IN A RESEARCH PROJECT before I wrote my first book, “Hiring Squirrels”, we discovered that 58 percent of all salespeople employed in retail jewelry stores shouldn’t be in any job that requires selling for a living.
While the causes for the disconnect in hiring are varied, they can be reduced to one simple sentence: We look in all the wrong places for the wrong stuff.
We prize things that are nice to have, such as experience with jewelry and/or watches, sales experience, pleasant personalities, and good looks. Unfortunately, we approach hiring like a dating game. If we like the candidate, especially if they flatter the hiring manager, we see what we want to see.
Previous sales experience or product knowledge is not a good indicator of sales acumen. Being pleasant does not make you effective in sales; it just makes you nice to be around, and if that’s good enough for your business, keep doing what you are doing.
Short job posts that speak to the non-negotiable traits are best. In hiring salespeople, we ought to be diligent in identifying four critical traits.
The first is DRIVE. Look for evidence that the candidate is competitive and self-driven. You don’t want raging extroverts. Those types often struggle to listen to customers and read their non-verbal cues.
Advertisement
The second trait is OPTIMISM. We want people who see the best in others and have a positive outlook. We need pragmatic optimism, to the extent that they know they won’t make every sale, but they carry themselves with the expectation that they will give every customer an opportunity to make a purchase.
The next trait is EMPATHY. If people don’t like people, they shouldn’t be in sales. We can teach good language to salespeople, but with studies showing 55 percent of communication is non-verbal and 38 percent is tone of voice, you simply cannot fake empathy.
And the final trait is RESILIENCE. When people have low reserves of resilience (visible in their personal, academic, and professional lives), rejection for them is a brain-based hurt. Hearing no, or a version of no, registers neurologically.
Why does that matter? Our first evolutionary instinct is to keep ourselves safe. If we suffer when we perceive we are being rejected, we will unconsciously do everything in our power to avoid that rejection. That means we will provide friendly service and great product information. What we won’t do is ask for the sale. That’s the single best way to avoid hearing no.
No matter where the candidate came from previously, if they have the necessary traits, they can become a stellar sales performer.
