Making the Values Recruitment Sales Pitch Work

Having your sales team’s values aligned with your company’s values is a hard job. You don’t want (or have to) make it even harder by recruiting new sales people that have conflicting values with yours.

Talking about Values when interviewing potential candidates to work for you sales team is fundamental if you want to avoid ‘Values time bombs’ surprises later.

By Values time bombs I mean potential conflicts that will inevitably surface later on regarding day to day behavior.

It’s easy to understand why this happens, especially with Values.

Imagine I ask a group of people to draw a tree.

After all of them draw a tree, would they all be the same? No, right?

So would it be correct, from a leadership standpoint, if I criticized someone’s tree as inadequate or wrong? Or if I manifested my disappointment with some of the trees presented?

The answer is obviously ‘NO’, as I, the leader, wasn’t clear in my expectations for the tree I wanted drawn.

• Should the tree have branches?
• Should the tree have fruit?
• Should it have leaves?
• Should it have roots?

A leader has to be very clear about his/her expectations and the same applies to Values (actually, even MORE for Values!).

In my first article, we talked about the Values of your sales team, if they’re the same values your company has and what you can do to define and align them.

Today I’d like to tell you how to apply these concepts in a practical way regarding hiring new sales people.

What I recommend that you do is that you incorporate a specific set of questions into the sales recruiting/interviewing process.

That idea here is to go beyond sales knowledge and skills, which are what companies are mostly interested in, and also talk about Values and ATTITUDE, which are fundamental in the long wrong (but lightly, if ever, addressed in most sales hiring processes).

Again, this sets up many Values time bombs that could have been avoided.

These 12 questions are just an example – after reading them, you may want to adjust, adapt or even create your own. I recommend you print the questions and have the candidate
answer them by him/herself. Give him or her a pen, a sheet of paper and 15 to 30 minutes to do so.

The questionnaire can also be posted online – just by reading the questions the candidate will have a better idea in advance of what kind of company s/he’s going to be
working for ( a Small Giant!).

So here is my list of 12 SG questions to ask sales candidates:

1. A wonderful moment that happened to me as a salesperson was when __________________________________________________________ .
2. When I started in Sales, a person that greatly influenced me was _____________, because he/she always _____________________________.
3. One of the best advice I have ever received as a sales professional was __________________________, because ____________________________________.
4. If I could control something in the future, it would be _________________________, because ___________________________________ .
5. My brightest/proudest moment as a salesperson was __________________________ .
6. When a customer complains, I immediately feel ______________________________ .
7. If I knew when I started as a salesperson what I know today, I would have done or dedicated myself more to _________________________ and less to ___________________________ .
8. Some of my priorities have changed since I was a teenager. For example, before I used to value ________________________ and today I prefer/value ____________________________________ much more.
9. If I could relive a day of my life as a salesperson and change what happened, that day would be the day that ______________________________________ and what I would do differently would be to ______________________________________________ .
10. When I want to motivate and energize myself, I _____________________________ .
11. My personal ethics standards were challenged once when __________________________. I responded to this by ________________________ .
12. One of my main objectives in life that almost no one knows about is to ____________________ . This is very important to me because __________________

There you go! You now have a set of 12 questions that willhelp you have very interesting conversations.

You’ll be able to see a lot more beyond the professional being hired, his/her abilities, skills, knowledge. Those are all very important, but as Small Giants we want to go beyond.

We want the right attitude. We value Values.

This exercise will help you get a step closer to being a true Small Giant if you apply it consistently during your sales interviewing process.

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