Want A-List Salespeople? Here’s What to Look For

Want A-List Salespeople? Here’s What to Look For
By John Warrillow | May 12, 2011

An exceptional salesperson can be two or three times as productive as an average salesperson. When you find one, all you want to do is clone her.

But screening for sales talent is an inexact science. Complicating matters, the very best salespeople with an established client list rarely want to leave their current job, so you’re often left choosing between second-rate salespeople with experience or taking a chance on a relatively inexperienced person.

Here are three tactics I use to improve my odds of finding top-performing salespeople:

1. Look down-market

Generally speaking, salespeople get paid on commission, and since their commission is based on what they sell, the more expensive the product they sell, the more money they make. That’s why it is virtually impossible to recruit a top salesperson away from industries in which they sell very expensive things. For example, the best investment bankers on Wall Street sell entire companies and take home seven or eight figures for the privilege.

Top real estate salespeople make more than a million dollars in commissions selling luxury homes. Top car salesmen take home hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and so on down the line. The only salespeople willing to leave a job selling an expensive product are the underperformers.

By contrast, the top wireless phone salesperson working at your local Verizon store is probably earning mid five figures. Look for the top-performing salespeople in an industry selling cheaper products than yours. If your average sale is $1,000, look for top performers in industries in which the average sale is around $500. That way, you can avoid picking over the second-rate performers and go straight to the top rep, who will have an incentive to leave his company and join yours.

2. Look for carnivores

The one personality trait that defines the best salespeople is a high degree of competitiveness. They define their worth by how they compare to others, and once they are on your team, you can use this competitive streak to your advantage to motivate your group. To find a competitive tendency on a résumé or in an interview, look for examples of the candidate comparing herself to others in rank order. For example, “achieved 105% of plan” looks nice on a résumé, but it says nothing about how she performed relative to others.

You’re looking for statements like “ranked second among 26 salespeople,” which communicates she knows and cares about how she compare to others.

3. Look for competitiveness in their personal lives

Skip down to the candidates’ “interests” section (or ask about their hobbies in an interview) and look for how they spend their time outside of work. To find great sales potential, look for a competitive streak in their hobbies. If a candidate was a ski racer as a kid or runs marathons now, you know you’re dealing with someone who is competitive with others and himself, which is the secret sauce that drives salespeople to top performance.

A competitive streak is easy to see if someone is sporty, but there are other ways hobbies can reveal the desire to win. Dog groomers, for example, take their dogs to shows and want them to win a ribbon — that’s beyond my realm of understanding, I admit, but to each his own. The type of interest a candidate has is less important than the way he approaches his passion.

Just curious — how do you find your top-performing salespeople?


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