More about Sales Culture

As you develop your culture, you will have challenges to face. How do you find people to participate in your culture? I mentioned a bit about the hip-hop culture. You can’t join the hip-hop culture unless you like a booming baseline. First prerequisite: If you don’t like your head vibrating from the baseline, you can’t join the hip-hop culture. Every culture has its pre-requisites.

So let’s talk about selling culture. How do you find filtering systems to filter out the people that don’t belong? Perhaps you have tried to train someone who wasn’t really interested in being in a selling culture and had a bad experience. It is probably because you did not establish the pre-requisites and hire accordingly.

Let’s look for some qualifying hoops. How do you find the people that you hire? If you’re using advertisements, how do you word those advertisements? What do you call your position? Is your position a salesperson? Is your position a store manager? What do you call it? And whatever you call it now, I would urge you to call it something different in your next advertising campaign, and call it something different in the next one, and keep playing with wording and find out what sort of people are attracted by what sort of ad for the position. It’s very interesting to find out what happens. We do this when we hire at PhoneSmart. Sometimes we call the PhoneSmart rep’s job a call center position. Sometimes we call it inbound sales. Sometimes we call it marketing. We try so many different things just to see what people are attracted to, and it’s fascinating.

You should also do a voice screening for prospective employees. Do you hate to hire people because you have to talk to 75 people to get two that you want to interview? It’s frustrating, isn’t it? So, what’s the one way that people judge your staff? Let’s say if they’re calling on the phone, how much time do you think your staff has to make a great impression on the caller? Five seconds? Ten seconds? So why not set up a voice mail message, so your new prospects call in on the voice message. Your greeting will invite them to talk to you for a minute and tell you something about themselves? You give them five seconds; and if they’ve got a smile in their voice and you enjoy how they sound, call them up and do a telephone interview. If not, delete the message and move on to the next one. It’s kind of cold hearted, but your customers don’t give your people more than five or ten seconds to impress them. So, use that as a yardstick.

Certainly look for the red flags and the green flags. What are those? Well, they can be all kinds of different things. Some people certainly don’t like hiring people who’ve had lots of jobs, but I would caution you to not automatically eliminate someone because of that. Sometimes what you see is a progression of a responsibility or a person who has a goal to be at a certain level and keeps having to move through organizations to get to that level. So just because they’ve had a lot of jobs doesn’t mean they go to work the first week and then oversleep every day and get fired. That’s not what it always means. So you have to look a little deeper into that subject.

Green flags should come up with people that are fun to talk to, people you enjoy visiting with. Now, I would caution you not to hire your friends because that can be complicated. I am saying you should hire people you enjoy talking to, because your customers will enjoy talking to them, too. Hire people that make a great first impression on you.

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