You want your salespeople to disqualify all the prospects that should not be in the funnel. This prevents filling your funnel with a lot of garbage that you're going to waste your time and company resources on. But are you holding yourself to the same standard by getting rid of all the candidates that shouldn't be there? Weeding out bad candidates is easier said than done when managers are under a lot of pressure to fill open roles.
Managers know that they need to make sure to hit their revenue numbers, and vacant positions on the sales team are an incredible headwind to overcome. So managers are under a tremendous amount of pressure to fill that gap. This is especially difficult when the manager is personally filling in gaps becasue now they serve as player and coach. Rather than focusing on strategically building the team, they serve in the field protecting that territory until someone new is hired. On top of that, many sales managers don't interview frequently so they are rusty when they interview.
It's important that sales managers looking to add to their team establish a process and a mindset for hiring. That mindset is the same as the sales team should have, qualify or disqualify. It's five times more expensive to hire the wrong person and have to do it again within several months, rather than getting it right the first time. You're going to spend hours, days, months, cleaning up your mess later, so do it correctly up front.
Disqualifying is the entire point of a job interview but it's frightening to have vacant spots so we get less strict in our evaluation. It's easy to get lax on the screening process when you're doing double work, but if you put three mentality components together, it will be a short term problem.
• It's okay if they don't qualify, you're better off discovering that now.
• If the person in front of you does not sync up with your candidate profile, don't compromise on that criteria.
• Ask a pre-set list of questions and your ideal responses. If a candidate does not sync up closely to most of those responses, they are not the right fit.
Don't spend your interview time pushing a job that doesn't make sense for this person. The law of averages says that most jobs aren't going to fit the applicant. Just make sure, for you, that you have the right person in the right job.
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Social media and online marketing have quickly become the gold standard for prospecting. Ninety percent of top performing salespeople utilize social media as part of their approach. |
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