Ricardo Barriga

How much is a bad hire costing you?

If you have 20% of your sales team delivering 80% of the sales figures, would it make a difference to your business if you were able to attain a team of sales superstars?

What would that mean for your business?

The average bad hire can cost a company $120K, yet most hiring decisions are made after an hour-long interview, and according to Chet Holmes’s book, “The Ultimate Sales Machine”, most CEOs estimate that a single bad hire may cost them millions. So how important is it to hire a superstar over an average salesperson?

Given the importance of the sales function, you would think that companies would spend vast amounts of effort on recruiting great salespeople. Many companies, however, tend to be less scrupulous about hiring salespeople than engineers or accountants. This is because of a lack of understanding of what it takes to be a sales superstar and how to spot one in an interview.

Interviewing salespeople can be difficult, as they are trained to interact with different types of people, and sometimes they can be very good at telling you what you want to hear. Using assessment tools to evaluate a person’s sales skills is highly recommended, and this will work effectively when combined with a strong interview.

In order to find a great salesperson, we must first understand what makes someone a sales superstar. So what makes a superstar?  A sales superstar is someone who is put in a difficult situation with poor tools, no training, and bad resources and still, after a short amount of time, begins to outperform the best salesperson in the team. Hiring someone like this is not about getting lucky but about understanding the personality characteristics that fit the job for which you are hiring and having the tools to identify the candidates that possess those characteristics.

The recipe for a sales superstar is a combination of ego strength, ego drive, empathy, a superior skill set, training, and market knowledge. Top performers have a combination of various skills, including being naturally empathetic, patient, persistent, and thoughtful. They are also able to relate to structure and organization, have a strong ego, desire to control situations, and assert themselves in every interaction.

In part two of this blog, we will discuss how to interview and find a sales superstar.