The Quality of Your Results Is a Reflection of Your Hiring

The quality of your results in sales—or in anything else—is the quality of your hiring. If you hire well, you produce great results; if you don’t hire well, you don’t produce great results. Your results and your hiring are directly correlated.

Hiring well means making one of two choices.

Hire the Very Best

One way to ensure that you produce the results you need is to hire the very best salespeople you can find.

I’ve read books like E-Myth Mastery, and I know that there is an argument to be made that you should build a system in which you can hire relatively low paid, low skilled employees and still produce the results that you need. This might be a terrific strategy for making sure your french fries get taken out of the oil when the buzzer sounds, but it’s a horrible strategy for hiring sales people. The difference in success and failure now is in having the ability to think, to be resourceful, to develop relationships, and to find new ways to help your clients move their businesses forward.

There is no sales tool, sales process, or sales methodology that allows you to hire poorly and still succeed. Period.

Hiring the very best salespeople you can hire makes it easier and more likely that you achieve the results you’re after. They already have the beliefs, the skills, the experience, and the love of the game. They can hit the ground running and put up numbers.

Hiring poorly makes it impossibly difficult to produce great results—and it makes it more likely you’ll spend all of your time dealing with the issues that come with hiring poorly. But you might be able to get away from hiring only salespeople with the skills and experience.

Hire the Soon-To-Be Very Best

If you have the processes, systems, and wherewithal to teach, train, coach, and develop salespeople, then you don’t have to hire the very best. You can hire salespeople with the potential to be the very best.

It’s still not easy to identify the salespeople with the potential to be the very best, because you are hiring for their beliefs, their behaviors, and their willingness. Their willingness is especially important.

If a salesperson has the willingness to try new things, to take new actions, they can very quickly improve. If they have a willingness to learn then you can teach them what they need to know and help them gain the situational knowledge. But all the teaching, training, coaching, and developing in the world is all for naught if the salesperson is unwilling to be coached, to take new actions, or to learn.

If you want to produce the sales results you need, invest your time and resources in hiring the best salespeople—or future best salespeople—that you can. Hiring less makes it lees likely that you succeed and reach your goals.