9 Myths

The combined findings of our secondary research and our analysis of over 3,000 completed questionnaires leads us to conclude that virtually all financial service companies are sub-optimizing their recruiting, selection and development process for sales and service personnel and are incurring unnecessarily high sales opportunity cost and employee turnover rates.

In the process of assessing current recruiting and selection practices we identified what we believe are the 9 myths of salesperson selection:

1. A born salesperson will be effective in any selling role.
2. Sales experience is the best predictor of sales success.
3. The best salespeople will be the best sales managers.
4. Sales recruiting is HR’s job alone.
5. Sales competencies are easily coachable.
6. We can use one scorecard to evaluate candidates for all sales positions.
7. The more restrictive we are, the better the applicant pool.
8. We can improve our success rate by recruiting from our competitors.
9. Training and performance compensation will fix our mistakes.