|
Newbie or Not Newbie?
by Daniel Tynan
What to do when faced with a sales candidate who lacks technology skills...
Q. I'm in charge of hiring two new salespeople and have interviewed several candidates, including one who seems talented and has great experience, but who is not at all tech-savvy. Should I take a chance on a newbie, or is it best to stick with someone who knows how to use a computer?
A. Susan Gilbert knows what it's like to be a newbie in the land of the techies. In the early 1980s she took a sales job with a small computer retailer in San Diego, even though she'd never seen a personal computer, let alone used one.
"All I could do was show customers how it worked," Gilbert says. "When they asked me a question I had to run into the back room to ask the tech guys, then run back and give the answer." But, she says, "I was selling like crazy."
Gilbert went on to head sales organizations at Computerland and AT&T before starting her own business. She's now a motivational speaker and author of The Land of I Can.
Back in Gilbert's sales days, familiarity with computers was an oddity; today it's a basic assumption and should be considered a prerequisite for any sales job, says Chris Lytle, author of The Accidental Salesperson and founder of Apex Performance Systems, a sales training firm in Madison, Wisconsin. "Hiring a person without computer skills today is like hiring someone who couldn't read twenty years ago," Lytle says.
"If you can only type ten words a minute and you have thirty-seven e-mails you need to answer, you're not going to be very productive dealing with customers," he says, adding that most sales professionals rely heavily on the Web to do preliminary research and prepare themselves before sales calls.
If your top candidates are not tech-savvy, Lytle recommends asking if they're willing to take a typing class and giving an assignment to test their basic research skills. "Ask them to find out ten things about your company?and not information that's on your Web site," he says.
Still, it's far easier to find a good salesperson and teach her technology than to train a technology novice how to sell, says Mike Vermillion,founder and president of Vermillion Group, a Des Moines, Iowa based franchise of Management Recruiters International.
"I tell new salespeople, 'Don't worry about your computer skills; you're going to be on that thing all day long. You'll learn it.' It's rare when people can't get the hang of it," Vermillion says.
And some of the best salespeople might be the ones who sell themselves despite their lack of technology skills. "If you hire a salesperson who is a Luddite in this day and age, he or she must be a tremendous salesperson," says Anne Maxfield, founder of Project Solvers Inc., a fashion-industry placement agency, in New York.
Gilbert agrees. "Salespeople only need to know how to relate to their customers and their problems," she says. "If the salesperson isn't hip to technology but is getting the job done, get over it."
| 
