The rest of the title is...

and how to make sure they support your mission.

First, what is your mission?

• Solve for the customer?
• $1M/year?
• Sell your company for $10M in 5 years?
• World domination?

Simple math. If X + Y = Z. You can solve that two ways. Hire whoever comes along (X). Let them do whatever they want (Y). You'll get what you get (Z). However, if you know what you want (Z), you can hire the right people (X) who are predisposed or can be coached to do what you need done (Y) to get what you want (Z).

Once you know what you want, then you can work on what they need to be? I look at 21 Sales Core Competencies.

• Do they need to be able to find their own customers or will you provide more perfect customers than they need?
• Do they need to be able to develop a relationship quickly or develop a deeper relationship over time?
• Will all leads be sell-able or will your rep need to be able disqualify 'no-fits'?
• Will the 'presentation be longer than 5 minutes? Customized?
• Are you new to the market or well established? The market leader or one of many?
• Are you replacing an incumbent or is this new to your customer?
• Has your rep mastered the dozens of skills that make up the 10 Selling Competencies or can they learn them?

Regarding Sales DNA...

• Does your rep's attitude toward the customer align with yours?
• Can they listen to their customer and follow a sales process without memorizing lines?
• Do they have any of the 42 self-limiting beliefs that can kill them before they open their mouth?
• Are they contemplative shoppers? Are they decision-makers? Does their buying style match their customer's?

Finally, do they want to succeed as badly as you want to succeed and in the same way? Does their reason for getting up in the morning align with why you get up in the morning or will you be training them for their next boss?

When I started this section, I mentioned 21 Sales Core Competencies. Each of those competencies has 6-42 attributes. Do the math. That's a lot of little things that can get in the way and you and your sales managers have a lot to do. However, your sales managers #1 job should be to coach their reps up, but many don't know how and/or are more worried about closing a deal than helping all of their reps close their deals.

Here's where it gets fuzzy. Remember your mission. If you want a $500K-$1M lifestyle business, You probably either need to learn to sell or you need one good hire. However, if you're after world domination, you'll need to scale and scaling means multiple hires, multiple sales managers and coaches. My son wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million. If you're looking to scale huge, read it. Pay attention to the first few hires, where they came from and what roles they played in growing the company. If you hire correctly, many of your first sales hires will become sales managers and will need to recruit and coach your next tier if salespeople. Remember at the beginning we mentioned supporting your mission? This is where it becomes critical that your mission, your sales managers' missions and their salespeople's missions all align. Misalignment cause churn and churn costs time, money and reputation. I mentioned earlier that your sales managers #1 job should be to coach their reps up. If you listen to Mark's golf story at 24:26 in this video, you'll learn the secret to coaching.

I'll stop here.

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