Crafting Hiring Success: Identifying Key Attributes in Sales Reps

Cracking your own code may be the secret to hiring great reps

Here are 20 characteristics that you might agree are important to have as a sales representative:

1. Time Management

2. Organization

3. Optimism

4. Personal Motivation

5. Listening Skills

6. Curiosity

7. Communication Skills

8. Coachability

9. Self-Awareness

10. Team Player

11. Initiative

12. Resourcefulness

13. Integrity

14. Adaptability

15. Competitiveness

16. Closing Skills

17. Prioritization

18. Likeability

19. Empathy

20. Resilience

You can probably add several more to the mix.

Hiring good sales people is critical for any sales leader.

Finding the right person to hire is one of the core competencies of a sales leader, but often we outsource much of the process to HR or a recruiting firm, hoping that they get it right, and often they don’t.

I think this is primarily for two reasons:

1. They haven’t identified the must-have characteristics.

2. They are not vetting candidates with these characteristics in mind (with any measured discipline).

Most likely, you can look at your top salespeople and easily identify one or two qualities about them that make them special or unique.

You will rarely, if ever, find all of the characteristics above in a single person, let alone a candidate who walks into an interview looking for a job.

So what do you do?

We identified several characteristics in our top salespeople that we felt were “must-haves” to be successful on our team. Note: This may be different for your team or your sales process.

Then we divided those characteristics into “Teachable” and “Non-Teachable” groups.

Lastly, we created questions we thought would help us understand if a candidate has the characteristics to be successful. Okay, then we used them to interview candidates.

Here is the list of our Must-Have Characteristics grouped into teachable and non-teachable:

Non-Teachable: Things we can't teach

• Optimism

• Need for achievement/personal motivation

• Curiosity/Listening

• Self-awareness/coachability

• Initiative/Resourcefulness

Teachable: Things we can teach

• Organization/Prioritization

• Communication skills

• How to be a Team player

• Developing initial relationships

Why teachable and non-teachable?

Isn’t everything learnable or teachable? Maybe…

This stems from a belief that some things come naturally to some people. Or some people are oriented towards, say, optimism versus pessimism. I believe it is difficult to teach someone to have innate personal motivation or natural optimism. I don’t want to get into the argument that people are born a certain way or that anyone can learn anything given the time, environment, and resources… it’s true… Humans are amazing and have the capacity to do amazing things, including dramatically changing their own behaviors and circumstances.

I do think we can look for candidates with characteristics that we’d like them to have already and also characteristics that we are willing to and/or have the capacity to teach.

This is also unique to your organizations.

When looking at a candidate, I’d put more weight on them bringing the non-teachable characteristics to the team than the teachable ones. If they have all of them – bonus, but I really want to hone in on the non-teachable ones.

How do we do that?

Questions designed to uncover these characteristics.

A Scorecard to see how they do to our standard.

We’ll dig deeper into the questions in our next article followed by the scorecard after that.

Thanks for reading!

-Joe