you send invoices, newsletters, or any other correspondence to your existing customer base? If you do, consider telling your customers you are looking for a representative to assist your company in securing new business. Along with the correspondence, ask your customers if they know people who are honest, intelligent, and hard-working, and perhaps aren’t entirely happy with their current employment or have found themselves out of a job in these troubling times. Ask them to have their acquaintances call you to inquire about a career with your company. Great leads can come from this source. What better reference could job-seekers want than from a satisfied customer they know?
Restaurant Servers
When you go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, have you noticed how professional some of the servers are? When you are in recruitment mode, pay closer attention to them. Do they present themselves professionally? Do they sell the specials with excitement and flare? Do they convince you to purchase a good wine? And do they sell you an after-dinner drink or a dessert?
The server is, for all practical purposes, a straight-commission salesperson. Yes, she earns a wage, but in most restaurants that is half of minimum wage. Their real income comes from tips and sometimes a commission on wine. Do you think the server working with you wants to be a server for the rest of her life? Maybe she is completing a college education, or has been seeking better employment but hasn’t found it yet.
If you see a person like that, tell her that you noticed the professional way she did the job, and then hand her a very nice tip and your business card. Tell her to read the back of the card when she has a private moment.
Salespeople Who Call on You
Like me, you may have a person working for you, often a receptionist, who has to say no to salespeople cold-calling your business to sell copy machines, office products, cleaning services, you name it. When you are looking for salespeople, tell that receptionist to let you know whenever someone cold-calls the business.
When that happens and the salesperson is ushered into your office, listen completely to what he is saying. Mentally grade the person on appearance, personality, professionalism, presentation, knowledge of the product, and closing skills. Did he ask you to buy?
Tell the salesperson that you will need time to think the purchase over. Then wait to see what he says. Does he attempt to handle the objection and close you? You might even voice a second objection if he answers the first just to see if he continues to try closing you. Effectively you have just auditioned a salesperson in a real-life scenario. If he scores well, offer a job instead of agreeing to buy. Explain how well he could do and how much money he could earn in your business if he does just what you witnessed today.
A Note on Educational Requirements
Let’s talk about the level of education that salespeople must achieve to work for your company. Do you require a college degree? Have you convinced yourself that a salesperson must have a degree to be successful in your company? Do you have any evidence to support your case, or did someone else convince you?
I bring this up because of my firsthand experience. You see, I joined the Navy, like many young men and women, right after high school. By the time I completed my four-year enlistment (actually four years, eight months due to the Vietnam War), I knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted a better life and that a college education was desirable. However, since I passed on the opportunity to continue my education in favor of joining the Navy, I had to pay my own way by working as I pursued a degree.
Some years after taking the job with Kirby Vacuum Cleaner Company and before earning my college degree, I interviewed with a chemical company for a sales position. I had reached a point in my career when I wanted to move up from door-to-door straight commission sales to a company that offered benefits and a career path.
The manager of the chemical company perused my application, talked to me about my sales experience, and then asked me if I had a college degree, specifically a degree in chemistry. When I said I didn’t have either, but that I was fairly close to earning a degree, he promptly laid my application down. I didn’t meet their requirements.
Being the salesperson I had become, I took that statement as an objection, and began a rebuttal explaining why his company should disregard the requirement and hire me anyway. But regardless of what I said, he explained that they had a hard and fast rule. In order to successfully sell chemicals, a salesperson needed to have a strong knowledge of chemistry. I continued to argue my points, but ultimately lost the argument and the opportunity to work for the company.
Not long after, I learned that a competitor of the chemical company I had interviewed with was also looking for a salesperson. I applied for that job, and this time I got hired. It seemed that they didn’t have a rigid rule about education; instead they relied on the judgment of the sales manager who conducted the interview. His gut said I could do it.
I hit the streets after a rather brief training period in which I rode with a salesperson in another state to learn how to represent the company and its products, and when I got back home to my own territory I proceeded to kick sales butt. I sold chemicals with names I could barely pronounce. I sold chemicals to golf courses, to high rise building for their chiller systems, to hotels for housekeeping, to bars and restaurants, and to every other business I thought could be a prospect. Much to the first company’s dismay, many of those clients had previously been their clients. I especially enjoyed selling to them.
At the end of the first year I was presented the Rookie of the Year award at the company’s annual convention. I accomplished that without a degree in chemistry, or in anything else for that matter. What I did have was sales experience and a burning desire to succeed.
Does this mean I believe that you shouldn’t prefer a candidate who possesses a degree? No. But I do believe that you should allow a manager to make a gut decision based on experience. Having a degree should not be a critical requirement.
One last point, if you conduct your recruitment process partially online or through the human resources department, and your company has a degree requirement, consider a way to allow exceptions based on the experience of the candidate and the judgment of the interviewing manager. The final decision can be sorted out in the interviews. I know companies that post sales jobs on Monster.com, and when applicants answer they have no college degree on the online application, the system automatically disqualifies the applicant, and no one sees the application. I understand that this automated process likely saves time, but it leaves no room for personal judgment and good old gut reaction.
4. Interviewing
Now that the calls from your more traditional methods of recruitment are coming in, it is time to set up interviews. The sooner you can arrange these, the better. Just like fish and sales leads, they begin to spoil the older they get. You should want to see the sales applicant as soon after she calls as possible. When you have an ad running, speaking to the applicants becomes the most important thing on your to-do list.
Based on the type of ad you placed and the anticipated number of responses you will get, you’ll need to decide what kinds of interviews you will conduct. Here are some of the choices:
Prescreen phone interview
One-on-one personal interview
One-on-one personal interview, followed by interview with other team member
Group interview, followed by one-on-one interview
When there is a large response to an
