I’ve spend the majority of my adult life in sales. I don’t call myself a
“salesman,” mostly because I don’t feel that a label based on what you’ve
done for a living is an especially fulfilling tag to wear.

That said, having spent a lot of time both being a salesperson, and managing
salespeople from my experiences I’ve developed a lot of strong opinions on
the subject of sales. Here’s one of them: companies that are dissatisfied
with their revenue generally totally misunderstand their salespeople. They
don’t understand what drives them, and they don’t understand how to get the
best out of them.

Right off the bat let me say that only experienced sales managers who’ve
been successful in sales themselves should hire and manage salespeople.
Without that core understanding, time and money are wasted hiring unsuitable
candidates.

At one point in my life I managed the commission sales floor at a major
department store. On several occasions applicants who I refused to consider,
either because of a poor interview or an even worse resume were hired
anyway. In one case, the store’s HR manager dug a resume out of my trashcan,
interviewed and hired the candidate and put him on my sales floor. It is
never advisable to take a “warm body” and hope that, despite the evidence,
they’re going to work out.

On that note, when hiring new salespeople, experience isn’t everything. In
fact, sometimes it’s detrimental. Early on, I was coached by my own trainers
to consider candidates based on ASK: Attitude, Skills, and Knowledge. Skills
and knowledge can be taught, but right up front, the right attitude is
either present or it isn’t. As it happens, when you hire seasoned
salespeople it can take longer to retrain them, getting them to give up bad
habits that they’ve picked up over the years than it would to train a
bright-eyed, enthusiastic, but otherwise clueless new salesperson from
square one.

Case in point: I once worked with a gaggle of sixty year old bitter
waiting-for-retirement salesmen, all of whom smoked. Each of them could be
counted on to take a minimum of five smoke breaks a day. Each of those
breaks lasted a minimum of fifteen minutes. This meant that each of them was
off the floor for at least an hour and a quarter every day, leaving me to
skate the floor and make more sales. If trading business for cigarettes
isn’t a bad habit, I don’t know what is.

I could go on all day, but the takeaway here is that if you want to coach
your salespeople to be top performers, you need to be one yourself,
otherwise you won’t really understand how their heads work, and how to get
the best out of them. Your company’s revenue depends on it.