How to define your Ideal Salesperson

When asked to do this recently, I thought, easy: Question 1: What’s their track record ? Question 2: Are they a natural salesperson ? We all think we can spot ‘natural’ salespeople, but defining it isn’t easy at all. And how then to measure skills and qualities ? A month on, I reckon I have a pretty good start point. I ended up with five categories, each broken down, with a single summarising quality:

COMMUNICATIONS AND PERSUASION SKILLS	Networking Cold calling Rapport building Managing meetings Questioning Probing Listening	Charisma: are you fully engaged by them ?
PRODUCT AND SERVICE CAPABILITY	Understanding of market/competition Depth of product knowledge Appropriate use of knowledge Crispness of summaries Use of case studies	Problem solving: do they pull it all together into a compelling, unifying solution ?
SALES SKILLS	Presentation skills Handling objections Managing deals and pipeline Qualification skills Accurate forecasting Negotiating Closing	Grip: do they know their numbers and current state of deals ?
PERSONAL SKILLS	Curiosity and nosiness Attention to detail Project management Writing skills Goal directed Stress Tolerance and Resilience	Planning and organisation: do they have control of time and task management ?
PERSONAL QUALITIES	Look and feel Warmth Self awareness Judgement	Interpersonal Sensitivity: how fast do they tune in to you ? do they validate your feelings ?

Next problem: how to measure each of these….I’ll cover this in a future blog