé. Be specific about what you want to see from them. Ask for a summary of why they are qualified for the position, as well as identifying their top three philosophies in succeeding in sales. You may discover a variety of useful things about your candidates right away. You will also get to see writing samples. Incidentally, if you do not receive a cover letter answering these two questions and you decide to interview the person anyway, it might it be a good idea to ask them in person, right off the bat.

Step 3: Interview Template

Create a template of best practice open-ended, situational questions to expose specific qualities that tie back to the job description. Here are a few examples:

-If you are looking for discipline and good organization skills, you might want to ask candidates to describe what they would do upon returning to the office immediately after making a sales call. If they give responses such as “enter notes into the company CRM [customer relationship management] system” or “schedule follow-up phone calls and meetings in the calendar,” then they just gave you a good response.Avoid asking, “Are you organized?” What do you think their answer will be?