Over the last 5 years or so I’ve interviewed a wide range of candidates for our business development role here at AG. They all have a variety of backgrounds from 10+ years of inside sales experience on down to a recent college graduates anxious to get their feet wet in the sales world. What I’ve discovered is that nothing surprises me anymore.
Now I wouldn't consider myself to be the toughest person to interview for. I usually try to play the role of good cop and allow the other folks I work with make the candidate squirm with the extra tough questions. My goal is to get a true understanding of whether or not the person is interested in working on my team. And are they someone that I can see myself spending 40-50 hrs a week working with. I recognize that I can't expect every solid candidate I interview to be someone that I want to head out and grab a beer with, but at the very least will they add value to AG? Could they challenge me to be better at my job? My president made a good point recently ..."If I'm thinking at any point during an interview that I want to "help" this person, then I probably shouldn't hire them. We’re not offering charity here; we're trying to bring in people that will help to grow the business."
Usually I try to set the scene by being relatively laid back in an attempt to draw out the interviewee's personality. Our culture is extremely important so I want to bring in people that I know can add to our work-place and co-exist peacefully with others. After a little small talk like ... any trouble finding the office? where are you from? ..I'll start with my first softball question to get them comfortable... So what interested in you the Business Development Representative role here at AG? Well apparently that isn't the easiest question for some candidates. A couple of my favorite responses include.. "Well if you worked at my current company then you would probably be looking for a new job too" or another beauty "The summer was over and I figured it was time to look for a job. Your company just happened to be the first company to call me back." Both true stories.
C'mon people since this is a sales job you need do a better job on selling ME on why YOU want to work at my organization.
Here are 6 warning signs to look for when a candidate comes in to interview for your company. Yes they may seem like interviewing 101 to some of us...but I've been unpleasantly surprised.
1) They trash their current or previous employer:
My first thought when people get into this is “ hmmm well golly, what will they say about me if they don’t agree with a decision I make?”
2) No research has been done on the company or the role they’re applying for:
If I’m going to spend a half hour of my time with you …then come PREPARED! I’ve fielded some interesting responses to my question asking them to explain to me what they understand that the job will entail. My favorite was “I’ll be selling office furniture here, right?” Nope sorry buddy…you might be confusing us with your last interview. Another true story.
3) They have little to no questions regarding the role they are applying for or on the company itself:
As with #2 above come prepared, surely there are a few things you would like to know about the role and the company.
4) They make their first or second question about the sales compensation plan or better yet vacation time:
I can respect that people are interested in what their compensation will look like, especially since they are applying for a sales job and all….but at least butter me up with questions about the job and AG Salesworks. And the vacation time question speaks for itself.
5) They never look you in eye:
At this point I’m thinking..”You got something to hide partner?” I understand they may be applying for a teleprospecting job that doesn’t require eye contact, but quite simply I’m not going to hire someone that I feel I can’t trust off the bat.
6) No follow-up email is sent after the interview thanking the company for their time:
Seems to me that this is common courtesy these days, if they want the job badly enough, they should go through the effort of typing up a simple thank you email.
From my experience as a hiring manager this has been a great way to identify a legitimate candidate from the rest of the field. It can at least be a better way of weeding out the folks that you are on the fence with. If they exhibit any of the warning signs above it may be time to remove them from the pool.
Happy Friday Everyone! This week we offered some answers and tips for some popular questions out there: How effective is hiring inside sales reps with no past experience in inside sales? What is the importance of providing your inside sales reps with a quality list to call into? How are you insuring that your reps are on track to meet their numbers for the month? And what are your thoughts on cold calling introductions?
Before I give a detailed recap of everything, I’d like to highlight a blog by Ardath Albee B2B Marketing Strategist. Here she had a great entry asking "Is Sales Stepping on Your Marketing Dialogue?" It really touched on the importance of communication between Marketing and Sales, and the importance of having them work together as a team.
Monday July 19th
The Benefits Of Hiring An Inexperienced Sales Rep – Chris Lang offers his take on the benefits of hiring someone with a clean slate:
“Our sales process is a bit unique and more than a couple of reps have come to us thinking they were going to crush their number only to leave with their tail tucked between their legs. As these inexperienced new hires grow into their roles, I am always pleasantly surprised with how fast they pick things up.”
Tuesday July 20th
Are You Giving Your Inside Sales Reps A Good Quality List? – Craig Ferrara discusses the importance of having a quality list for your reps:
“If you are dumping a list of marketing leads on the inside sales team that is filled with incomplete contact information, or is chock full of duplicates, then you are you putting them at an automatic disadvantage before they even pick up the phone. Have you taken into consideration how much that can negatively affect the progress of your campaigns or the growth of your pipeline?”
Wednesday July 21st
Mid Month Inside Sales Diagnostic Check-up – Pete offers some great tips to make sure your team is on track to have a great month:
“We don't just look how they've done, but we all look at whether or not they have what they need to finish strong for the last 2 weeks of the month."
Thursday July 22nd
The “Introduction Debates” of Cold Calling – Laney Pilpel talks about the repeated debates of Cold Calling Introductions, and offers some great suggestions:
“Over the past several years, I have spent a lot of my time studying different selling techniques, from Sandler to the SPIN selling model. Personally, I think the best method to use is a combination of all the selling methods out there – but most importantly, making sure to add a personal touch to your communication with a prospect, especially during your introduction. In thinking about this, I was reminded of a constant debate that goes on here at AG, but also for many sales organizations out there: Is there a proper way to engage a prospect when contacting them and how personal can you get?”
Friday July 23rd
Are Your Inside Sales Reps Good Detectives? – A new guest in our blog this week, Stephen Wolff discusses the importance of getting as much information as you can out of a prospect.
“I think of my job as a detective. When I call I try to use every minute that I am on the phone with someone to get as much out of the call as possible. This can be tough with time constraints, meetings and people who just really do not want to talk to people taking up their time with sales calls."
That wraps it up! We wish everyone a happy and safe weekend!
Hiring a new sales rep can be an interesting exercise for us. Our services are not the easiest to sell. We offer a solution that most companies think they can do on their own and for less than they will spend on our services. To compound this issue, a lot of these companies have used other services to solve their problem and have been "burned" by companies that offer pieces of what we do. Picture your shoes being untied as you go for a walk, but you can't bend over to tie them because you have your hands full with groceries. (Yes I know you could put the groceries down, but roll with me here). Anyways, a person comes along and offers to tie your shoes for you for five dollars. Seems to be a waste, but you need the shoes tied so you give the person 5 bucks. He ties your shoes and then as soon as you start walking you fall on your face dropping your groceries all over the street. You look at your feet only to discover the guy has tied your shoe laces together. You tie your shoes the correct way, start walking and they become untied again. Here I come along and say "hey I can tie your shoes for you so that they stay tied, but it will cost 10 bucks". That's a tough sell.
As we think about who to bring onto the team we will look at what always appears to be a million resumes. Each one has the true sales spin on it, using terms such as rainmaker, self starter and my favorite, elephant hunter. Many of them look great and I would be happy to hire several of them, though the "elephant hunter" seemed to be logical choice to me. I mean hell, if a guy can bring down an elephant, he can surely sell our solution. My CEO will look at all the resumes, listen to my recommendations and then proceeded to ignore all of them. He often prefers to hire the guy with a total of 0 days experience selling solutions like ours. He explains, "He has all the tools to do this job and no one knows it yet." I would be skeptical to say the least, but fast forward 6 months, and the guy is a rainmaker. How does this happen? Not that I get upset about it, but I thought for sure that we needed to invest significantly in someone with plenty of experience to get the job done.
As it turns out the inexperienced candidates greatest weakness was can be his greatest strength. They are a blank slate. As the person responsible for training I did not yet understand this. I would have to show him who to call, when to call, what to say, what steps to follow, how to prepare a proposal, how to negotiate, hell even how to dress for different meetings. I quickly realized how much easier it was to train someone who just listened and learned, and did not have any preconceived notions or bad habits to undo. Absorbing every piece of information I could throw at them, following our processes to a T. A lot of experienced reps would have used their knowledge from past sales experience to guide them in their sales process. This could be great. Then again, this could be awful. Our sales process is a bit unique and more than a couple of reps have come to us thinking they were going to crush their number only to leave with their tail tucked between their legs. As these inexperienced new hires grow into their roles, I am always pleasantly surprised with how fast they pick things up.
When I relay my surprise with how well they are doing to my CEO, he explains: "What I look for in a sales rep is work ethic, intelligence, personality and the willingness to learn. The sales process can be taught. The personality traits cannot. I trained you and you were a lot further behind than him. Now you are training him. The goal is to have all of us sell the same way, to have the same message and the same great results. It takes a bit more work, but the end result makes it worth it." He has created a process to develop a sales team that emulates the behavior and has the passion of the first person to successfully sell our solution, himself. There is no replacing a great experienced sales rep. They bring industry knowledge, they are usually up and running quickly, they have contacts and they don't need to be closely watched over. That being said, you may want to look into bringing on some unproven sales executives into the mix at some point. They are a clean slate ready to learn and execute the sales process in the way that you would like. If you have the time, they could be well worth the investment.
Before we recap this week’s Sales Prospecting Perspectives, we wanted to share another great article we liked this week:
In his blog on Tuesday, Umberto Milletti explains the importance of changing with your customers. Social Networking is booming and it’s important for the Sales world to stay abreast on what their potential customers are doing. He offers 5 steps on how to do just that in his blog titled: 5 Steps to selling to B2B Customer 2.0
Now onto the quick recap! With blogs this week by Chris Lang, Laney Pilpel, Pete Gracey and Nicole Puddester, they addressed some important questions about your inside sales team: Are your inside and outside sales reps working as a team? How do your reps manage their time effectively? How can you tell whether you’ve hired the right inside sales rep? And lastly do you make the most out of EVERY conversation you have?
Monday, June 21st
Getting your Inside Sales and Field Sales to Work as a Team? – Chris Lang provides a great comparison on how he and his inside sales team mate are much like Rigg’s and Murtough from Lethal Weapon, and why it’s important to work as team.
“Much like Riggs and Murtough, Steve and I didn't always work well together. It's not that he was ever a bad rep or I was a bad sales executive. We just weren't on the same page. Over the past couple of years we have worked on and refined our process to the point where Steve knows exactly what I am looking for in a lead and I know what he needs to find great opportunities. There a lot of different things that we do to keep in sync with each other. Listed below are the first steps that we took to make sure that we are getting things done as well as team…”
Tuesday, June 22nd
Can You Train Your Inside Sales Reps on Effective Time Management? – AG’s Manager of Client of Operations Laney Pilpel is growing to be one of the most informative bloggers here at AG. In this post she discusses the importance of teaching your inside sales reps effective time management.
“Some will argue that certain people have the intrinsic ability to manage their time well. Though some might be "better" at balancing their day, I think time management techniques are trainable, and we teach best practices here at AG as a result. Effective time management techniques can be taught immediately after a new hire begins, and also after an inside sales rep has been at the company for months - years even. We like to hold periodic training workshops and effective time management is a perfect example of a one hour training workshops that we would hold for all inside sales reps, new and old.
So what are the top three techniques we find most effective?...”
Thursday June 24th
Did You Hire the Right Inside Sales Rep? – Pete Gracey shares some helpful signs to look out for to determine whether you hired the right kind of inside sales rep for your company.
“We’ve all got great hiring processes in place I’m sure. We ask the right questions, run personality profiles, put potential hires through role plays, and do our best to select the best person for the job. However, there is only so much you can do on the interviewing side of the equation. Inevitably you are going to have a bad one slip into the ranks. I have some things you can look for during the first few days of a new rep being on the phone that should give you a good indication as whether or not you’ve hired a keeper.”
Friday, June 25th
Inside Sales Reps: Are You Making the Most of Every Conversation? – AG’s Manager of Client Operations Nicole Puddester offers great follow up questions for the top objections we are all hearing.
“The goal is always to qualify an account, extract pains, and create interest. Your objective is always to get to the end result, which is to qualify in or out. Just because someone expresses no immediate pain or interest, your job is not done. To make the most of every conversation you need to understand why there is no immediate need. Thus it is important to have the appropriate follow up questions ready for the various reasons that could be presented…”
There is no greater point of anxiety for all of us then that moment in time where we question whether or not we hired the right guy\gal as a inside sales rep. Teleprospecting is not an easy gig. At most companies the burnout rate is far higher for teleprospecting in comparison to other job functions. You are right in having some healthy anxiety about your new hire. Will he\she cut it on the phones? Do they have the work ethic that is required to be a great teleprospector? Will they fit into your culture? Most importantly…will they hit their number?
We’ve all got great hiring processes in place I’m sure. We ask the right questions, run personality profiles, put potential hires through role plays, and do our best to select the best person for the job. However, there is only so much you can do on the interviewing side of the equation. Inevitably you are going to have a bad one slip into the ranks. I have some things you can look for during the first few days of a new rep being on the phone that should give you a good indication as whether or not you’ve hired a keeper.
- The activity test: If you’ve hired well, you have placed a person in the seat that understands that mistakes will be made. You can only prepare a new hire for some of the things they will face on the phone. They are, after all, calling humans, and humans have a way of reacting in new and interesting ways all the time. That being said, you do your best to prep your new rep for all the things they will hear on the phone and see via email. Sadly, mistakes will be made. It’s a part of life. You’ve got to hope you’ve hired someone that “get’s it”. Someone that understands that mistakes will happen, but the key is not just to learn from them - the key is to make as many as early as possible so that you are up to altitude faster. I know a rep has a high likelihood of being great when they simply make more calls than the comp plan calls for. They understand that more activity up front accomplishes many positive things for them. It leads to more conversations faster so that they can get their hiccups out of the way earlier. They know that more conversations\calls at the start is necessary because they must do that in order to hit their lead goals due to the fact that they aren’t a seasoned vet yet. This also tells you that they aren’t afraid to tell the boss “yeah, I’m not afraid to make more calls than you asked me to”. Finally, it is a great indication of overall quality work ethic. People that put their best effort forward right out of the gates are most likely bringing the right work ethic to your team. All good things.
- The quality test: After your new rep has spent two days on the phone, run your “quality conversation” (QC) report from your Salesforce.com. Look for three things on this report. Total QC’s, Titles of the contacts associated with each QC, and the detail surrounding the conversations. The total QC activity for a “Great” new hire should be at least 10% higher than that of your average rep. The titles of the contacts should vary wildly as they try and get a feel for their target audience. Varied contact titles also indicates that they are using “0#” techniques to find something…anything of value out about the target organization. The detail or notes for each conversation should be well written and clear. This is self explanatory, decent writing skills are critical in this job. If the notes are sloppy or make no sense, you may have a problem on your hands.
- The cultural test: This one is tough for some people to swallow. When I discuss this with people they often criticize me for placing too much emphasis on how my employees feel about one another. We always agree to disagree on this point. For AG, the culture is everything. We’ve tried to create a place where people want to work. A place they miss when they move on. We’ve been successful in both areas so it is important that your new hire is exposed to that. Make a point to see how they are introducing themselves to your team. Do they gravitate towards your happiest and best performing employees...your “A” players? Or do you see them not interacting much at all with anyone? Either one of these is acceptable…however, be alarmed if you see your new hire gravitating towards your B and C employees. This can be a harbinger of potentially not so great things to come.
There is no exact science to alleviating the anxiety around a new hire, but these are some things I’ve come to look for that have always proved to be great indicators as to the quality of my hire. How do you put your mind at ease about your new hires?
I have been asked, several times, about the type of individuals I look for when hiring telesales reps. Many assume that, due to the nature of the job, we must have a revolving door of employees - this couldn't be further from the truth.
Our people are our product, and it is imperative that we hire individuals whose values are aligned with ours and who impact our culture in a positive way. By doing this, our turnover has been much lower then is typically seen in similar organizations.
These are the traits I look for when determining if someone is a good fit for our team:
1. Energy and Enthusiasm - Employees with a high level of energy and enthusiasm tend to do very well in an inside sales role. Since all communication is done over the phone, I need people who sound passionate about what they are selling.
Good energy is contagious and I look for reps who will boost morale if need be.
2. Inquisitiveness - People who ask a lot of questions and have a desire to learn new things tend to have a high level of success in a telesales role. When you are speaking with prospects it is essential that the right questions are asked in order to uncover pains and needs. People want to talk about themselves and employees who ask questions and show a high level of interest will get prospects to open up.
This skill is also important when an employee is going through training - you want someone who will ask clarifying questions so that they clearly understand what they are being taught. It also demonstrates their level of engagement in the training process.
3. Positivity - Let's face it; there are days when even the most enthusiastic rep does not feel like picking up the phone. The best reps are those that rise above that and push through. Every one gets into a rut now and then where it seems that leads are impossible to find. The more positive a rep stays during a dry spell the faster they will get out of it.
I also look for my team to be positive and encouraging of one another. I once had a new hire turn to me, after she finished her first week of training, and say "is everyone really THIS nice??" I laughed and told her that, yes, everyone was actually that nice and that our low turnover was a direct result of our positive and friendly culture.
4. Work Ethic - I look for people who take pride in what they do and understand that those who work hard will be rewarded. Employees that put in extra effort and time when they are behind in their goals and show initiative in taking on extra responsibility are the ones that will move ahead.
5. Acute Listening Skills - A telesales rep doesn't have the luxury of reading body language and picking up on non-verbal cues, therefore, they must be adept at listening for certain things that a prospect might say (or not say) that will help to uncover potential pain points. They must also be good active listeners and remember things that a prospect said earlier in the conversation or during a previous phone call. Strong telesales reps never cut a prospect off and instead wait for a prospect to complete their thought before asking their next question.
There are certainly other things I look for during the hiring process but these 5 traits are essential.
What else have you found to be important to look for when hiring a telesales rep?
A well trained teleprospector is the corner-stone of an efficient sales operation. Though they may not be closing business, they do play an integral role in your forecast and pipeline development. What we recognize at AG is that cold calling is not necessarily for everyone. When a new hire walks in the door with big aspirations to get into sales, what they have to realize, like any other job, is that they need to pay their dues cold calling and teleprospecting before they hop right into closing business. That all being said, we firmly believe that the first 90 days on the job let's us know one way or the other if a candidate is cut out to make teleprospecting calls.
Our corporate culture is very important to us here at AG. It is obvious to us that burn-out can have a big effect on our team's motivation to bang away on the phones each day. As a result, we try to cultivate the kind of setting that echoes the mantra of our co-owners: "play hard, work harder". A problem we occasionally encounter is a teleprospector may have difficulty understanding when to draw that line between work and play, and that is why it is important for us during training (and over the first few weeks on the phone) to set the appropriate tone with our new hires. It is absolutely not our intention to micromanage each person that walks in to our door , but after the first 90 days there are typically some common themes that arise that would indicate to us whether or not someone can handle the grind that can be teleprospecting. It would be easy for us to take the whole "sink or swim" approach, but that has never made any sense to me. You've taken the time to bring a candidate through an extensive interview process, run them through a thorough training...and then what? "Here are the yellow pages. Make it happen!" Guess what? Inevitably they are going to fail. We've found that you need to be there for them over their first 3 months as a continual support system and at the same time you need to pay special attention to potential warning signs.
Here an example of an outline that we've compiled to evaluate a new hire during their first 30 days on the job to help us better identify those signs:
1) Set first check-in meeting one week after going live on the phone.
2) Review daily activity numbers - such as conversation totals, leads passed, and feedback on leads passed
3) Assess new employee's team interactions:
a) Are they actively involved in team trainings?
b) Are they actively seeking help?
c) Are they responsive to constructive criticism?
d) Do they detract from the culture?
4) Reset activity expectations when needed and outline proper consequences . When activity levels are struggling, expectations will be reset
5) Schedule next weekly check- in meeting
This process will repeat itself each week during the employee's first 30 days on the phone. If the performance and effort does not meet our expectations, then we will go through the same process for the following 30 days. Once we hit the 60 day mark and we set some very specific goals around performance, and will again sit with them on a weekly basis. If they cannot hit the goals we've set by the 90 day mark generally we come to a mutual understanding that this job probably not a fit.
Now, we realize that there are other factors that can play a role in a new hire's poor performance, for example they could be calling into a tough vertical, or a bad list with inaccurate contact info. The most important thing we pay attention to in those cases is how they react to those roadblocks. As I mentioned in the outline, if they are proactively seeking out ways to improve output while adding positively to the culture, this will certainly be taken into consideration as we go through this 90 evaluation.
Every organization I've worked for has evaluated their employees differently, and maybe our approach at AG would not necessarily work for you or your organization. The key and is to pay attention to the warning signs that every new hire exhibits and determine your own process to quickly identify it, and then come up with an outline of how best to manage to it. In case you missed it, you can learn more by watching the webcast Perspectives on Teleprospecting: Best Practices for Hiring Teleprospectors.
How do you go about managing your new hire evaluation process?
Over the last 5 years interviewing teleprospectors, I have gotten to the point that nothing surprises anymore. The candidate who blew me away when I met with them face-to-face may not always turn-out to be a rain-maker on the phones. On the other side of the coin, the person I was lukewarm on turns out to be a perfect fit and ends up being the standard by which we compare all of our Business Development Representatives. They could meet with the president, Director, training team, other top BDRs, and you still may not get a true sense if they are going to be a success at the job. My point is this - interviews alone generally are not the single best indicator of a candidate's capability of making cold calls. That all having been said, there are other ways to identify if someone contains the traits necessary to get the job done. There are two other areas, as I mentioned on my webcast,
Perspectives on Teleprospecting: Best Practices for Hiring Teleprospectors, last week that can help you. It starts with a simple personality profile and ends with the most important piece, the phone-in role play.
I've always been told throughout my career that when your start a new sales job, seek out the individuals who are always at quota and then duplicate their approach. What I've come to discover is that typically, those individuals do not fit into just one particular profile or mold. Some took the approach of being more conversational and others were more to the point, but ultimately they managed to exceed their goals. That really isn't any different here AG. Each of our teleprospector has their style which we proactively encourage...as long as they are productive of course. That is why we bring in a simple personality profile to our new-hire process.
Now we're not expecting them to ace the Wonderlic or complete a 5000 word essay on "Why You Will Be a Success at This Job," since this is not the tone we want to set with a candidate when they first walk into our door.
What we want to do is simply uncover the potential traits that we already see in our top performers at AG. We've come up with our own brief personality assessment that has helped us to identify the tangible and intangible skills we see as being the foundation of a strong teleprospector. Before they fill the assessment out we explain that there are no right or wrong answers and they should answer each question honestly, rather than giving the answers they feel we want to see. This can also help us to understand what manager and/or project they would best align with (assuming we decide to hire them). I suggest putting a basic profile together or to use some standard on-line assessments like DiSC Profile. Once you've pulled that together, take the time to survey your team to see if you can pull out some common themes and then hire/manage based on the results.
The last, and in my opinion, most important component of the interview process, is the phone-in role play. Selling yourself face-to-face versus selling over the phones can, at times, require two very different skill-sets and we often find that the candidate can represent themselves much differently on an interview than they do over the phones. What we want to hear is an ability to project a message with some level of confidence; if they don't have command of the conversation they will be less likely to uncover and opportunity. They should also be able to handle a few curve balls we throw their way, from pricing objections to the prospect rushing them off the phones. The scenario we set typically revolves around them pitching AG Salesworks' services, and then have them push for a meeting with one of our reps. We don't set an overly complex scenario, but our reasoning behind it is to make sure that they have taken the time to understand our organization and how we uniquely position ourselves in the marketplace. If they can't sell the organization they are hoping to be a part of, it just might be another reason why you shouldn't bring them on-board.
No one said hiring a teleprospector would be easy. Think about some ways, outside of the standard interview, to draw out the traits you feel should be required in all your new hires.
Next week I want to cover some suggestions on how we feel you should evaluate your new hires, keeping in mind that a thorough evaluation (especially over the first 60 days) can determine long term success...or a quick flame-out.