Recruit for attitude, train for experience

Recruit fresh talent with the right attitude

Recruiting great salespeople from outside your industry can be a winning strategy. But there’s an obvious problem: they have no experience of your industry. How do you help new hires to learn the knowledge they need to be effective quickly?

I’ve seen this strategy work very well for businesses that want to inject some fresh blood into their salesforce. It might seem counter-intuitive in some ways but it works for one simple reason. It’s more effective in the long run to ‘recruit for attitude and train for experience’ than to ‘recruit for experience and train for attitude’.

If you recruit great salespeople with the right attitude they will usually take ownership for attaining all the knowledge they need to work effectively in their new industry. On the other hand, if you try to develop your time-served ‘industry experts’ into great salespeople, it probably won’t work unless they are great salespeople already – in which case you needn't have bothered training them.

Selling requires learned skills, but the majority of a salesperson’s success in the long run comes from their attitude or mind-set, which is deeply rooted in their personality attributes. That’s why you can’t easily train people to ‘learn a great attitude’ for sales, or anything else for that matter.

Although I believe the recruit-for-attitude strategy is the right one for most sales organisations, the potential drawbacks are clear – even with the best attitude in the world, it can take a long time for new salespeople with no industry experience to learn the new knowledge they need.

But I've found it’s possible to significantly reduce the time this takes if you provide very comprehensive training to accelerate the acquisition of the 20% of critical need-to-know industry knowledge that generates 80% of the sales.

The great thing with delivering training in a sales environment is that the bottom-line impact of what you do (training effectiveness) is usually easier to measure than in other areas. For example, great sales training should reduce the time it takes for new salespeople to get on target. Another useful measure is how long it takes them to pay for themselves.

For example, let’s say that at current performance levels, your salespeople take around eight months to break even - to generate enough profit to cover their salaries. In my experience, with the right training, you can probably reduce the time it takes your salespeople to break even by about half.

Use the comments below to tell us about your experience of good and bad on-boarding training!

Picture: IntelGuy, Flickr