Category Archives: Interviewing & Assessment Articles

We wrote about cold call reluctance earlier this week (see My New Hire Won’t Make Cold Calls). Qualifying a prospect is one of the most critical phases in the sales cycle is another area where we see reps exhibiting reluctance. After the initial call is made, qualifying is one of the most feared phases in

Reference Checks Reference checks are one of the most critical ways to validate the traits and performance abilities of a potential sales hire (see The Importance of Reference Checks in Sales Hiring). Unfortunately many companies make up their mind to hire someone and then perform only cursory reference checks or, surprisingly often, none at all.

This may sound like a familiar scenario. That new sales person you hired isn’t working out. After six months on the job, he hasn’t met one monthly sales goal. And, he doesn’t get along with others on the team. How did this happen? He seemed so great in the interview! If this sounds familiar, maybe

We were recently putting together the interview script for a sales hiring project we are working on and I was thinking about some of the nutty questions that have been popular over the years. “What would you say was your weakest attribute?” This is not an uncommon interview question and I can remember asking this

Never underestimate what you can learn from checking the references of someone you are thinking about hiring and never get so enamoured by a prospective hire that you don’t bother to make reference checks part of your hiring process. Here are some of the most insightful things we have learned from years of checking sales