You’re going to notice that I’m a little bit dressed up for today’s video blog and the reason for that is because we are going to role play a job interview and I’m the candidate, so you know I got to look good for my role play. What I’m going to do is I’m going to answer some questions that get asked sometimes in a sales interview and then comment about the three ways that we can really take advantage of gaining information about our candidate, questions certainly being one of them.

So, here we go:

Candidate:

Oh yes, I’m a very good hunter. I love to hunt, oh hunting that’s the best part of sales. Oh, sure be happy to share an example with you. It was Pierre Cardin Eyeware Designs, they are at 485 Madison Avenue. Yeah, they actually shared a floor with Mad Magazine. I never did see Alfred Newman but I wonder whether it was there but, you know. I knocked on their door actually called them first, got their name on a list. Had a chance to talk with the president of the company, a nice Frenchman by the name of Yves Farigier and took him through the whole sales cycle, ended up closing the deal and they became one of my key accounts in Manhattan and it became a great reference. Love hunting, just love hunting.

I’m an excellent closer, excellent closer. Let me tell you a great story. It was 3D Bed and Bath, Bernie Abraham, he was the CEO. I took my CEO to meet Bernie and Bernie just beat the heck out of my CEO. We are having some money problems at the time and Bernie was concerned about that. So, on the way back to the office my CEO let me have it. He told me these guys are not ready to buy from you. They are never going to buy, why did you waste my time for blah, blah, blah. Well, the next day I got to Bernie’s office at 5:30 at night and three hours later I’ve got a signed contract and a 10 percent deposit on two computer systems. I’ve got great closing skills.

Competitive, oh yes I’m a very competitive guy, absolutely. In fact let me share with you. I played Varsity Tennis for four years and I wasn’t that good and I lost plenty of matches to guys that were better than me. But if it was close I was going to win. We played best of three sets and there wasn’t one match in my four years that if went to a third set that I didn’t win. I’m as competitive and I’m as tough as you’ll find anybody.

Okay, time out. So, pretty classic interview questions that get asked. Are you a hunter or farmer? Are you a good closer? Are you competitive? And although they are not bad questions I much rather see you utilize your questioning time to get to information that you can’t get other ways. You can find out whether somebody is a hunter or a farmer by looking at their behavioral profile. Let’s face it, the behavioral profile is not going to lie and there is a very specific difference in what a hunter is and what a farmer is. You can go watch the Opus blog, it talks about them. Ask your candidate these questions and they are going to tell you what they think you want to hear. But you can get good answers to questions. Not every question is going to be positioned that way.

Ask them about how their pipeline got built when they worked at ABC company.
They are going to tell you and that will lead to whether that ties into how you built your pipe line.

Ask them about the nature of the competitive environment.

• Who do they compete with?
• How did they win against that competition? (Ask this in order to learn how they sold in that situation.)

Ask about the nature of the complexity of the sales process.

• Who did they sale to?
• Who did they need to meet with and how did that work?

What you’re trying to find out in your questioning is how similar a world has this person come from, as it relates to their behavioral nature. Are they a good closer? Are they a hunter? Are they competitive? Utilize the behavioral matrix that you have at your fingertips and utilize your power of observation.

You do not have to ask anybody whether they are a good closer or not. See if they close you. Ask yourself, if this person were a good closer what would they be doing right now in the interview process. Because a good closer doesn’t just mean that they ask for the job. It means that they ask for the job when they have earned the right to ask for the job and they are trial closing all along. Use your power of observation as it relates to closing skills, listening skills, speaking skills. Use the behavioral matrix to have a clear understanding to the behavioral nature of the candidate and ask questions that shed light on how the person has been involved in an environment that most likely mimics the environment that you will be putting them in. Thanks for your attention.

One of the great things about what I get to do for a living is that I get to talk to people all over the world. I mean, I can be on the phone with a candidate for a client in Moscow or Singapore or Detroit or San Francisco or anywhere. And it’s great because it’s such a big, big world that we get to work in.

Something happened to me last week which really convinced me that as the saying goes, it’s a small world after all. I had a chance to do a profile of a candidate. And as part of the small talk, we talked about where the person was from and as it turns out, he’s from the same town that I’m from.

This is a little tiny town on the east end of Long Island. And when he gave me the family name it registered with me, and I said, “Not only do I know that you’re from the town that you’re from, I know what street your family is from.” He said, “How could you possibly know that?” I said, “It’s because your family was my next door neighbor.”

So I want you to think of the odds of that. Think of the odds when you’re talking to people all over the world that I could end up talking to the grandson of my next door neighbor. So when I recounted the story to my mom later in the day, she said, “Well you know that his Aunt Vivian was your babysitter when you were growing up.” And I just couldn’t believe it. Aunt Vivian was my babysitter?

Well, it really struck home with me that although the world is big, in so many ways what we do brings it all close together. Now I grew up in a family business where we sold merchandise in one small town and we really did get to know our customers. We knew what color of clothes they like, what sizes, what brands, and what they bought last year for Christmas. We knew all of that.

Well as much as the world has changed, there is still a lot to be said for understanding that you could be talking to your next door neighbor and your reputation of who you are and what you stand for still matters. It maybe a big world but you still can’t hide from your Aunt Vivian.

Thanks for your attention.

Probably the most typical vernacular that I hear when discussing the personality profile of a salesperson is using the phrase hunter versus farmer. And more often than not, a vice president of sales or even a CEO will say, “What we really need around here are some hunters. We’ve got farmers but we really need hunters.” Help us find some hunters and in fact, it’s one of the critical reasons why people work with us and utilize our candidate assessment and personality profiling services is to be able to determine whether or not the candidate is a hunter or if that person is a farmer.

Now we can talk about whether or not a company really does need hunters versus farmers because we’ve definitely found situations when companies are looking for hunters yet, in fact, their top performers are farmers. But that’s a topic for a different video blog. We’re talking today about understanding the personality profile difference between a hunter and a farmer. And it’s very simple and it’s very clear. There are four behavioral traits that get measured in a personality profiling tool. Dominance, which is the level of aggressiveness, extroversion, which is for sociability, haste, which is rate of motion, be it fast pace, go – go or slower moving, slower going, and then structuring detail. Detail oriented or not detail oriented. What’s very clear to define a hunter versus a farmer. Hunters are aggressive personalities – so their dominance will be high. Hunters are impatient personalities, so they will be fast-paced and they will be action oriented. And hunters are traditionally big picture oriented people, so their conformity will be low.

Farmers on the other hand, are consensus oriented people. They are collaborative and consensus oriented, therefore their dominance is low. They are typically good listeners and they pay attention to what is important to the client’s needs and they take their time to understand. Therefore, their patience is high. More often than not, they are process oriented and procedural and they will follow the steps necessary to do what needs to be done. Therefore, their conformity is high. We didn’t talk about the extroversion trait because in both cases hunters and farmers, more often than, not the extroversion trait is high. That’s not the measurement that makes the difference between a hunter and a farmer. What we look at in candidate assessment, personality profiling is the positioning of the dominance trait, high is hunter, low is farmer. The pace trait – high is farmer, low is hunter and the conformity trait – high is farmer, low is hunter. It’s very easy to define and it’s also very easy to be able to see the grey areas as to when somebody combines certain traits of both hunters and farmers.

Thanks for listening.

In the first case, I had a client that was trying to hire a sales person for their operation in Brazil and the manager knew that he wanted a very strong, very direct, independent assertive person for the job and low and behold, he found a candidate that really fit the bill.  This person had dominance as their highest trait and everything about them in the conversation, in their resume and their results showed that they are a very strong, very assertive person. And with that we know there is good and there is bad that can come along because the nature of that person although they can be very strong, can also be a bit challenging to work with on the inside.  They perceive other people that don’t see things their way as potentially being incompetent and they have a really difficult time dealing with anything that they see as interference or micromanagement.  So, we know that going in and so the manager and I had a very good conversation about the nature of this person and the manager said to me, “You know what Bob, I’d rather worry about taking a little bit of lead out of the person’s pencil than trying to put the lead in” and I said, “You know, I understand right where you’re coming from.”

Well right after that phone call, I had another conversation with the manager that was trying to hire somebody to work for them to run a program running alliances in Europe and this person was going to need to work with country managers all over Europe working with different partners and different areas of their business and in conversation with this manager, the manager said to me, “I am looking for somebody that’s very collaborative.  I need somebody who is a consensus oriented person who knows how to get things done while not making waves” and low and behold, he found himself a great candidate for that role.  This person’s dominance was by far their lowest trait and their patience was their highest trait, but when you take low dominance matched up with high patience, you definitely have a consensus oriented collaborative oriented person.

So we had a conversation and said all of that is great, but some times the person who may need to know how to break a little glass and you’re going to need to coach them on that and the manager said, “No problem, I am great at breaking glass.  I don’t have any problem in working with somebody that I am going to need to coach them to be more assertive than is their natural style.”  So it was a great lesson.  In both cases, mangers would go in to get what they think they were looking for, but they knew going in what the nature of their candidate was and they knew exactly what they were going to need to do to make this person more effective. And isn’t that what leadership is about? Understanding the strengths of the people that we have on our team, knowing how to position them to take advantage of what they do well, but also knowing where they may have difficulties and being able to anticipate that and coach them on that, so they can work through those areas that are not as natural for them.

Thanks for your time.