Screening Reps for Personality Attributes and Attitudes
While education is becoming a more vital criterion for selling, sizing up prospective reps for desired attitudes remains essential. Unique traits and qualities in reps are demanded of different types of sales specialties.
For instance, industrial reps who sell to trade accounts such as dealers or distributes have to be comfortable in cementing long term relationships and taking responsibility for managing regular low-level contacts with a great deal of independence and self-sufficiency.
A rep doing consultive selling of big-ticket products or services (such as computers, telephone systems, consulting services) requires a strong team orientation, an academic bent,status and image consciousness, and the ability to interact comfortably with top executives. So consultative sales reps, in order to succeed, require personalities very different from those of relationship sales reps who work through dealers.
Reps who sell on commision in a retail environtment or via cold calls on different prospects every day need another set of personal traits. These include very high physical energy levels, strong money motivations, a competitive mindset (which makes them indifferent to customer rejection), and extroverted personalities (they really enjoy people).
Balance in the Rep Team
A sales team needs to be balanced, with some reps older and very experienced and others young and eager to learn. Veterans on any team provide stability, maturity, and seasoned gudance to younger team members, who bring fresh enthusiasm, energy, new ideas, and a desire to compete and impress older teammates. A sales manager may want to blend the skills and personalities of the young with the existing, more experienced reps.
Balance is a also important in rep skills and backgrounds. It is often a good idea to blend together people of varying backgrounds and life experiences, Sales problems tackled by the team then have some guarantee of being approached from different perspectives.