and then invite the ones who best fit what they are looking for. When I conduct prescreen phone interviews, I follow a set of steps that leads me to those best matches.
Specifically, when a candidate calls in and asks for Mr. Lewis, that call is directed to a person on my staff who is trained to do part one of the phone interviews. He or she asks the callers about their previous experience, whom they worked for last, why they are looking for a job at present, and other questions along those lines.
The main thing the screener looks for is previous experience, if that is my highest priority. They also pay close attention to the callers’ personalities (how they sound), motivation, and attitude. The screener rates the callers on a one-to-five scale, with one being weak and five strong. At the end of the calls, the screener tells the candidates that they might receive a call from the manager, Mr. Lewis, later that evening, and they ask for a phone number Mr. Lewis can call after 6 pm. Then I, “Mr. Lewis,” began by calling the candidates who rated five, and work backward to the ones if I still need more.
Why call after 6 pm? Primarily because, like you, my day is often cluttered with the day-to-day issues all managers face. And when I speak to sales applicants I want to be able to do so with few—or better yet, no—interruptions. Making the follow-up calls after 6 pm allows me to focus on the important task at hand, recruiting salespeople.
I have others reason for calling after 6, too. First, I want to see if the candidates want a job badly enough to wait by their phone for my call. Second, I learn a lot about their personal life by calling them at home at night. If applicants have a drinking problem, they might be sober enough to speak to me in the morning, but rarely can they hide their condition later that evening. Third, part of good selling is common sense. I learn which applicants have the foresight to ask me to hold for a second so they can get to a quiet spot where they can talk without the background noise that exists in most homes.
After completing the phone interviews, I invite the applicants I want to proceed further with to a second interview. If my office isn’t large enough to conduct the second interview, or there isn’t an office in town, then this will take place in a meeting room at a local hotel. I’ll hold it as soon after the phone interview as possible, preferably the next day.
The type of interview I will conduct often depends on the number of candidates who make it through the phone interviews. If there are only one or two, I’ll likely do one-on-one interviews. If, however, there are more than ten remaining, I will do a group interview followed by one-on-one interviews. Why?
Let’s analyze what should happen in a sales interview. The first thing I need to do is similar to what the ad should do, and that is sell the opportunity. Here is what I have to sell to the applicant:
The company. Unless my company is in great demand or has huge recognition, it is important that I communicate why a salesperson should want to work for us. A side benefit of doing that is that I also demonstrate how the salesperson, if she gets the position, should sell my company to prospective buyers.
The company’s product. Just as salespeople will have to sell the company product to end users, I need to sell the product to the applicants. When they conclude that the product is exciting, needed, and worth buying, they become more excited about the opportunity to sell that product, and they have witnessed a professional presentation of the product that they can emulate.
The problem the product solves for the consumer. I believe every product basically solves a problem, which is why the prospective buyer should want to buy it. It follows that salespeople don’t really sell products—they sell solutions to problems. In order to do that most effectively, they must make the consumer aware of the problem if she isn’t already convinced it exists. And perhaps more importantly, the salespeople must educate the prospect about the real problems the prospect faces, increasing the value of the product in her mind, and therefore the amount of money she will invest to purchase a solution.
Sell the investment. When the investment for the solution is less than the cost of the problem an easy sale is made. That is, of course, if a professional salesperson makes that case in a professional manner.
After selling our company and our solution, I demonstrate the financial opportunity available to the successful candidate. For purposes of illustration, let’s say I have thirty applicants in the room. Before doing anything else, I address them in the following way:
Ladies and gentleman, by looking around this room you can see that we have had an almost overwhelming response to the ad we ran; there are approximately thirty of you here. To conduct personal interviews with each of you individually, spending the time necessary to answer my questions and yours, would take no less than thirty minutes for each of you, and there just isn’t enough time to do that properly. So I thought I should do this a different way.
First, I think you all would like to know more about my company so you can decide if you’d like to represent it.
Second, I think you want to know about the product my company sells.
Third, you should want to know why anyone would want to purchase our product.
Fourth, you likely want to know what kind of financial reward is in store for successful salespeople here.
Fifth, some of you may want to know what is up the road with a company like mine, what sort of career path is available to qualified candidates.
Sixth, you may want to know what my company does to help salespeople succeed, what kinds of training we’ll provide.
And so, with your permission, I plan to do all of that first, and then after I’m finished, if you think this sounds like something you’d like to do and would like to take the next step, I will conduct personal interviews with you after this meeting. Does that sound fair?
I have made that speech hundreds of times, and no one has ever said no, it isn’t fair, because it obviously is fair. In effect I’m letting the salespeople interview the company first, and only if they like what they hear will they let me interview them. Only then will it be the salesperson’s turn to sell me.
So then after that speech and buy-in from the group, I sell the company as I demonstrated above. I sell the product. I sell the problem, followed by the solution the product solves, which brings me all the way back to earning potential.
Selling earning potential requires that I know my company’s average sales numbers. Using those numbers, here is an example of what I have done in a group environment that produces the results I was hoping for. I say:
Ladies and gentleman, now that you know more about my company, the products we market, the reason customers buy our products, and the problems our product solves for our customers, let’s talk about how much money an average salesperson can earn working for ABC company; to do that I will need your help.
It takes our salespeople approximately thirty minutes to tell a prospective customer everything I’ve told you about my company, product, and services. And it takes approximately another fifteen minutes to do the paperwork, and, finally another fifteen minutes on average to get to the next prospect. The entire process takes approximately one hour including travel time. Given the time involved, if you were hired and trained to do this, how many presentations should I expect you to make in a day’s time?
Ready to write the answers on a whiteboard, I look around the room for hands to go up. Typically someone raises a hand and says four. I repeat that number and then write it on the board. I look around and ask, “Anyone else?” Then someone says five. Again I repeat the number and write it on the board. Invariably someone says seven or eight, and
