Zach Selch walks through hiring a regional sales manager for international teams. He uses a three-stage interview process with behavioral questions about specific sales situations, because many candidates lie about quota experience. One candidate claimed six sales calls a day in São Paulo, which Selch flagged as impossible given traffic.
Chapters
Let's talk about interviewing a regional sales manager. It's a very, very difficult job to hire. A lot of us, well, we're— first of all, we might not be completely in sales, we might not be in channel management, and we don't understand the different cultures. A salesperson from one culture, a salesperson from another culture. Sometimes they'll find it'll be very, very difficult to get that cultural communication and understand each other. So it's— and it's a critical job. If you have the right regional managers, you're going to be successful. If you can't find the right regional managers, you're not going to be successful. So what are the type of questions that I'm going to ask? I'm going to do, first of all, 3 groups of questions. One on my telephone interview, one on my first face-to-face interview, and then I'm going to do another face-to-face interview. Sometimes with additional people there. And the questions I'm going to ask are going to be divided into 2 groups. One, I'm going to be taking a look at the survey they did, get a good understanding of what might be their culture, their weaknesses. So I might understand from the survey what their weaknesses are, and I'll ask specific questions based on those indicators that I'm going to get from their group. Buy inventory, or if I'm using a different test. Then I'm also going to ask them questions, and most of my questions are going to be tell me questions. Tell me about this situation. Tell me about that situation. I find that a lot of people applying for regional sales manager jobs aren't salespeople. They'll tell me they're salespeople, they'll basically lie about it, they might even get their references to lie about it. But if somebody hasn't actually been a sales guy with a quota covering a territory I can't afford to take a risk with them. That's my feeling. So you have to start somewhere? Everybody has to start somewhere, but they can't start with me for those types of jobs because I don't know if they're going to be successful. It's a very hard job to predict somebody who hasn't done it being successful. So when somebody comes to me and says they were in sales, I'm going to ask them and dig down deep. Tell me about your typical day. Tell me about a call. Tell me about, you know, a situation where the customer objected to price. How did you deal with it? Tell me about how you deal with headquarters in terms of your interaction with headquarters. Tell me about a time when you couldn't ship something on time. How did you deal with the customer to calm them down? Tell me about a time when there was product flaw and you had to deal with your customer. Tell me about your customers and your distributors. Tell me about a time when you had to really push to close your quota that year. Tell me about your best sales year ever. Tell me about your worst sales year ever. Those are the type of questions. I want to get them talking and talking and talking. Very often I'll catch them talking problems or lies that way. One example is I had a guy once tell me he did $6 million in He said, I do 6 sales. sales calls a day in São Paulo every day. And I said, are you sure about that? Are you sure you want to stick with that story? And he was like, yes, yes, I'm a very hard worker. And I said, you know, there is no way that you're getting around São Paulo traffic and the size of the city to do 6 sales calls a day. I guess he didn't believe it. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
