Want to hire a top producing salesperson for your company? Sure, everyone does. In all my management and consulting years I’ve never been mandated to hire average salespeople.

But hiring top producing salespeople on a regular basis—those individuals who consistently sell at least four times more than their average counterparts—is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in business. In this chapter we look at the first of the six best practices used by the world’s best sales teams to overcome this challenge. We have already established that selling is a natural born talent. The next logical question then is which talents do we look for? What are the natural ingredients of a top seller? When I set out to answer this question so many years ago I quickly came to the problematic realization that the answer depends on the type of sale you are hiring for. There isn’t one ideal recipe for a top producer because there isn’t just one sale type—there are many. Haven’t we all experienced the frustration and bewilderment of hiring someone we knew to be a top producer, only to watch as he or she flounders in the new sales position? Well the first secret is to understand that different sale types require very different talent sets.

Some salespeople for example love to prospect. Other salespeople hate it. Some salespeople love serving the same clients for years and years. Others need to win over new people all the time. There are those salespeople who excel at the long-term sale, where many meetings are needed to assemble many pieces of a solution with many participants from different departments—they love to orchestrate all of this. Then there are those who prefer the shorter sales cycle, which typically means many more sales, or "victories," per period.

Some salespeople thrive on selling "concepts," where others simply can’t do it, excelling instead with the consistency of unchanging product features and benefits. Some people love to convince others; they thrill to the challenge of converting others to their way of seeing things. Others thrive on fulfilling (or surpassing) the predetermined needs of their clients, and simply cannot sway other people’s opinions—they’re too empathetic. They make great servicers, but terrible closers. Remember, if hiring a top salesperson was as easy as finding a known top producer and then training them to sell your product or service, well. . . everyone would just be doing that. The fact is, with so many different combinations of the above sale characteristics, selling your product or service can be a completely different job than selling another product or service, thereby requiring a completely different set of talents.

The following is a typical job ad for hiring salespeople. It was distilled from dozens of newspapers and career Web site ads (ads that read so similarly that I started to think they had all been copied from the same source), and it denotes the common characteristics being sought for most sales jobs today.

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