Here’s a short post to answer a big question:
Often, VPs of Sales, Sales Managers, and other Sales Leaders ask us to help them find the best salespeople. They tell us they’re tired of being fooled by salespeople who are “all show and no go.”
They just want the best.
The “best” salesperson in one company (or territory, or product line, or for one manager) is not necessarily the “best” somewhere else.
Why is that? Two reasons:
- Almost every salesperson is a human and humans are notoriously complex creatures. Every factor you can imagine (and some you can’t) have bearing on an individual contributor’s success or failure.
- At the same time, virtually every sales job is unique and complex. Territories and customer profiles are unique. So are managers and companies.
That means that the “best” salesperson is really the one who approaches selling in a way that’s most closely aligned with the customers in your unique selling environment.
So that means that a salesperson with a sincere thirst for knowledge stands a much better job of being able to align with a wide variety of customers and jobs.
However, your environment is different than ours and you should begin with a clear understanding of who will succeed in it before beginning to search.
After all, if you know what success looks like, you’re a lot more likely to know where to look.
