How to Hire Stars for your BtoB
Telephone Sales Team

Finding and hiring the one in ten people who can succeed in selling business products and services by telephone is one of the great challenges of managing an inside sales team.

To begin with, standard sales hiring techniques are about as useful as spin the bottle in determining who will be successful in selling over the telephone. Selling by phone is as much about inborn talent as it is about training and experience.

Secondly, unless you observe some well-established parameters for hiring a b-to-b sales team, you’ll face an uphill battle you might not be able to win. These parameters are:

A. The more involved and technical the sale the more you’ll need full-time sales reps with industry and sales experience, especially where multiple call-backs and decision-makers are involved. Part-time and at-home workers are very unlikely to work out over time.

B. Telephone sales candidates should be interviewed over the telephone. If they can’t sell themselves over the phone they won’t be good at selling your products and services.

C. Don’t let how a telephone sales candidates looks or dresses decide whether you hire them (remember, prospects can’t see them). What you really want is someone who looks good in the mind of the person on the other end of the line.

D. Before recruiting and interviewing telephone sales people, set up a system for evaluating and documenting what you hear on the telephone interview so you can compare candidates accurately.

You can dramatically improve your chances of finding telephone sales stars by organizing the hiring interview into key characteristics. During the phone interview you can score each of them from one to five as follows:

1. Experience: Previous sales and industry experience count for a lot. Award a candidate points for every year of related experience.

2. Voice Quality: Score for a regionally-neutral accent, clear
pronunciation, good vocabulary, rate of speech, and most of all the tone of the voice. Tone is especially critical because it projects professionalism, enthusiasm and confidence. Deduct points if you sense nervousness, hesitancy, timidity or lack of confidence.

3. Call Opening: Score how well the candidate opens the interview call. Did they give their name and reason for calling? Did they sound confident?

4. Rapport: This key predictor of sales success is difficult to quantify but you’ll know it when you hear it. Does this person have the ability to make
you trust them? Do they sound believable? Are they able to communicate their personal strong points?

5. Closing: Do they ask for the order – the chance to be hired – or to further the process of consideration? Do they paraphrase your comments about the job and tell you why they will be great at it?

Finally, if you already have a telephone sales team it would be good idea to score them on a phoned sales presentation to you (or someone you designate) on the same characteristics you use in the hiring process. This will allow you compare one to another and to a group score and understand better where they need training and mentoring.

Go to www.SalesJudge.com for more information on sales assessment