Specifically, I’ve been part of the hiring process, trained and mentored over 1,000 sales and sales management professionals at every level. Moreover, I have personally managed 48 sales offices in 39 markets as well as 2 national sales organizations from coast to coast.  This includes but is not limited to recruiting, building and revamping sales teams in branch sales offices, sales regions and national sales organizations from top to bottom in myriad industries.

Moreover, I have worked with companies like Taleo, Intel, Microsoft, Wells Fargo Bank, Salesforce.com and IBM to name just a few.  As a sales organization consultant, I have worked with these companies to rebuild their recruiting and hiring practices that in many cases were severely antiquated with limited strategy,  poor execution, no repeatable process and dismal results.  Therefore, I can honestly say that I speak from a real-life and real-world perspective that few others ever attain.

I’m going to share a valuable recruiting lesson with you because much to my amazement, a significant number of hiring professionals; including internal recruiters within a company, hiring managers, executive level management professionals at the HR, VP and CEO level as well as professional recruiters still mistakenly fall into this one catastrophic trap when they recruit sales and sales management talent.

In fact, I often smile in amusement, albeit frustrated amusement, when I see headhunters or hiring managers post an advertisement for a job search, and the first thing they put at the top of the ad is something along the lines of…“Must have five years medical device sales experience selling into hospitals to be considered” or… “Must have seven years human resources consulting experience” or… “Must have carried a quota selling SaaS into financial institutions.”

With all due respect to my professional hiring brethren, this type of mentality or philosophy is completely short-sighted and totally contradictory to hiring exemplary sales and sales leadership talent.

Plain and simple, the #1 mistake hiring managers make when recruiting sales and sales management talent is putting too much emphasis on specific product knowledge and specific industry experience (the things you can teach), but they do not focus enough of their efforts recruiting talent based on what I call the intangibles or better defined as (the things you can’t teach) when it comes to hiring sales and sales management talent.

Based on my professional sales, management and consulting experience often through extraordinary trial and error, I have found there are (15) KEY Sales and Leadership DNA Intangibles which are traits and attributes top performing sales and sales management professionals possess within their DNA that I specifically focus on when interviewing potential candidates.  Simply stated, these are things neither you nor I can teach or train.

Don’t get me wrong, you can make an attempt to train them, coach them or develop them, but at the end of the day, the individual either has these traits or attributes already present within their DNA or they do not.  It’s that simple!

Most hiring professionals whether they are CEOs, VPs, internal recruiters, HR professionals or headhunters all fall victim to poor recruiting and hiring practices often because they simply do not know enough to realize that they don’t know enough when it comes to recruiting top-level sales and sales leadership talent.  The result is that they end up passing on great candidates, and at the same time, end up recruiting the wrong people for the job they are trying to fill which ends up hurting their individual reputation as professionals while at the same time hurting the hiring company’s ROI.

The Top (15) Sales and Leadership DNA Intangibles:

Intelligence
Personality
Ambition                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Instinct                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Creativity
Image                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Accomplished
Passion
Vision                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Integrity
Perseverance
Receptive                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Flexible                                                    Successful                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Competitive

These “15 DNA Intangibles” are imperative to success in sales and sales management, and you simply cannot train, coach or develop them in someone unless they are already present at some level or capacity in the individual’s DNA.

Let me put it to you this way…

You have a better chance of seeing Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Sasquatch and the Easter Bunny all playing “kick the can” in your own backyard than you do trying to teach/coach/train the (15) Sales and Leadership DNA Intangibles I referenced above.

Frustration will often set in when a salesperson you hired is failing, but as the sales leader, you cannot do anything about it because more times than not, the #1 reason they are failing has more to do with what is lacking in their foundational DNA more than anything else.  In other words, the wrong person was hired.

For example, I can take 20 new salespeople and train them how to cold call for new business, but if they do not possess many of the aforementioned “15 DNA Intangibles,” they will fail, plain and simple. No amount of coaching or mentoring will change this result unless the salespeople I’m training already possess the foundational traits and attributes present in their DNA from which to harness and enhance.

This phenomenon explains why millions of dollars are spent every year on professional sales training in the corporate world often to dismal results. It’s not that the sales training isn’t valuable, and it really has little to do with how much of the training is continually reinforced by management. The problem is that valuable sales training is being wasted on salespeople who simply lack the traits and attributes in their DNA to implement what they are being trained or coached to do in a successful manner.  In other words… “You can’t train a parking lot attendant to be a brain surgeon.”  Think about it!

This also explains why the average salesperson and sales manager changes job every 1.75 years, often because they are fired from the company for poor performance.

90% of the top performing sales and sales management talent I have personally recruited already had sales and sales management experience, but they often had zero industry experience.  The reason they were successful was because they possessed the “15 DNA Intangibles” already present in their foundational DNA which gave me the nucleus from which to teach, train, coach and mentor them into becoming top performers regardless of industry experience.

It’s extremely unfair for so-called sales leaders to hire a salesperson, and then six months later blame the salesperson for their poor performance yet the sales leader takes zero responsibility and instead blames the person they hired.  In reality, salespeople fail because the sales leader who hired them mad a bad hiring decision more times than not.

In closing, my advice is to concentrate your sales and sales management recruiting efforts on hiring professionals who possess the “15 DNA Intangibles” and don’t worry so much about the things that can easily be taught once they are hired.  After all, how many so-called “industry veterans” have gone from company to company and failed?  Tons!

Sales training and coaching is paramount to success, but it starts with hiring the right people!

When you focus on “The (15) Sales and Leadership DNA Intangibles,” you will increase your hiring success rate exponentially, you will experience reduced turnover and you will achieve tremendous productivity within your sales organization which will increase your bottom-line profitability.

Do I guarantee this recruiting strategy works?  You can bet your bottom-line dollar I do!

Tom Mangini / Founder

Copyright 2012 / The Sales Advisory Board: http://www.thesalesadvisoryboard.com/