If you’re contemplating starting or upgrading a sales force, you must determine the types of people you might want to hire. Certain personalities and personal proclivities are better suited to careers in sales than others. Based on extensive, empirical, psychographic research by social psychologists, these are the indicators you should be looking for when evaluating new candidates for sales positions in your company.
Here are the eleven Characteristics of an Ideal Salesperson which a company should keep in mind while hiring a sales-person.
- High self-esteem –The person likes him/her and is proud of his/her accomplishments and abilities.
- Fair-to-high self-confidence – The person exudes a strong belief in his/her abilities to achieve his/her sales targets.
- Highly self-motivated -The person is a self-starter and needs little outside encouragement to succeed.
- Achievement-oriented -The person desires to complete tasks and proactively seeks new challenges.
- Need for recognition- When reaching his/her goals and achievements, the person wants others to know of his/her success.
- Goal-oriented –The person sets his/her own level of achievement and works toward accomplishing it.
- Better- than-average math skills – Not a genius or a wizard, but should be better at math than most folks. Better math skills help to get quantitative analysis and convenient to understand facts and figures of the market.
- Better-than-average verbal and writing skills – A good salesperson should have better communication skills. This helps customers to understand better which ultimately leads to more orders.
- Enjoys being with and working with people –Gregarious and thrives on interacting with others. A salesperson should be a good team worker. Better coordination among salespersons may lead to better order conversions.
- Enjoys learning new skills – Welcomes insight and training and seeks it out. A salesperson should always be ready to learn new updates related to business.
- Enjoys money and material things –The person likes exercising the benefits of his/her success.