Who’s Really Going to Perform? Key Competencies for Salespeople

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times…and we’ll keep saying it:  Previous experience in an industry, a specific marketplace, or with a certain product should rarely, if ever, be the main reason for hiring a salesperson.  Why?  Because if you hire based on past experience, you’re:

1. presuming that the person’s previous industry experience was positive and productive.

2. assuming that the person is motivated, has strong drive, and possesses good selling skills that they will bring to bear at your organization.

3. believing that the person is available for hire because of circumstances over which they had no control, such as downsizing, rather than because of average or lower performance.

So what should you be hiring for?

Personal skills.  A person may have excellent sales skills, be knowledgeable about the product/service they need to sell, and be behaviorally suited to doing the sales job and motivated by its rewards.  But if they don’t have the right set of personal skills, they won’t succeed at sales.  Personal skills are the attributes driven by how clearly one sees the deliverable capacities the job requires – things like self-starting ability, goal-directedness, handling rejection, and so on.

There is a unique set of personal skills required for each job, whether it’s the skills of developing others and leading others that are so important to sales management, the teamwork and results orientation skills that matter so much for administrative support positions or the resiliency and customer focus skills needed for selling.

Our TriMetrix® Assessment System measures 23 personal skills.  The order in which these skills are needed for any particular sales position, and the intensity of each, may vary. Below are just a few of the personal skills that we measure.

• Customer Focus.  The best salespeople who get the most long-term business and greatest number of referrals are genuinely and completely committed to customer satisfaction.  They serve as their customers' advocates and do their best to ensure that their customers’ wants, needs, and expectations are met at every step of the sales process…and they don’t just drop the ball when the sale is made!

• Personal Accountability.  A key factor for success at virtually any job, Personal Accountability has to do with a person’s capacity for taking responsibility for his or her own actions (or lack thereof).

• Self-Management.  If you feel energized and enthusiastic about your job, and yet you still have plenty of time and energy to manage and enjoy your personal life, chances are you are good at Self Management.   People who are good at Self Management don’t just react to events around them, but they plan for meeting their own needs and schedule their participation in the events that make this happen.

• Interpersonal Skills. This one is pretty self-explanatory – the ability to interact with others in a positive manner.  It only makes sense that salespeople should be skilled at natural, comfortable conversational give-and-take. 

• Resiliency.  Resiliency has to do with how quickly you can recover from a setback or other adversity.  Sales is a notoriously challenging career partly because salespeople face regular rejection from prospects and customers.  Individuals who can let rejection roll off of their backs are far more likely to be successful at – and happy doing – sales.

Alright, you say.  How can I tell if someone has these personal skills?

One of the easiest ways to determine how strong someone’s personal skills are? Ask them questions related to each.  Let’s look at a sample question for each of the personal skills we described above.  A person’s comfort level in responding to questions on each issue – and how comprehensively they answer – is directly correlated with how strong their personal skills are in each area.

• Customer Focus. 

• In your view, what makes some customers more valuable than others? Should all customers be treated the same?

• Personal Accountability. 

• Tell me about a time when it was necessary to admit to others that you had made a mistake. How did you handle it?

• Self-Management. 

• Do you consider yourself to be a good time manager? Share with me the planning system you use and show me how you use it.

• Interpersonal Skills.

• What is your single biggest communication strength? How do you know?

• Resiliency.

• Tell me about a specific setback you faced at work. How long did it take you to get past it?

There are all kinds of personnel assessments that tell us a lot about a person’s behaviors and values, as well as job-specific skills, but not very many that address personal skills.  If you aren’t using an assessment that delves into your interviewees’ personal skills, the best thing you can do (other than start using one) is to ask your interviewees questions about the personal skills most relevant to sales.

Remember:  You can teach sales skills, but you can’t teach personal skills.  It’s better to hire someone with strong personal skills and have to spend a little time training them on selling skills than to hire someone who’s got a past history in sales, but who has minimal personal skills.

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