In today's cloud and digital world your sales (and marketing) staff must be Digital Athletes.
Am I ranting and raving when I constantly say - "What the heck is this guy/gal doing hiring a sales rep that was successful yesterday?" I'm not trying to be mean or belittle anyone but for anyone that knows me I'm just telling it like I see it. Hiring the guy/gal with the supposed Rolodex and was successful "yesterday" dialing for dollars is simply not going to work today - especially when selling recurring revenue cloud. Beyond the fact that today you need some form of marketing function feeding leads to a sales rep to make it all work, let's look at the DNA of today's sales rep - the Digital Athlete. Full disclosure first. When I read Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge I said "OMG we think eerily alike". Their thoughts on today's sales rep and mine are very similar.
This guy/gal is,
1. Digital - lives, breaths and sleeps in today's digital world. Has a blog, twitter account, active LinkedIn account with 100's of connections and any other social platform du jour. Why? Because doing their own "social selling" (btw I hate those words for some reason) will be part of their job requirements.
2. Competitive - this person doesn't need to be an Olympic athlete or has run the Boston marathon in under three hours, we are just looking for someone that likes to compete and doesn't enjoy losing and also understands what it takes to compete and to be on a team.
3. Proven work ethic - this is huge. What's needed to be successful in sales today (or any job today)? - grit and determination. To gotta have someone willing to put in the hours - it's that simple. Please look for proof that he/she has been willing to work hard to get the job done - the job can be work related or coming back from a knee injury - it's in their blood.
4. Engaging - this really goes hand in hand with the digital DNA part and social selling. Get someone that you can engage with in a interesting conversation and even a great debate. You'll want this person having engaging interactions with prospects and also with the team. Engaging = adding value.
5. Trainable - huge, huge, huge! I don't know about you but I must spend 10 hours a week learning something new about this crazy industry and world. IMHO half that battle with sales 2.0 today is the desire, willingness and ability to learn something new every day - and that's not going away anytime soon.
