When Interviewing for a Sales Job, Look for These Things
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As I have said in earlier posts, a sales job is always a temporary job. You can’t expect to work your entire career for one company. To do so would be bad for your career and bad for your employer as well. Since it’s a virtual certainty that you will work for multiple employers as a sales professional, then you need to know how to select employers.
Most salespersons are great at interviewing since that’s part of their daily job duties. What they aren’t so good at is asking the right questions sometimes. I cannot begin to tell you the number of sales candidates I have interviewed through the years that try to just “close” the interview and get the job without really knowing what they are getting into. Here are a few key things that you need to establish before ever accepting a sales job.
1. Why is the position open? Just about every sales position that becomes available to the public probably is not the best sales position available at a company. Think about it. If a great account base is vacated then it will be assigned to a proven salesperson that is currently working for the company or it will be offered to someone that is networked into the company. Bottom line, vacancies for sales positions where sales are stellar will not be publicized.
2. What is the turnover for the entire sales force? If it’s much above 20% you should be concerned. If they won’t or can’t give you turnover information, run, don’t walk, from that interview.
3. What is the modal income across the entire sales force? Asking the average income for the sales force is a waste of your time. There are always a number of super high producers that pull the average up and sales management always pads the average on top of that. The number you should care about is the modal income. When asking for the modal income you are asking what income level is most prevalent. In short, if you lined everyone up by how much they made last year, how much did the people make in the longest line?
There are a lot of questions to ask when it comes to interviewing for a sales job. These are three of the most important. Since sales is a numbers only job don’t be shy about asking these questions. If they won’t or can’t answer these questions then you probably have all the information you need anyway to make a decision.
Tags: interviewing
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October 19th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
[statgeek]
Don’t ask for modal income. You’ll get a bogus answer because they’re not going to even know how to find the modal income. To get the mode your interviewer would need to understand that equidistant intervals, preferably ten, need to be found across the range of incomes, given the fact that sales incomes would more than likely be a continuous distribution. Incomes would then need to be assigned to those intervals at which point you could find the mode, but you’d be a lot better of charting a frequency distribution.
You’d be better off asking for the average income with a standard deviation figure as that would be far more informative than the modal income.
A high standard deviation would indicate instability or inequity in the income, a low standard deviation would mean consistent production across the board.
Failing that ask for a 5% trimmed average, i.e. an average of the incomes with the highest and lowest 5% removed from the range.
But the best case scenario is a histogram of a frequency distribution of the incomes.
[/statgeek]