Talking to a friend the other day, they were talking about a bunch of new hires, what they described to me was a bunch of salespeople that was the "same old, same old".

The ideas were things like "run a webinar", "attend an event", even "cold call", all of their suggestions, I totally got 10 years ago but not in 2021.

Two questions about your hiring process

Today I read Thomas Ross's article "How to hire your next Sales Person".

He asks to key questions

• Are you hiring more analog people or do you want digital professionals who can grow customers in today's digital world?
• Is it your plan to provide customers and leads or do you want your sales team to develop at least some of their own? 

What skills do you need to "make it" in sales today?

Yesterday, I was talking to a sales leader and they said they wanted to see a salesperson demonstrate on social that they are creative, understand sharing and understand storytelling.

The sales leader was not bothered about the new hires buyer centric profile, network and the level of content, as all that could be taught.  But without these attributes this sales leader didn't think the person would make it in sales today.

Legacy selling vs modern selling - what are the key attributes?

Having heard about the new hires that I talked about above Vs the type of person this sales leader was hiring it seemed to me that things had moved on and so was the type of person you should be hiring. 

I recently shared this table of old skills vs the new skills companies need to be hiring for and, I've just had a read and updated based on current social selling / digital selling / virtual selling / remote selling / modern selling thinking. 

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling?  Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind” 

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.