The ability to learn quickly is the most important skill a sales person can have.
I have participated in many discussions about what exactly is the most important skill in sales, and concurrently, how to interview for that skill.
As a disclaimer, the opinions expressed here are solely my own, but that opinion is based on more than 30 years of sales management, during which time I have interviewed and hired several hundred sales people. During the first 15 years of my career as a sales manager, my interviewing and hiring practices were fairly routine, and in hindsight, less effective than I would have liked, if effectiveness is based on the success and longevity of the hire.
For the past 15 years, my hires tended to be more effective as salespeople in that they generate more revenue quickly and more consistently, and requiring less training and management time, and from a very subjective perspective, are more pleasant and easier for me to manage. And in my opinion, it all comes down to one skill.
So, what is the skill that I value most in a new sales hire? The ability to learn quickly.
Of course, I expect the basic competencies in a hire. But beyond that, most sales professionals and managers that I've interviewed tend to have very different lists of skills, most of which are immeasurable when it comes to what their success might look like in my role.
In my previous article on write my research paper service blog, I asserted that only candidates that demonstrate a compelling phone presence and solid, relevant writing ability should move on to a face-to-face interview. I will repeat here that every sales person needs to exhibit a compelling phone presence and be able to communicate a clear story while creating a sense of urgency, or overcoming the routine status quo.
But beyond that, how would you screen a candidate for the ability to learns quickly? The first thing is to notice what the candidate does ineffectively. Do so by assessing the following:
As an interview winds down, I ask the candidate if they have any questions. Most of the time they don’t, or the questions themselves might be trite. But a good candidate will ask questions, and good ones, to which I typically address with more questions of my own.
This is when I ask them any, or all, of the following questions (if they have not already asked them of me):
As you might imagine, this is can confuse candidates, and that's what it's meant to do. The most frequent answer from candidates is “I don’t know.” When I ask the candidate why they don’t know, they frequently tell me “because I did not tell them.”
The true gems will acknowledge that the reason they don’t know is because they never asked me. I would have been very willing to share the answers to these questions.
At this point, I tell the candidate that they will have a second interview with one of my associates, and if they leave that interview the same way they have just left this one, they will not get a job offer. The next interview may happen immediately if my associate (who has been trained to screen for “learns quickly”) is available, or at another time in the near future.
After that interview, my associate and I confer as to the amount of learning that may or may not have taken place with that particular candidate, and if we’d like to eliminate or further their hiring.
It all depends on your current team--where are they strong? Weak? Get what complements them best. Desire is high on my list, no matter what other traits I might need at any given moment. Ability to learn, as you mention, is another biggie. I've experienced people who have the ability to learn but not the desire; the latter negated the earlier.
Great salespeople need to be honest and sincere, appreciate learning, deflect objections, very good at asking questions, tech savvy, open to criticism without sweating it, and if they can earn a decent income, they'll stick around with the right leadership at the dealership principal level. Closing skills can be taught.
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Hire the attitude, train the skill. We want to hire good people that were raised to treat people with respect and kindness. We can teach these people to sell. We cannot teach these core values, but their parents did. We cannot teach a good salesman to be nice.