Great salespeople are made, not found

I am very passionate about selling, because to me it is the engine that makes the company run. If you are not getting people sold on the idea of walking into your store, sold on the idea of buying from your website, sold on your product or your service by whatever route it travels, you do not have a business.

So the question comes: can you take someone and train them to be a salesperson? The answer is absolutely yes. I have built my companies by doing exactly that, over and over. You should see the recruiting machine I run to bring people in the door. It never stops.

What I actually hire for

My selection points are simpler than you would guess. One: they look like they are awake. Two: they have a good communication cycle. I say hi, how are you, and they come back at me with life in their voice instead of mumbling at their shoes.

Then I hand them a pen and say: sell me this. I am not grading the pitch. I am watching whether they get into it. Are they willing to try, or do they freeze and apologize? Because what you are really hiring is someone willing to show up and have a conversation with a stranger. That is the requirement, the whole requirement. Everything else can be built, and I have watched it get built thousands of times.

The training: what you say, how you say it

Once they are hired, they go into a training process I have developed over decades, and it comes down to two questions.

First: what do you say? You, the owner, must define how your product gets talked about. That is not the rep's job to invent. Your salespeople will help you refine it, because you will listen to them live and learn what actually works, but the standard belongs to you.

Second: how do you say it? That is drilling. The customer says no, I am not interested, because that happens in the world of selling, and the rep needs the rebuttal ready, delivered eloquently, without a flicker of hesitation. So you drill it and you drill it and you drill it. Then you put them into live action, record what they do, bring them back, and correct it. A good starting diet is the leads that almost closed themselves: people who called in, people who tried to sign up on the website and quit halfway. Let new reps learn by rehabilitating those.

And stay close to the floor while they learn, because your salespeople will teach you things in return. You listen to the live calls and you hear which lines land and which ones stall, and the script gets sharper because of it. Training is not a one-way street. It is a loop: define, drill, listen, refine, drill again.

Stop shopping for unicorns

The idea of just going out and finding great salespeople has one problem: the great ones have jobs. They are already making good money. They are not looking, and the odds of catching one falling free are very low.

Every now and then you get lucky. But I will tell you something: if you are going to build your business on luck, you are probably going to end up with bad luck. Knock it off. Build the machine instead: hire the awake and the willing, define what they say, train how they say it, and then work on the third element, which is getting them to say it a lot.

Do that, pay them well for being successful, and that alone will take your company out the top. It is your job as an owner or a manager to have this in place. Not to wish for it. To build it.