There is an art to interviewing an Inside Sales Agent. If you want to bring on skilled employees to work the phone and deliver ROI, use these 4 tips when you bring in candidates for interviews.

Video Transcription

Alright, so we’ve been talking about hiring an inside sales rep for your business and in the intro video I gave you four tips that you need to apply before you jump into the water of hiring an ISA and the final tip was make sure you interview your candidate over the phone.

One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to hiring an ISA is businesses that do only do face-to-face interviews. You’re hiring this person, they’re gonna spend the majority of their time on the phone so you need to make sure you experience that so you can hear their tone and their inflection. Today I want to give you guys three other tips to apply to your interview process that can help you really hire a killer when it comes to hiring an ISA.

Keep it vague.

The first tip is don’t open up your interview by explaining to the candidate exactly what you’re looking for. This is a common mistake with businesses, they tell the candidate everything they want, but what you want to do is you actually want to open up with the complete opposite—ask the candidate what they’re looking for. The reason why is because if you spill your guts about what they’re gonna do, is they’re sales people, they’re gonna hear that, they’re gonna latch onto it, and they’re gonna repeat it back to you and everything you want to hear.

What you’re looking for here is you want to find out what their passions what their hobbies are what you would call their “why.” What are they after? What drives them? Because you want to find out what they want so you can make sure it aligns to your company’s needs.

Put together a plan.

Second tip I’ll give you is make sure you come prepared for your interview and outline a detailed process. Make sure you’re prepared with your questions and then develop a scoring system around those questions. Don’t ask every candidate different questions. Ask the candidates consistent questions so you can actually measure one against the other the point of your interview is not to be conversational, you’re interviewing someone here.

Give yourself time.

Then the last tip I’ll give you is make sure you leave ample time for role-playing. Your interview shouldn’t just be question based, especially for salespeople. They’re gonna have to pitch over the phone, they’re gonna have to overcome objections over the phone, make sure you leave ample time to test this and roleplay with them. Ask them to pitch your product or maybe a product they’ve sold in the past and if they’ve never sold anything ask them to pitch themselves and then leave time to overcome objections.

The takeaway.

So there you guys have it, there are three tips to apply to your interview process to help you hire a killer ISA. If you like these tips make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel, of course comment below let me know the interview questions that you might ask, you know let me know your successes, your failures with interviewing over the phone, make sure you check us out on Instagram and Facebook but most importantly, take action on this today!