Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2018. Its opening, saying salespeople are among the most sought-after professionals “this 2018”, is based on a Randstad Spain press release about 2018 hiring trends.
Salespeople are among the most sought-after professionals this year, 2018, and according to various agencies, companies say they have trouble hiring good salespeople. Why does this happen when there are, in fact, excellent salespeople out there?
I’m currently running a kind of experiment to draw clear-cut conclusions about the problem companies have when they look for salespeople. Even so, I already have a clear view of the problem, which I’ve been seeing in the world of sales for decades and on which I’ve advised several companies in their search for sales talent.
Why can’t companies find good salespeople, and why can’t good salespeople find good companies to work for?
First of all, on the companies’ side, there’s a serious underlying problem. You can’t find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for. So the problem starts with this:
You can’t find good salespeople because you aren’t looking for sales profiles
It’s as simple as that. As we have said many times before, sales is a career in its own right. Meanwhile, companies say they’re looking for salespeople when in reality they get wrong the requirements they should be asking of a salesperson.
The first mistake when looking for a salesperson
“Salesperson wanted to sell electrical products (or medical equipment). Requirements: vocational qualification in electrical work or a university degree in a medical field.”
Here we have a clear example of a misguided search. These companies aren’t looking for a salesperson; they’re looking for someone who has studied a trade or a degree, and if that person ever takes up sales, they’ll most likely do it in passing until they find a job more in line with what they trained for. Either way, in most cases they are not sales profiles. You’d only have to ask them how many books on selling they’ve read. We’ll come back to this point.
See also: This simple question will help you hire good salespeople
At other times, they look for a salesperson who has already worked in sales in the same field or industry the job is for.
That might be understandable in terms of saving the time it takes to teach a salesperson how the industry works. However, when it comes to selling, despite what some people believe, the sales process is exactly the same in every industry. I’ll say it again: it doesn’t matter whether you sell vacuum cleaners or investment funds. The reason a customer buys is exactly the same: benefit, and trust in the person and the company.
See also: 9 facts every salesperson and company should know
Why do companies make this mistake when looking for salespeople?
The truth is that everyone likes to feel that what they do is more complicated than what people do in other sectors. In other words, a financial firm selling financial products to clients with assets of more than 1 million euros finds it hard to accept that a vacuum cleaner or book salesperson with only a school-leaving certificate would sell three times more than a finance graduate.
But the data and statistics prove us right on this. A salesperson with a clear sales profile and sales experience will always beat someone with long experience of the product being sold but who lacks sales techniques or a clear sales profile.
Situations I’ve come across when restructuring sales departments
I remember the case of a company selling health products. Its sales weren’t picking up and the turnover of salespeople was huge. They said they had trouble finding good salespeople.
First, we looked at their requirements:
Medical studies. Here we had probably ruled out 60% of sales profiles (the percentage is probably even higher).
A high level of spoken and written English. Very useful, of course, for visiting Spanish shops run by Spaniards.
Previous experience in the same sector. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve run out of salespeople.
This company found it hard to understand that I can’t turn people who don’t like selling, and who are itching to jump to a job that fits what they studied, into star salespeople.
It found it hard to understand that several experienced salespeople with no medical knowledge could acquire what they needed to know to defend the product in less than 30 days.
And it’s natural for people who are passionate about a field, and who had to study for a university degree, to feel bad when they find out that, to do a particular job, others can acquire in just a few weeks the knowledge that took them 3 or 5 years.
They found it hard to understand, until they saw their revenue soar within a few months of bringing in genuine sales profiles with no medical degrees, no English and no previous experience in the industry.
What requirements should you ask of a salesperson?
A good salesperson has to be made of very special stuff. No university degree teaches you to put up with 20 customers in a row telling you they’re NOT interested, and then to visit customer number 21 with the same vitality and energy you had when you visited the first one.
A good salesperson isn’t made by studying products (although that’s also part of the job). They’re made by improving their habits, by becoming more disciplined and more resilient. They have a clear customer focus: to improve the customer’s quality of life as far as possible.
See also: Hiring mistakes Spanish companies make when recruiting salespeople
There are certain habits shared by the best salespeople, and those habits are built by working day after day in sales, constantly learning everything related to selling, sales psychology, buyer psychology and so on.
Like it or not, if you’re going to sell financial or medical products and you’re looking for a salesperson, you should make sure that person has read more about selling than about medicine or finance.
Remember that one of the truths of sales is that “mediocre products with good salespeople sell far better than excellent products with mediocre salespeople”.
The good salesperson:
A good salesperson is someone who gets results. Sometimes not even they know how they do it, but they hit their targets. So, by definition, a good salesperson is a person who sells. A bad salesperson is a person who doesn’t sell.
The truth is that sales is a career and negotiation an art, and since there are no universities that teach them, they can only be learned on the field. So my only advice to companies looking for salespeople is to understand what selling involves and what the qualities of a good salesperson are. To find a salesperson, first you have to know that a salesperson is what you’re looking for.
Featured image: unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
