I’ve been helping clients recruit sales staff for over 20 years and am often asked; are great people born or made? Having developed a selling IQ questionnaire I know that it is both, but not either. What I mean is, you cannot compensate for lack of natural talent with exceptional environments like, great training, marketing and CRM tools. Alternatively, I have watched and heard of great talent that persisted against all odds and no tools to become ‘Solo’ stars.

Solo stars never become team players and often leave to start their own business in direct competition with you, leaving you short-staffed again.

So if you don’t want to get off the recruitment treadmill there are 3 parts to hiring the right person and growing a successful team long term.

1. The capacity of the individual.

SIP shows you their raw capacity with 90% accuracy. Using the SIP online recruitment tool, you can see long before you meet them regardless of their résumé (CV) exactly what type of salesperson they have the capacity for. Talented candidates represent a very small percentage of the population, so if you are using the old ‘hire a bunch and see who sticks’ system you will waste a lot of time and resources locating even one of them and years to build a team.

Sales Inventory Profile, or SIP is an on-line recruitment tool available in all English speaking countries.

2.How quickly and well they are trained.

But locating the right person is not enough for long term stability. You need to support them to realise their potential as quickly as possible by starting selling specific training from their very first day on the job. High-quality sales candidates, even in their most ignorant state, will not tolerate failure. They will not stay in a role where they cannot see how to improve and finally succeed. Candidates with real potential for selling are already impatient for success and will not wait around being unproductive. You also do not want them teaching themselves through trial and error as every mistake they make will reduce their commitment to your job and reflect directly on your companies reputation.

3. Feeling they belong in the team and are valued

When a newbie joins a team, unlike with the birth of a child into a family, they do not come as adorable babies but rather they arrive as opinionated and arrogant teenagers needing a strong yet still nurturing hand to ensure they reach their fullest adult capacity and take their rightful place in your team as adults.

You cannot leave them to their own devices to make poor decisions, waste their energy and develop battle scars. Because, if they survive all of that, they will know themselves to be solo stars and will forever be above the team. If you don’t manage them well from the beginning you will not earn their respect and they will remain impossible to manage and show no loyalty to you or your business. For this same reason, hiring superstars from other business rarely works.