“It’s been dirty, and it will be a little tough, but we’ll be fine.”

I have the wonderful experience of working with the co-CEOs and my fellow board members at Rome Snowboards, one of the premier worldwide snowboard brands and not coincidentally a business located in my home state of Vermont.  I checked in with Josh earlier this week right after the floods to see if he and his team and the business in general were okay. With water damaging the first floor of the factory and a busy shipping season right in front of them, Josh’s response above, is partly the result of both he and his co-founder, Paul, being very successful entrepreneurs and also an expression of his being a classic Vermonter.  I just thought that his statement was a perfect example of perseverance.  Short, to the point, it is what it is, let’s get back to work.

Perseverance, like “resilience”, which I wrote about in last week’s post, sounds like one of those squishy, “Motherhood & Apple Pie” words that we all want to have embodied in our salespeople.  Phrases such as “good work ethic”, “strong motivation” and “dedicated” are also thrown into the same mix. 

So, just what are these “things” that we talk about when we use words such as “perseverance” in describing what we expect to be embodied in our salespeople?  They’re not skills; skills are activities that one is trained in.  Perseverance, resilience, and work ethic are typically not trained skills, but are more a part of the emotional DNA of a salesperson.  They’re somewhat aligned with experience since that’s where we develop our personalities, but, in fact, they’re “attributes”. 

I know that Josh, Paul and the rest of the Rome team have perseverance since I’ve worked closely with them since the company was founded ten plus years ago.   When hiring salespeople, we typically don’t have that luxury, and as a result, we often fail in our assessment of a candidate’s attributes by simply relying on our “gut instinct”, an inadequate and very costly decision process since in more than 50% of the hiring cases, our instincts are going to be at least partially wrong. 

In fact, none of this guesswork is necessary, when there are very sophisticated, easy-to-use hiring tools readily available.  We have two favorites that we strongly recommend.

We’ve been using Predictive Index for more than a decade now and use it with every single hire from salesperson to CEO.  With 60 years of experience behind them and millions of assessments in their databases, PI for us provides an easy to assess, non-invasive, quick means to provide an analytical and objective outline of a candidate’s attributes.

We also think very highly of Skill Survey, the leading provider of behavioral web-based reference-checking.  Using their software, we’ve been able to quickly get a "360° view" of a candidate's potential for success in a specific position.  We’ve found Skill Survey invaluable for sales hires.

In today’s world of increasingly complex selling environments, hiring decisions, just like sales processes, need to be analytical and metric driven limiting the guesswork and “gut feel” in trying to interpret such critical characteristics such as perseverance. 

For additional ideas, you might also want to take a look at our three part series of Hiring SalesPeople More Effectively in the Solution Center Toolbox on our site.

And finally, if you would like a way to donate to the people directly affected in the area of Stratton Mountain, Vermont, please just click on HERE.  I know that it would be greatly appreciated by the community.

Good selling, today.

Jack
Head Coach