Hiring bad salespeople is like pushing a boulder up a hill—it’s exhausting, unproductive, and takes a toll on your time and energy. A sales managers job is tough enough without the added burden of trying to make up for a team’s shortcomings. Without the right salespeople on your team, you risk becoming a highly paid babysitter or grief counselor, fielding endless complaints about their lack of success.
As I mention in my book, Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership: Get hiring right, because nothing else matters. Yet so many sales managers end up with mediocre salespeople. Why? One significant reason is the failure to vet candidates for emotional intelligence (EQ) skills—the soft skills that drive hard results.
The consequences of overlooking EQ in the hiring process are BIG. You might hire salespeople who aren’t coachable, lack resilience, or can’t establish true win-win relationships. These shortcomings make your already challenging job even harder.
Below, I outline three critical EQ skills (there are many more) to evaluate during the hiring process, along with interview questions to help you better qualify or disqualify candidates who possess them.
- Delayed gratification – This is the ability to put in the work to earn the reward. Without this skill, salespeople often fall into instant gratification traps such as:
No calendar blocking. They avoid taking the time to plan a well-organized week or month, claiming it takes too much time. Very ironic because of the amount of time wasted because of poor organization.
Chasing easy sales. Instead of pursuing challenging opportunities, they stick to low-effort tasks like calling on existing accounts. They slowly turn into professional visitors rather than professional salespeople. No introduction of new products or services are discussed----because of lack of planning. (See above point.)
Avoiding skill development. They don’t invest time in role-playing or refining their selling skills, preferring to practice on their poor prospects instead of their peers. They remain average at best producing average results.
Interview question: What is the hardest goal you’ve worked to achieve? What made it hard? How long did you work to achieve the goal?
Candidates with delayed gratification skills will give examples of where they demonstrated the discipline to invest effort into activities that paid dividends in the future.
- Self-Regard - People with good self-regard have the inner confidence to recognize both their strengths and weaknesses.
- They are humble - No puffery going on her. The willingly acknowledge blind spots that need illumination.
- They avoid excuses and blame - Instead, they choose accountability and responsibility for both their successes and failure. Salespeople with good self-regard are coachable and seek constructive feedback.
Bill Campbell is known as the “Trillion Dollar Coach” because he coached tech titans such as Eric Schimdt of Google. He enjoyed great success: however, I believe some of that success was because he only worked with coachable people. His interview process focused on one question: Are you coachable?
How many of you are vetting your sales candidates for humility and coachability?
Interview Question: What do you attribute your success to? What do you attribute your failures to? (Listen to see if they give credit to mentors, peers, parents or colleagues---or if they attribute all success to themselves. Listen to see if they took responsibility for failures or assigned blame.)
- Assertiveness - This EQ skill is defined as the ability to state what you need clearly and nicely. It’s the key skill for creating partnership sales relationships. Without this skill, salespeople often display non-assertive behaviors which lead to:
- Practice proposals - When a prospect isn’t willing to share their budget, non-assertive salespeople “go-along-to-get-along” wasting hours creating a proposal only to hear the words, “This is more than we wanted to spend.”
- Avoid critical questions and conversations - They hesitate to ask for meetings with all the buying influences, even when the win-loss report shows these meetings are critical to winning business. As a result, they lose to a more assertive competitor who secured those meetings by nicely explaining the necessity of involving all stakeholders.
Interview question: Share with me a time where the prospect wasn’t open to introducing you to other decision makers in the organization. What did you say or do? What was the outcome.
Candidates with assertiveness will have examples of how they nicely persuaded the prospect to include other decision makers or deployed a champion strategy.
Sales leaders, stop pushing the boulder uphill. Make your job easier and more enjoyable. Upgrade your hiring process by including interview questions that vet your new sales candidate for soft skills, emotional intelligence skills. Soft skills do produce hard sales results.
Good Selling and Leading!
