Filling sales vacancies a treacherous process even for the most experienced of sales managers. The actual process itself is not difficult, but if you’ve ever got it wrong (that’s most sales managers) then you’ll realise just how much time it takes to undo the damage this can cause.

Bizarrely, in a team of 10 people, two poor performers can take up 80% of a managers time trying to sort things out. So, at the point of recruitment, there’s a lot at stake. So why are sales vacancies any different to any other kind of vacancy? Well a core skill of the sales person is to be able to adapt your style to that of your buyer, in this case, an interviewer. A candidates is looks fantastic, communicates well with you, is charismatic, looks the part, so what’s the problem?

Well, unfortunately, there are heaps of sales people out there who talk a great game, but deliver consistent results. They can even deliver fantastic calls on field visits when managers are with them, but fail to reach the top of the league tables. To be a top performer in sales roles, you need to be able to deliver go calls day in day out, this requires both discipline and motivation. In many cases, I have seen people who have been great sales people for 2 or 3 years and then collapsed. The fact that they have been good, doesn’t make it any easier cleaning up the mess when this happens.

The key to avoiding this at interview is to look beyond ‘just’ trying to establish a history of sales success. In almost all cases of the great who have fallen, there were clues in the history which cold have predicted their demise. The missing act during the recruitment phase to was to look at how the candidate responded to adverse events. This could be anything from professional scenarios such as company restructures, the loss of a long term sales manager, to personal scenarios such as a bereavement or divorce.

Ultimately behavioural traits are remarkably consistent over time, and from one context to another. People who have been stable in the face of adversity in the past, will likely be so in the future. The converse, is of course, also true. A particularly consistent feature are timescales. People who have stayed in roles on average for 3 years at a time in the past, whatever the reasons for movement where, will likely do the same in the future. If 3 years good service is enough for you, you may be happy to take them on this basis that they will likely leave around the three year mark.

In summary, when recruiting for sales vacancies, it’s important to look beyond just sales results when interviewing. Write a list of desired traits and ask for examples from their past where they have shown them. Also look closely at their response to adversity, predicting future adversity is impossible, predicting a response to it is not.

Good luck