Top performing sales people are rare. Finding, attracting, hiring, and keeping them is more difficult than ever because the best are already gainfully employed. And the best salespeople for one company may not be what's best for your company. Shot gun approaches to sales hiring rarely produce worthwhile results and if you think slogging through resumes is going to get it done -- think again. More than 30 million people have secured a job by lying on their resume. And if they're lying about their selling skills, you'll want to know that before you waste your time, energy and money training them to do the impossible for you.

Here are the first 10 of 39 things you must do to perfect your sales recruitment and hire stronger salespeople for your company.

1. Get Clear About What You're Hiring

Often we see companies posting ads that neither attract the right candidates nor detract the wrong ones. Broad-stroked, general sales ads will bring you lots of resumes but very few of the...

How do you know for sure before you hire them that a salesperson or a sales leader can and will do what it takes to succeed? Their resume can't tell you. The headhunter doesn't want you to ask. The candidate will try to convince you in the interview and will likely be a more skillful interviewer than you are.

If you are serious about the success of your sales force and the success of your new hires, you simply can't wing it. You must know the specific sales skills, sales strengths (and weaknesses) sales competencies, and understand the sales DNA of each candidate before you hire them.

Many CEOs and sales leaders I speak with want a better way to predict the success of a new hire. The ONLY way to predict success is to customize a hiring process specific to your company's needs and to screen each candidate for the skills and competencies that matter most to each type of sales role for which you are recruiting (e.g. traditional outbound, inbound, account manager, hunter, customer...

How hard can it be? We just need them to sell, right? Recruiting high performing salespeople and sales leadership is one of the most difficult tasks a CEO will ever have to get right -- and keep right to stay successful. There is much more to it than posting the ad, sifting through resumes, and hoping you picked the right one. The vast majority of ads are poorly worded, focus more on the company than on the role, and fail to attract qualified candidates. People lie on resumes, resume readers all read for different things (and they're usually the wrong things), and hope is simply not a strategy you can hang your hat on. And don't think that placement firm is doing you any favors either. Their job is to sell you candidates.

There are things that you as a CEO or company president must know before you put your team through another failed sales recruitment initiative. Here are 7 to get you started.

1) Recruiting Salespeople is different. Sales Recruiting is different from every...

What is it beyond sales skills that exceptional salespeople and sales leaders possess that make them so successful? It's not just one thing but a set of factors that create a competency that make the difference between a good salesperson and and an elite sales superstar. You can think of it as the sales equivalent of Emotional Intelligence.

The more of these factors your sales team has, the better they will be at keeping cool under pressure, forging meaningful connections with prospects and customers, digging deep to uncover issues, and creating the kind of urgency that gets prospects to move forward and commit to solving problems.

Southwest Airlines is famous for hiring employees with a high degree of emotional intelligence. These people are great to be around and seem to have a knack for diffusing tension and adding a sense of humanity and adventure back into airline travel. The same can be said for an emotionally intelligent sales force. You wouldn't mind being stuck in an...

There are enough sales lessons in this song to fill a chapter in a book. But for today, let’s focus on why your salespeople insist on keeping prospects in the pipeline who are never going to buy from you - - and what you can do to fix it.

Your sales pipeline should be the predictive determiner of future business but month after month and quarter after miserable quarter, CEOs and their sales leaders continue to play guessing games about how much business they can actually count on coming out of their pipeline. This affects more than just revenue. It affects staffing levels, inventory, cash flow, manufacturing, and operations. Much like a heart in the human body, the sales pipeline pumps the lifeblood (sales) through the organization creating the opportunity for optimum health. If there isn’t enough lifeblood or if the lifeblood gets stuck, potential is created for disease and death.

Salespeople tend to keep dead prospects in the pipeline for lots of reasons, not the least...

Lead, follow, or get out of the way. That’s the sentiment I grew up with. My dad was a naval officer in WWII who served at the same time Ronald Reagan served in the US Army. And he knew how to steer a ship. He was kind, consistent, and competent and he taught me a great deal about leadership. Unfortunately, in today’s business climate I see far too many leaders turning over the helm to employees who haven’t a clue about leadership, budgets, revenue, selling, or management. Unless, of course, you consider how well the employees manage their bosses or how they manage to consistently underperform.

Why this lack of leadership now? Now, more than ever, companies need their leaders to be smart, strong, decisive, out in front. Today’s leaders need to be fearless in managing their businesses and their people. They need to be able to make decisions and get their employees to rally behind those decisions. They need to take massive daily action toward the...

Much has been written about the cost of low employee engagement. But keeping customers and prospects engaged in your sales process is equally important to the success of your business.

We know a great deal about the high cost of low employee engagement. We know that there are over 20 million disengaged workers in America alone and that the cost of this problem is nearly $350 billion dollars per year in lost labor and output. We know that the root cause of this disengagement is employee-job misalignment and that when employees “fit” with both the culture of a company and the job to which they are assigned, productivity soars along with business profits. If it sounds like an easy fix, it’s not. Hiring for technical fit and competence is challenging enough without taking the cultural aspect into consideration. Finding technically proficient human talent that aligns with your culture, embraces your core values, and is passionate about your vision can be down...

We have all been there. The stakes are high, the pressure is on, and we have to perform at our best. And instead, we choke. Maybe you were playing golf. Maybe it was an important meeting with your bank or an investor. You blew it and now you're kicking yourself because you knew you could have done better. It's happening to your salespeople too. They're in the middle of a selling situation, and BAM! The prospect says something or does something that catches them off-guard and they panic or become distracted or otherwise lose their focus. They've become emotional and their inner dialog takes over. It happens. It’s bound to happen to everyone at one time or another. But if it’s happening to your salespeople regularly, you have a BIG problem.

Research shows that salespeople who have a tendency to become emotionally involved are 20% less effective. That equates to 20% fewer customers, a 20% reduction in sales commissions and – most importantly – 20% less revenue...

In the movie Hoosiers, coach Norman Dale has led his team to the regional finals and is delivering a pre-game motivational speech. He knows these guys are excited. He knows they are nervous. He knows they are preoccupied with both hopes of winning and fears of losing. And he wants them centered, focused, and present to the game they are about to play.

Isn’t that how it is for your sales management and every salesperson on your team? Every day they are responsible for winning the game. They get nervous and excited. They become preoccupied with winning or losing, rather than maintaining a clear, calm focus on the process. They are distracted by the noise of the game. They sometimes forget why they are there and may not have a plan for their calls or meetings.

Coach Dale's reminder to focus on the fundamentals and not move to the next step until you’ve finished the step you’re on is spot on. But this excellent advice presumes two very important things about your sales...

Most CEOs are well aware of the costs associated with generating new customers. Few, however, are able to accurately predict exactly when those potential customers will become actual customers. That’s a real problem for CEOs who want to significantly grow revenue and are faced with inaccurate, stagnant, and bloated pipelines that are less reliable than the local weather report.

There is a famous quote by John Wanamaker about half the money spent on advertising being wasted and not knowing which half. The same philosophy can be attributed to your sales pipeline. It’s probably at least half wrong; the problem is most CEOs don’t know which half is wrong. And to add insult to injury, the entire organizational structure they have created is inadvertently conspiring against them in their quest to harness the power of good data to make informed decisions that move them closer to their goals and objectives.

One of our clients compared it to playing a game of football with...