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• hire for talent, not skill or even experience;
• blend positive and negative motivators; and
• measure results instead of micromanaging process.

The book features dozens of anecdotes and clear lessons for any company seeking dramatic improvement in its sales performance.

Want to hire a top producing salesperson for your company? Sure, everyone does. In all my management and consulting years I've never been mandated to hire average salespeople.

But hiring top producing salespeople on a regular basis—those individuals who consistently sell at least four times more than their average counterparts—is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in business. In this chapter we look at the first of the six best practices used by the world's best sales teams to overcome this challenge.

We have already established that selling is a natural born talent. The next logical question then is which talents do we look for? What are the natural ingredients of a top seller? When I set out to answer this question so many years ago I quickly came to the problematic realization that the answer depends on the type of sale you are hiring for. There isn't one ideal recipe for a top producer because there isn't just one sale type—there are many. Haven't we all experienced the frustration and bewilderment of hiring someone we knew to be a top producer, only to watch as he or she flounders in the new sales position? Well the first secret is to understand that different sale types require very different talent sets.

Some salespeople for example love to prospect. Other salespeople hate it. Some salespeople love serving the same clients for years and years. Others need to win over new people all the time. There are those salespeople who excel at the long-term sale, where many meetings are needed to assemble many pieces of a solution with many participants from different departments—they love to orchestrate all of this. Then there are those who prefer the shorter sales cycle, which typically means many more sales, or "victories," per period.

Some salespeople thrive on selling "concepts," where others simply can't do it, excelling instead with the consistency of unchanging product features and benefits. Some people love to convince others; they thrill to the challenge of converting others to their way of seeing things. Others thrive on fulfilling (or surpassing) the predetermined needs of their clients, and simply cannot sway other people's opinions—they're too empathetic. They make great servicers, but terrible closers.

Remember, if hiring a top salesperson was as easy as finding a known top producer and then training them to sell your product or service, well... everyone would just be doing that. The fact is, with so many different combinations of the above sale characteristics, selling your product or service can be a completely different job than selling another product or service, thereby requiring a completely different set of talents.

The following is a typical job ad for hiring salespeople. It was distilled from dozens of newspapers and career Web site ads (ads that read so similarly that I started to think they had all been copied from the same source), and it denotes the common characteristics being sought for most sales jobs today.

A self starter with strong communication skills; able to work independently but also a team player; aggressive and highly motivated. Several years sales experience, preferably in our industry, with a post secondary degree.

While interviewing for these qualities may not seem particularly illogical, there are two flaws. First, the typical job interview does absolutely nothing to uncover whether your candidates truly possess the talents you are looking for (which we address in chapter five). The second flaw is with the identification of the talents themselves. Self starter, communication skills, team player, highly motivated—these "qualities" are not nearly specific enough. It is probably accurate to say that we would want to hire these qualities for all of the different sales jobs—perhaps for any job at all! You need to be far more precise in naming the talents you seek. You must learn how to hire people that are naturally "wired" for your exact sale type.

Over the course of 25 years I have identified and refined 10 different selling talents. After you read their definitions you may realize that you have several different sale types within your organization—each requiring different talents—that are currently being executed by the same salespeople. This usually explains why you have salespeople that seem to always sell the same few products or services, and rarely sell others.

Of the 10 Selling Talents, the first six deal with how people are hard-wired in terms of work ethic, tolerance levels, ability to influence, and aptitude for abstract communication and thinking. One person's idea of "working hard" can often put another person to sleep. Some people's idea of fun on the job can be hell to others. Top salespeople all influence other people very well, but their specific communication abilities vary greatly. We can all think of someone for instance who is very persuasive, but not particularly articulate.

These first six are must-haves; your candidates must possess the exact needed arrangement of all six. Talents seven through ten however are more preference than talent, and with these you have some leeway.