Hello, I’m Steve Suggs, author of the book, Can They Sell.
Thank you for buying the book.
Until it arrives in the mail, I am going to give you some more free training in this video.
After watching this video, please email your friends the website to buy the book.
Click on the “Email to a Friend” button below this video.
After you watch the video, leave some comments below, because I personally respond to every
comment.
When Conrad Jay Levinson, the great Guerilla Marketer, endorsed my book, he spoke about
recruiting salespeople with one hand tied behind your back.
He is saying that without a good working knowledge of human behavior, it‘s difficult to make
great hiring decisions and to become a great sales coach.
We are wired by genetics but shaped by our environment.
We talked about this in the last session, I’ll spend the next 20 minutes talking about
this in more detail.
You’ll learn what to look for during the interview process that predicts future behavior
of the candidates you’re interviewing.
This knowledge will help you score candidates in all areas of the Best Salesperson Profile.
You’ll recognized weak candidates early in the process, and know which candidates
to spend more time interviewing.
At the end of the selection process, you’ll know with a great deal of certainty the candidate’s
true strengths and weaknesses.
Recently while coaching a manager about a particular candidate, she accused me of having
a crystal ball.
During the process, I asked her a few questions about the candidate, looked at the information
we collected and told her to call a reference and ask the reference a very specific question.
She asked the reference the question, and the reference broke down and told her that
the person she was considering worked hard for two weeks and then slacked off and never
got back up to full speed.
That was exactly what I was seeing in the data we collected during the interview.
How did I know the person she was interviewing might have this problem?
Personality traits point to which character traits a person will most likely struggle
with.
Get ready, I am about to show you how you can have your own crystal ball and avoid bad
hiring decisions just like my client.
Let’s review the 5 Dimensions of the Best Salesperson profile, then I’ll show how
to predict which character traits certain personality types will struggle with.
First – Attitudes – We want to hire candidates who have a passion for solving the problems
of your customers using your product.
We want them to have a positive image of themselves as a salesperson.
Second – We want to hire candidates who have immediate and long-term financial needs
that can be met if they are successful selling your product.
Thirdly – We want candidates with the Character Traits of Concern for Others, Honesty, Strong
Work Ethic and Responsibility.
We want candidates with high scores in the personality traits of Social Drive, Social
Confidence, Goal Orientation and Need for Control.
All 4 of these dimensions will determine the level at which they will master the 5th dimension,
the sales skills of Prospecting, Holding Appointments, Fact Finding, Presenting, Handling Objections
and Closing Sales.
We use tools, interview questionnaires and personality assessments to measure these traits.
Let’s first look at the Character Traits in more detail.
Character is built in our past.
When our parents or mentors teach us right ways to behave, we experience the positive
results of better relationships and the rewards of hard work.
When we are rewarded and praised for good behavior and properly disciplined for bad
behavior, we are motivated to eco good behavior.
With the right combination of praise and discipline used on a consistent basis and repeated during
our formative years, we become bonded to these Character Traits.
When we don’t receive the instruction needed, we develop gaps in character.
Dr. Denis Waitley says that much of our character is developed during our first five years of
life.
He also says that if we experience abuse or challenges during these five years, it can
take a life-time of self improvement help to get us on the right track.
Since we live in an imperfect world, there are no perfect people.
We want to recruit those salespeople who have a strong foundation of character and who are
proactively seeking self improvement.
Zig Ziglar said, “We are like fruit.
If we are not working to ripen, we are on our way to rotting.
That’s why we want salespeople who are working to get better all the time.
This is why we ask interview questions that find out how much effort candidates are putting
toward growing and getting better.
Let’s examine our top for character traits, Honesty, Hard Work Ethic, Concern for Others
and Responsibility in more detail.
Please allow me to use my own childhood to demonstrate the development of these traits.
It was no where near perfect, but I had a mother who was very good at instilling these
traits.
She taught her five children the impact lying had on our relationship with her and each
other.
Through her teaching, we learned that the happiness of a clear conscience was preferred
over the heavy burden of a guilty conscience.
She taught us a concern for others by helping us understand that the constant pursuit of
our own selfish interest made it difficult to have a peaceful family life and meaningful
relationships.
Hard work ethic was built through many years of requiring that each person contribute their
part.
She taught us to set a goal and visualize the outcome we wanted when the job was complete.
When the work got hard and we began to sweat and wanted to quite, she was there with a
firm hand to ensure that we pushed through the hard and finished the job.
We finally experienced the satisfaction of wanting to repeat the hard work and enjoy
the benefits of the labor.
We became bonded to the trait and began to eco the pattern.
When a person has a strong work ethic, it means they have the ability to visualize the
end result they desire, they prioritize the important steps and set deadlines.
They then exercise discipline to stay focused on the important activities until the goal
is met.
When they begin to sweat, they push through and complete each task.
The most complicated character trait is accepting the responsibility of the outcome of our actions.
In other words, when things don’t go as we plan and our expectations are not met,
we must look in the mirror and honestly admit the mistakes we made that contributed to the
negative outcome.
We are prone to say, “It wasn’t my fault.
I did it because of what they did to me.”
It’s the blame game we all play.
The degree to which a person experiences this type of training and mentoring will determine
the degree to which they are bonded to each trait.
We measure these character traits by asking questions that get candidates to tell us stories
that illustrate ways they exercise these traits in the work environment.
Later videos will go into more detail and give examples of these questions.
Let’s look deeper into personality traits.
Remember personality is hard wired and changes very little over time.
When we are performing job duties that are inline with our natural personality traits,
it take less energy to do those tasks.
For example, people with low social confidence get tired and discouraged if they have to
work at tasks that require them to ask sensitive fact-finding questions, asks people to buy
and handle objections.
Conversely, salespeople with high scores on the Social Confidence scale are better suited,
or energized, when they have to perform these tasks.
Here you see a chart From the Craft Personality Questionnaire, or CPQ, of a high activity
salesperson.
There are 8 personality traits.
Social Drive, Social Confidence, Goal Orientation, Need for Control, Detail Orientation, Skepticism,
Need to Impress and Need to Nurture.
Each trait is measured on a scale of 0-100.
Low scores are below 50%, and high scores are above 50%.
Low and high is not an indication of good or bad, they are simply scores.
The green areas indicate the preferred scores in each trait for a salesperson who sales
in a high activity, high rejection environment.
This is the profile of a salesperson who needs to find prospects and build clients from scratch.
Let’s look at each trait.
We want high scores in Social Drive so the candidate will be comfortable getting involved
in social situations in order to build a network for the purpose of finding prospects.
We want high scores in the areas of Social Confidence so the candidate will be comfortable
getting facts, asking people to buy and handling objections.
We want high scores in the areas of Goal Orientation so salespeople will have a creative and restless
pace in getting things done.
We want a high score in Need for Control so salespeople will control conversations and
situations that move the sales process along.
We want salespeople with low Detail Orientation because they will be more driven to see the
big picture and not get too bogged down in details.
We want high Skepticism so salespeople will not be to naive and trusting of the embellishments
of prospects.
By the way, Skepticism is the only one of these 8 traits that’s not genetic.
We want high scores on the Good Impression scale so salespeople will be resilient to
rejection.
We want low scores on the Need to Nurture scale so that salespeople will be more task
oriented and not spend too much time with prospects who are not ready to buy.
This is a brief overview of the CPQ.
When you use this tool, either one of my staff or I will give you personal coaching to answer
questions.
Now that we know that character is built in our past by parents and mentors and personality
is genetic, let’s now look at how certain personality traits influence which character
traits we are most prone to struggle with.
By having this knowledge we can then spend time during the recruiting process focused
on measuring whether or not a person disciplines themselves past their weaknesses.
I have a quick disclaimer.
The information I am about to give you is based upon my own personal experience from
interviewing, managing salespeople and coaching sales managers through the hiring process.
The following statements should not be taken as absolutes for every person you interview
or who takes the CPQ.
People are complicated, so this information is given for the purpose of giving you a basic
knowledge from which to operate.
The combination personality traits I am about to tell you about, does not mean that people
absolutely do not have the character trait, it simply means that they will be prone to
struggle with one particular trait over the other.
Many people are aware of their struggles and work hard everyday to resist the temptation
to behave negatively.
I am simply pointing out people’s area of greatest potential to struggle.
Let’s start with the Character Trait of Concern for Others.
People with high scores on the Social Confidence scale and low scores on the Need to Nurture
scale might struggle with concern for others.
This highly confident person is very task oriented.
It makes for being productive and getting things done, but this person must make sure
they are not so focused on the job, that they value getting work completed at the risk of
damaged relationships.
This person could also come across as intimidating and must be aware of their tendency to express
their opinion in an overbearing tone.
The other extreme of this behavior is the person with moderate to low scores on the
Social Confidence scale and high scores on the Need to Nurture scale.
These people will most likely have large amounts of concern for others.
They come across as very likable and are most likely the person that everyone goes to talk
to with their problems.
The risk of hiring this person to be on your sales team is that they might spend too much
time with customers who will never buy.
If their Goal Orientation scores are also in the low range, this person will also struggle
with managing time.
This is the person that has clients who love them.
The problem is, they don’t have enough clients due to low sales activities.
In my experience, I’ve found that people with very high scores on the social confidence
scale and very high scores on the Need to Impress scale, are prone to struggle with
Honesty.
This doesn’t mean that everyone with this combination of traits is dishonest, it simply
means this is the trait that they struggle with the most.
Where this combination trait is ideal for helping withstand rejection, it is critical
to confirm with the right interview questions and a thorough reference check.
Here’s a question I use a lot, “If I were to call your last manager and ask them to
tell me your greatest weakness, what would they say?”
If the candidate says something like, “They would tell you that I am impatient with lazy
people.”
Or something like, “I am a workaholic.”
These answers point toward a struggle with honesty.
Here is another important fact to consider with the person with high Social Confidence
and high Need to Impress scores.
They may also struggle with accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.
These people find it very hard to look in the mirror and reflect on their shortcomings.
They are more prone to look out the window to find others to blame for reasons things
went badly.
Unlike the above examples, personality trait combinations do not have as great of an impact
on work ethic.
Goal Orientation and Need for Control will impact the pace at which a person will work,
but not the discipline used to start and complete work.
People with high scores on the Goal Orientation scale and high scores on the Need for Control
scale have a natural internal clock that is always sounding an alarm.
It’s one of those alarms that says, “You are not moving fast enough, get on with it”.
These people need disciplined work ethic to help them stick with the task even when it
gets boring.
Without discipline, these salespeople will be prone to change jobs when they get bored
or if success is not coming quickly enough.
Strong work ethic is needed to help them push through the boredom and have patience to wait
on the reward of the sales process.
Many jobs over a short period of time and these high Goal Orientation and Need to control
scores are strong signs of a low work ethic.
People who have low scores on the Goal Orientation scale and low Need for Control scale do not
have this internal clock that sounds the alarm.
They are more focused on following a process to get the job done efficiently.
They need a disciplined work ethic to help them to not spend too much time on tasks.
Most need a manager to help set deadlines and hold them accountable.
When disciplined work ethic is low in these people, it takes a while for them to get the
day started, they take long breaks and measure their productivity by the number of hours
worked, not the amount of work completed.
This combination is a disaster for a high activity salesperson.
Let’s take a quick look at a personality trait combinations that impact time management.
Salespeople spend time gathering details and spend time with people.
If we spend too much time analyzing details and/or too much time with people, we simply
cannot make enough sales calls.
People with low scores on the Goal Orientation scale, Need for Control scale and high scores
on the Detail Orientation scale and Need to Nurture scale are very prone to have poor
time management skills.
Throw in some low work ethic and you have the type of salesperson you want to avoid
hiring at all costs.
These salespeople want to become a product expert before they make any sales calls.
They usually talk too much during the presentation and give the prospect too much information.
They are known around the office as the very nice product expert, but everyone wonders
why they are not successful.
The reason for their lack of success is simply not enough sales activity.
Today I further answered the question, “What do I look for when recruiting salespeople?
I answered this question by giving you greater details of the 5 Dimensions of the Best Salesperson
Profile.
We focused on the fact that personality traits point to which character traits people are
mot likely to struggle with.
You learned that when you have accurate personality information, you can use interview questions
to uncover character traits.
This knowledge of human behavior is going to help you make better recruiting decisions,
and help you become a great coach.
You have what it takes.
Commit to mastering this knowledge and your recruiting skills will grow.
What I’d like you to do now is please leave some comments below, because I personally
respond to every comment.
You probably know some other people who are struggling with recruiting salespeople, and
they would benefit from this training, so please email your friends this website so
they will get the same benefit as you.
Click on the “Mail this to a friend” button underneath this video.
They will thank you for it.
Be sure to watch your email box.
I am preparing some more free video training to help you while you wait on your copy of
the book.
I’ll send you another link in a day or so.
If you want more information on the Craft Personality Questionnaire, go to craftprofiles.com
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Congratulations on wanting to become a great recruiter and sales coach.
Now go recruit the best.