The Rainmaker

The quality of your sales talent is one of few elements to profoundly impact the long-term success of your business.

Yet, few organizations have the recruiting structure in place to attract, identify, and ultimately hire Sales Wolves -- high achievers.

I spend a great deal of time writing about Sales Wolves.  What defines a Sales Wolf. How many organizations lack them or once they have them, fail to nurture and retain their Wolves.

When a person is purchasing a sports car, they do not go to the dealership and randomly test drive every single car on the lot until one feels right. They do not test drive a minivan, nor a SUV. They go directly to the sports cars. Why? Because they came to purchase a sports car! To test drive other vehicles would be a WASTE OF TIME.

Yet in the sales hiring process, we have all kinds of inefficiencies for God only knows what reason. I believe this is due to disorganization, lack of business acumen and power intoxication. What gets measured gets improved. Most sales hiring is done in a very ad hoc manner.  

Is your mindset one that is reactive or proactive?

For most CEOs and sales leaders, turning around a sales team is a reactive, futile effort that occurs ONLY when the sales team is floundering or dragging the company under. In most reactive sales team turnaround instances, the effort is futile because the mindset that got them to floundering / dragging the company under is what ultimately keeps the doomed company on track to destruction.

You only have one chance to do this the right way.

Building your sales team will define the short- and long-term success of your business. You only get one shot. When your company is founded or when a new business unit is first set up, assembling a team of Sales Wolves is critical.

But here is the sobering truth: Few organizations do it well.

Few decisions impact a business model more than the quality of sales talent hired to represent a company.

It happens all the time. Sales hiring managers predicting strong sales performance from a candidate who later performed poorly.

This train wreck is easy to avoid.

The candidate positively lit-up multiple biases that the sales hiring manager was unaware were being lit up. The hiring manager should be selecting sales hires based on the merits of their background, education, experience, and sales personality match.  

If only the egos of those involved in the sales hiring process were hedged by a data-driven sales hiring strategy.

...what?

Most sales job interviews are meaningless.

“Nothing happens in business until something gets sold.” - Thomas J. Watson, IBM Chairman and CEO, Called “The World’s Greatest Salesman”

All of our business successes hinge on selling. Sell and succeed. Don’t sell and die. It is an absurdly simple formula.

So why do so many businesses screw it up?

The death of a business ultimately starts at the head – the CEO. What the CEO allows, so shall the sales team.

All problems start at (and in) the head.

Have you ever seen a star pitcher or quarterback just lose their IT factor in the middle of the season? Their mojo is gone. They can’t score a touchdown or strike out a guy for anything. But just a week or two (or a season or two) prior, they were at the top of their game.

Sure, there is the inevitable physical decline in athletes, but that’s usually pretty recognizable. This is different. I would even say it is an aura they project.

They lost their mojo.