Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top SalesRepresentatives by Bradford D. Smart Ph.D. & Greg Alexander

Author:Bradford D. Smart Ph.D. & Greg Alexander [Smart Ph.D., Bradford D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-06-18T14:00:00+00:00

Ask those six questions for every full-time job, and you will hire better.

If you learn only one simple technique from this book, make it this one: Ask those six questions for every full-time job, and you will hire better.

How can we be so sure this interview method is valuable? Hundreds of people have asked for the “secret”—people sitting next to us on planes, golfing partners, and people we meet at parties. We both have scribbled these questions and said to ask candidates those questions for every full-time job. In return, we’ve asked that people e-mail us the results. In a few weeks, we get the e-mails or phone calls, and the message is always, “Wow! That was by far the best, most revealing, most worthwhile interview I’ve ever conducted!”

This might be the equivalent of saying to someone learning surgery, “Don’t forget to slosh on the antiseptic.” If the surgeon is merely doing two stitches but forgets the antiseptic, the patient could become infected, and the patient could die. Ditto for those six questions: Ask them and you’ll hire better; if you don’t ask them, you’ll likely have a mis-hire.

Considering this Topgrading story:

Brad,

I stumbled on Topgrading near the end of 3.5 yrs as a sales manager. I had been gradually refining my own interview guide but was still getting too many false positives. Upon incorporating Topgrading, I avoided a number of costly mistakes and my last hiring decisions were much better than my prior decisions. Shortly after, I accepted an exciting opportunity that took me out of sales for over a year. However, my sales team continued to outperform the other sales teams and, even a full year after I had left sales, my people (distributed among the remaining teams) were collectively selling more than the sales-people hired by any of the remaining sales managers. Our Company has 30% annual turnover in Sales. So for every single person on my team to still be with the Company and performing well after a whole year suggests that I was doing something right in my hiring. Effective last week, I now have responsibility for all of Sales (2 sales managers and 20 sales-people) . One of my first initiatives is to install Topgrading in our sales organization. My sales managers and I are excited by the results we expect.

Best,

Marcus E. Goormastic

This is all good news for you, the sales manager, for it will assure better hiring. But realistically, Topgrading is more than asking just these six questions for every job. To achieve 90-percent hiring success, you’ll need to ask more than just those repeat six questions.

The first breakthrough in helping managers like you interview well was the invention of the Topgrading Interview Guide. It’s a convenient “road map”—just ask the question, take notes, go on to the next question, take notes, and when all the questions on a page are asked and notes show the responses, turn the page. Easy!

We’ve designed the Topgrading Interview Guide for Sales Representatives so that every question is just the right question.

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