Question and Answer for Sales Leaders
Q. Which of these two choices is more likely to result in an effective sales person: - hiring someone with technical expertise or industry experience and training them to become a sales person,
- hiring someone with sales aptitude, and training them in the product knowledge and technical aspects of the job?
A. That’s simple. I think you are almost always better off hiring someone with sales aptitude and educating them in the technical part of the job.
Here’s why…
1. In any population of people, there are far more people with technical aptitude than there are with genuine sales aptitude. So, good sales people are harder to find than good technicians. That’s one of the reasons why a good sales person earns more than a good technician.
2. Sales is a more difficult job than engineering, technical repair, or any of the other highly technical professions. Technicians invariably work with things, and things have reliable and known characteristics. Sales people, on the other hand, invariably work with people. And each individual person is an ultimately unknowable combination of thoughts, feelings, values, goals and beliefs
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variables.
If you can find someone with the qualities to handle this chaos -- the discipline to work an unsupervised effective work week, the personal self-image strong enough to withstand daily rejection, the personal motivation to press on no matter what – then believe me, training them in technical details is the easy part.
2. Technical people who become sales people almost always view their job as essentially uncovering technical problems to solve, and then proposing solutions to those technical problems. While this is a component of the job, it dramatically limits the sales person’s effectiveness.
Those of you who are familiar with my
“peeling the onion” analogy will recognize that “technical problems” are very near the surface of the onion. As long as a sales person views his/her job as that of finding solutions to... [click here to read the entire
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