The Unexpected Place To Find High Performing Salespeople

We get this question from people a lot.  They’re looking at growing their sales team and wondering where to find “the good ones”. In most cases, they’re right, their existing team are underperforming — but their approach on finding “good” sales people is often really problematic.

Because the place to find these people isn’t where you think.  In fact, it’s often the last place people look to find high performers.

We had a client who came to me recently with one solid salesperson. They’d hired and lost multiple others, who just couldn’t perform consistently, leaving them with only one who’d stuck. As part of our service, we hire salespeople for our clients, so we got straight to work as soon as they came to us.

We hired three new salespeople for them, trained them using our systems, and got them onboarded. When we hire new salespeople we often start them as appointment setters, while they find their feet. We find that this lower-pressure setup helps them to learn our sales systems and gain confidence in their job before they move onto the higher-pressure role of direct sales.

So, imagine our surprise when in the first week, one of the salespeople had someone on the phone she thought would buy.

Rather than set an appointment, she opened the direct sales script and went for it.

And — she made the sale.

The next Monday at our sales meeting, this was of course brought up and celebrated. As a result, in the second week (while they were STILL supposed to be appointment setting) it became a race — two of the salespeople sold 5 units between them for a total of $25k in sales. The third salesperson set 10 appointments.

Totally unexpected, but we loved it!

So, where did we find these amazing salespeople who just wanted to sell? Well there’s the SURPRISE bit:

Not ONE of these three salespeople came from a sales background.

We don’t hire salespeople — we train new ones. So we found people who were from the same or a similar industry our client was in, and who were incredibly smart, and we TRAINED them to sell.

Time and time again, we’ve found this to be a better approach. Someone who has sales experience but no knowledge at all of the industry, isn’t likely to be a better seller than someone with no sales experience who has deep knowledge of the industry and can impart the value and breakthroughs that close sales.

We have a very strong set of systems, including our script software and the AI-backed metrics collection that runs from that. We’ve been training sales for a couple of decades, so for us it’s a no brainer — systems and processes can be taught quickly. Years of experience in an industry can’t be!

There’s a lot of bemoaning the lack of talent out there at the moment, and we see a lot of people wondering where they can find salespeople who can actually deliver. So there’s the secret for you — we don’t find them, we create them!

Leela

CEO, Iron Cage