By Garrett Hollander,

Hiring the right B2B sales person is easy, right? Then why is turnover notoriously higher in sales departments versus other departments for most organizations? How do you explain the fact that the 20/80 rule (20% of the sales team is generating 80% of the productivity) applies more frequently to the B2B sales department than other teams within your business?

You can probably recall that individual you hired not too long ago who you thought would be a “Rock Star” based on their interview, and before the show ends, their performance was the equivalent of an eighth grade garage band at best.

You make objective business decisions every day. Although, when it comes to interviewing B2B sales professionals, we often justify a “gut feel” approach. We often hire people we like, and will subconsciously make the interview easier once that comfort is achieved with the candidate. You may be a great sales leader, but is your “like list” enough to determine an individual’s likelihood of success. The key is to stop hiring who you like, and start hiring who you need.

Step One: Bring Objective Metrics to the Analysis

Identify core behavior metrics the individual musr possess when performing under the pressure of the sales position. Stated another way, identify “the personality of the position.”

Based on the six listed personality traits, identify the behavior patterns in your sales process success plan.

*The ability to make the customer feel like a welcomed guest and instantly at ease; traits for the top performing retail sales professionals.
*The gift to quickly build rapport, and brings the natural discipline of close follow up that comes with repeat/maintenance sales.
*The comfort to take risk inherent with cold calling, and comfortable with handling multiple “NOs” and objections; traits one finds in new business development sales.
*Capable of quickly thinking on their feet while analyzing the information rendered from great questions; talents vital to technical sales.
*Well-suited to become a trusted advisor and sounding board that is required forlong-term relationship sales.
*The brilliance to make a script sound natural; an all-important facet of inbound B2B sales.

If you respond that you want your candidate to possess all the behaviors listed above, then we need to give you a “reality-check pill.” You might as well add “walking on water” to the job description if you expect the same individual to possess all six of the behavioral traits. There are instruments that can benchmark what behaviors need to be projected the majority of time in any given B2B sales position. In order to improve your “hiring batting average,” you need to first apply objective metrics to determine what you actually need in a given position. The more deck-level analysis of the position, the easier it becomes to know what you should be actually looking for in a B2B sales position.

Step Two: Using the Best Tools to Find a Qualified B2B Sales Team Member

The key to determining who you are going to hire after the “happy interview face” fades away is objectivity. Most next steps include accessing the “usual suspects” in hiring tools, but they have some downside:

• Resume – With the resources on the internet today, there is no excuse for anyone to not have already paid someone to wordsmith how wonderful they are.
• College degree verification – At no cost to you, phone the university to verify they graduated. Now that you know that their education is legit, does that degree mean they will be great for your B2B sales team?
• Reference checks – The joys of our litigious society makes this more challenging than ever to get relevant information.
• LinkedIn Profile – Certainly helpful, but are well-maintained pages in this area merely an indicator of good business acumen?
• Behavior interview questions – Great way to go, but the universities are starting to provide more training in this area than most hiring managers are receiving.

Based on your current interview arsenal, what is your “hiring batting average”? Are you batting .500, or are you closer to .283 in terms of hiring homerun-hitters? When push comes to shove, you need to know for certain that the person you hire will peform under the pressures of the job – that they are going to project the behaviors that are needed to succeed in that position. Again, we get back to the importance of bringing objective, tangible and concrete statistical data points to the interviewing process to balance the wonderful “gut feel” we have all grown to rely upon.

In 2002, the general manager for the Oakland Athletics baseball team, Billy Beane, hired a Yale economics graduate to apply empirical analysis of baseball statistics called Sabermetrics to assess players’ values. Beane looked for players who had strong on-base percentages (OBP), but were dismissed by scouts due to other characteristics. The Athletics had an incredible season that year, which included the longest winning streak in American League history. You may recall the movie Moneyball, depicting the real life story was portrayed. Are you dismissing the potential of “homerun-hitter B2B sales people” based on your subjective approach? Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and techniques of psychological measurement. As the Moneyball philosophy is to baseball, psychometrics is to making strong hiring decisions.