BY C. Lee Smith
As a hiring manager, you want to know that the candidate you bring into your business won’t let a few setbacks derail them. We all know the sales profession is full of disappointments. It can be tough to recover and carry on. When you include measuring resilience as part of your sales hiring guide, you’ll find the professionals who will succeed on your team.
Why Is Resilience Important?
Sales professionals encounter more than their share of setbacks. A prospect might tell them to take a hike. A long-standing customer could reveal they’re having financial problems and cancel their contract. And then there are the endless hang-ups that reps hear when cold calling. Some reps might brood for weeks after a particularly harsh setback. When that happens, sales stall.
How Do Resilient Sales Reps Achieve Success?
Sherrie Campbell defines resilience as “our ability to survive and flourish through our traumas, stressors, responsibility shifts and challenges offered by life.” We all encounter setbacks. Campbell says people who have self-respect are also able to “self-soothe when things get tough.” These are the people who tell themselves that they did nothing wrong and that they just need to try again.
Malcolm Fleschner reminds readers that resilience is “what sets high-performing sales professionals apart from the also-rans.” After a negative experience, a highly resilient individual may step back and think about what happened. They may also decide to change their approach going forward.
The mark of a resilient sales professional is that they move ahead, instead of stalling out. They don’t lock themselves in a room and refuse to sell. They show a positive attitude and keep selling. Your sales hiring guide should incorporate ways to measure this desirable tendency.
Resilience is also about a person’s level of commitment. Some individuals will say they’re committed to achieving a specific goal. They may tell you they plan to surpass this year’s quota by 20%. But do they have the motivation to keep their word? People with resilience, Campbell remind us, don’t allow anything or anyone to “pull our thoughts away from our focus.”
What Does The Research Say About Resilience?
Some of the earliest research done on resilience, by Norman Garmezy at the University of Minnesota, focuses on children. Garmezy studied stressed children who succeed in their school environment, despite difficulties such as poverty or abuse. His work was continued by other psychologists who noted that kids with the highest resilience had an "internal locus of control.” Overall, about 1/3 of kids subjected to extreme stress found a way to cope and become successful.
How Can Assessments Help You Hire for Resilience?
Does the candidate that you’re interested in possess innate resilience? One way to find out is to ask them to take a sales assessment test. The TeamTrait™ assessment measures multiple work tendencies.
In a good sales assessment, candidates encounter questions designed by behavioral analysts and sales professionals. These types of assessments should be part of your sales hiring guide because you’ll have access to objective data.
Candidate responses to questions about work tendencies can be revealing. The results of these assessments will inform you of an individual’s work tendencies, including their level of resilience, tendency to take initiative and confidence in the workplace.
Should You Dismiss Low-Scoring Candidates?
What should you do if a candidate you want to hire scores low on resilience in the assessments you give them? First, take the entire assessment into account. Maybe the candidate has scored well in some other key areas such as empathy. Second, know that individuals who are willing to work on their shortcomings can improve their resilience.
As a hiring manager, one detail you’ll want to pay attention to is the candidate's coachability. If your candidate appears to lack resilience but scores well on coachability, that’s a good indicator. If you hire this person, you may be able to coach them on how to improve their resilience.
What Do Sales Reps Think About Resilience
Our Voice of the Sales Rep survey shows that 37% of reps struggle with handling objections. This statistic is a hint that they may need coaching to boost their resilience. With the right skills, they can learn to handle objections and keep the deal moving through the sales pipeline.
The same survey indicates that only 31% of reps believe resilience is a core characteristic needed to succeed on their team. Consider giving your reps a full behavioral assessment to learn their resilience score. You may want to coach your existing reps on developing more resilience. When they lose a big prospect, help them see that all is not lost.
Conclusion
Managers may need to update their sales hiring guide to include resilience as a core characteristic when evaluating candidates. With the data from sales hiring assessments, they can also determine which reps need additional coaching to improve this important characteristic.
