"It ain't what you don't know about hiring salespeople that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Ok, so I used some poetic license, but if Mark Twain were a business owner he would have said it exactly as written above. There are many challenges to selecting, hiring, onboarding and training, compensating, and managing a new salesperson.

One of those challenges are the biases that many business owners have about salespeople. Some of those beliefs expressed often include:

•Good sales people are motivated by money
•It's better to hire people with sales experience
•A good salesperson can sell anything
•Introverts don't make good sales people
•Salespeople must have great relationship-building skills
•Sales is purely a numbers game
•A salesperson should be covering theirs costs within x number of months
•All sales people are lazy
•Salespeople are lone wolves

And the list goes on...

What evidence do we have that these things are true? We may have an experience with a few anecdotes from our past or the "wisdom" that is passed on to us, but the truth is there is loads of research debunking all these ideas.

In other words, many of those things that we "know for sure just ain't so."

So here is the problem with these biases. They somehow prevent business owners from going all in on the preparation and subsequent hiring, training, and managing their new sales people. The failure of those people is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask yourself these questions before hiring your next sales person:

•What beliefs do you have about sales people? Do those beliefs hold up when examined?
•How might these beliefs impact how you have approached hiring, onboarding, training, compensating, and managing salesperson in the past?
•How would you do it if you believed that if your company does it right, you can hire people who will succeed in sales.


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