Salespeople and Hiring

¶ … Employee Selection What type of interview would you use and why? The best type of interview to use in evaluating a new salesperson is unstructured, as this role in any company relies heavily on a prospect's ability to quickly ascertain opportunities and make the most of them. Salespeople by nature need to be able to also understand customers' needs, wants and the pains their organizations are going through. This type of intelligence and skill, combined with industry expertise, is difficult to ascertain through highly structured interview scenarios.

By relying on an unstructured approach to interviewing a salesperson, their innate skill sets and experiences in overcoming significant selling challenges will emerge in the conversation. Unstructured interviews provide the interviewer the opportunity to take discussions beyond the boundaries of a common format to better understand the innate strengths and weaknesses of a candidate (Aamodt, 2013). Using this approach for interviewing sales people will also deliver insights into how best they can align with a given company culture and how they will manage the processes internally for gaining support.

In short, an unstructured interview will also provide greater insights than structured interviews will most likely miss due to their highly formalized approach to gaining insights into prospects' skill sets (Aamodt, 2013). Often companies will expand on the unstructured interview process and create a more effective series of role-playing scenarios that give the interviewer an opportunity to find the best and worst traits of prospects. What's critically important is that interviewers see how a salesperson will work with prospects and how they will manage sales cycles successfully.

What types of interview questions would you use and why? The best questions for sales people need to center on their competence in managing long sales cycles while at the same time keeping everyone in the company updated on the latest progress on potential new accounts. This takes an exceptional level of communication, collaboration and ability to quickly interpret what's going on in a prospect and respond quickly. Unstructured interviews provide contextual insight into how prospects will manage uncertain situations (Aamodt, 2013).

The following are the top ten questions and answered that need to be asked of a salesperson's interview: 1. How do you manage the lead generating process? - The best answer will include mention of tight coordination with marketing, marketing operations and customer success programs (if available) in the company. Leads are generated from marketing programs, with marketing taking insights from sales on how best to optimize strategies to gain as many as possible. 2. What is your approach to selling? Price or Value? -- The best response is value. 3.

How can a sales person succeed in a highly commoditized industry? -- By focusing on customer relationships and trust first. 4. What was the best sales call you ever had and why? - See if the question leads to them mentioning that they won a deal based on months of creating trust and understanding customer needs. 5. What's the best book on sales you have ever read? - The Challenger Sale and anything by Dale Carnegie is a good response. 6.

What was the most difficult situation you ever faced in selling and how did you overcome it? -- Looking for the response of how initial rejection from a customer led to greater focus on their needs and winning a very challenging sales cycle. 7. How and when do you bring sales engineering or.