BY C. Lee Smith
Are you ready to make an offer to a top-notch candidate who’s applied for your open sales position? Given the difficulty of hiring sales talent, we don’t blame you for being in a hurry. But before you extend the offer, you should consider six sales mindset traits.
Objective Data from Assessments
If you lack objective data on these important traits, you might end up with an employee who doesn’t fit the job, the team or your management style. The best way to determine the traits your candidates possess is to give them an assessment. TeamTraitTM offers data on the following aspects of your candidate:
- Work Traits
- Motivation
- Behavioral Traits
- Selling Traits
- Critical Thinking
- Leadership Traits
Let’s take a look at these traits as they apply to the sales mindset.
Work Traits
Your candidate touts their ability to be resilient and curious. They claim to have references who will speak to these important work traits. When you’re trying to hire a new business specialist, you need a resilient individual, one who takes rejection in stride. They should be able to learn from the experience and adjust their approach to the next prospect they target.
Resilient employees are less likely to suffer from burnout. Individuals who also possess curiosity “tend to be critical thinkers.”
Should you take a candidate’s word that they possess these work traits? Not in today’s work environment. Using psychometric assessments, you can determine whether the applicant who wants to be your next rainmaker has the work traits that will set them on the path to success.
Motivation
After your most recent hired settled into the position, were you surprised that they weren’t as aggressive as you’d hoped in terms of chasing down new business? You might be able to adjust their behavior by appealing to the right aspect of their motivation.
If you have assigned the new employee to a selling team, but they have a high motivation to work autonomously, you’ve got a mismatch. Or you may have set up a challenge bonus program expecting it to appeal to most of your sales reps. Salespeople are always motivated by money, right? Not exactly.
Some employees have a different primary motivation. A review of their assessment data will reveal if their motivation stems from the desire to have more authority. If you find yourself in this situation, give your new hire more control – allow them to decide how many sales touches to make and which type of outreach to use. You may soon see a huge bump in the number of new leads being generated.
Going forward, review the motivation details from your candidate’s assessment. Be sure that you can offer the kinds of rewards that will motivate them to do their best.
Behavioral Traits
When you’re deciding who to hire for a key position, you’ll want to consider more than work traits and motivation. You need to understand the candidates’ behavioral traits in terms of the sales mindset.
Assessment can measure aspects of character as a person interacts with others. This information helps managers understand how to communicate with and coach a team member.
An individual who gives in easily to someone else’s ideas instead of ambitiously presenting their own, may need coaching to develop a stronger mindset.
- Selling Traits
When it comes to selling traits, some sales managers want a rep who excels at closing. Other managers insist that discovery matters more. In the recent Voice of the Sales Manager survey, 39% reported that pre-call intelligence (discovery) is the biggest weakness on their current team. Regardless of your preference, selling traits matter.
You can measure a candidate’s selling traits by giving them a sales skills assessment specifically designed for sales positions. If discovery matters to you, review the score for how the applicant finds out and understands why a prospect wants to make a purchase.
Critical Thinking Skills
It’s not exactly news that managers need workers who possess critical thinking skills. This skill is an important part of having a sales mindset. Despite the efforts of educators to help students learn how to identify, analyze, and solve problems, too many members of today’s workforce struggle with this core skill. Will your candidate come up with a practical solution to a prospect’s problem? Or will they end up far afield, proposing a product you don’t sell?
Thinking about AI
If you hire a candidate with outstanding selling traits, will they also show critical thinking skills? This is especially important in the era of AI. You’ll want to be sure your candidate will use AI appropriately and verify results.
Leadership Traits
How many times have you made the following mistake? When your sales manager leaves, you promote the rep who’s been with you the longest or who excels at sales into the role. This well-established practice in the sales profession often leads to disaster. Why? Because nobody thought to review the leadership traits of the newly promoted person.
Outstanding sales skills deliver great results to a company. Similarly, great leadership traits improve the motivation and output of the workforce. Rarely does one individual possess both sets of skills. Of course, we worry that putting a mediocre sales rep in charge of the department will result in disaster.
But that’s not what will happen if you promote and hire based on leadership traits. Promoting a rep into a management role buys that individual some respect. After all, they’ll understand exactly what reps put up with on a daily basis – the rejection, the threats to cancel a contract, and the need to document every moment of their work life in the CRM.
Beyond that, a manager with the right leadership traits can inspire others because they’ll adapt their communication style when necessary. They won’t speak down to their team members. At the same time, they’ll insist on accountability.
Succeed in Today's Employment Market
Hiring in today’s employment market can be intimidating even for the most experienced individuals. And if you listen to too many news reports, you may feel pressured to make an offer before your candidate ghosts you.
Before you panic and make an expensive decision that could take years to undo, tap into the unbiased data you can get from a psychometric behavioral assessment and use that information to make an informed, instead of an emotional, hiring decision.
When you pay attention to the crucial sales mindset and other traits, you improve your chances of onboarding the kind of employee who will take your organization to the next level.
Image by Ron Lach on Pexels
