Written by Hamish Knox; President of Sandler in Calgary, Canada
Creating accountable, sales focused organizations in Calgary
Interviews are to managers what discovery meetings are to salespeople the difference being the latter group theoretically gets a lot more practise.
When a manager is rushed, under pressure to hire or just uncomfortable seeking the truth with their candidate they tend toward surface level interviews. Surface level interviews produce results that make a manager feel good at the time, but often come back to bite them later.
To paraphrase, David Sandler, getting to the truth typically takes three or more questions. Just as you would expect your salespeople to seek the truth with their prospect, your role in an interview is to uncover the truth with your candidate even if that truth, like “not a good fit,” makes you uncomfortable.
Scene
- Sales Manager – our ideal sale is $20,000 and our sales cycle is three weeks. In your first six months we expect you to close 12 sales of at least $20,000. How would you go about doing that?
- Candidate – I’d reach out to my network and book meetings or ask for referrals.
Pause. This sounds great. A poor manager will hear, “I have lots of high level contacts who love me and will buy whatever I’m selling,” say something like, “that’s what we’re looking for” and move on to their next question.
A professional manager would follow up with:
- Sales Manager – I like the sound of that. Curious, what would the title be on the business card of the people you’d reach out to?
- Candidate – Manager of Communications or Marketing Manager.
- Sales Manager – thank you. Do those people have the ability to approve a $20,000 investment?
- Candidate – what do you mean?
- Sales Manager (gently) – if you met with them and they believed that we could support them in solving their problem could they approve a P.O. for $20,000 or would they have to get a Vice President to approve that dollar value?
- Candidate – oh, I’m not really sure.
- Sales Manager – in your current role, who typically approves investments of $20,000 or more?
- Candidate – in some of my larger clients a Director can, but it’s often a VP.
- Sales Manager – so in that case, how comfortable are you reaching out directly to VPs?
- Candidate – um…..
While seeking the truth it’s critical to pay attention to your candidate’s body language and tone when you ask your questions and when they answer, which the scene above doesn’t give us. I once disqualified a candidate after they said “sure” in response to a description of what a major part of their role would be if they were selected, but they also answered with a half shrug, which means “I disagree.” I didn’t call them on the half shrug as they probably weren’t even aware that they had made one, but I mentally disqualified them because their body told me what their words didn’t.
Some amateur salespeople try to sell their manager on “selling up” because they are comfortable speaking with certain titles, like “manager” in the scene above, but aren’t comfortable speaking with true decision makers. What these salespeople don’t recognize is that to “sell up” their contact has to burn their internal political capital with the real decision maker, which non-decision makers are loath to do. If this salesperson starts with the decision maker they may get downshifted, but that lends them referential power when they connect with the non-decision maker.
The scene above also works in an enterprise selling context, which might sound like, “our ideal sale is $500,000 and our sales cycle is 18 months. At the end of 12 months we expect you to have 8 qualified opportunities in position to close in the next six months. How would you go about doing that?”
Some managers may feel the questions asked in the scene above are too direct and possibly rude. Consider that a bad fit hiring decision could cost your organization upwards of $300,000. If you were going to invest $300,000 in research and development or a new machine you would probably go down a similar line of questions.
It’s okay to feel uncomfortable asking truth seeking questions in an interview. If you wimp out and stay on the surface you’ll get bitten later.
Until next time… go lead.
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