More on Moneyball and Inside Sales

Prospect selection illustrates a major tenet of the Moneyball movement:  the collective wisdom of insiders is subjective and often flawed.

This subjectivity is often seen in selecting high tech inside sales professionals.  Many hiring managers rely on “gut feel” and all the false positives and false negatives accumulated during their years of hiring sales people.

Moneyball prefers rigorous statistical analysis.

At memoryBlue we’ve applied this concept to our hiring process.  Any candidate interested in applying for an inside sales position must complete two online assessments *prior* to interviewing and only candidates that have profiles that have proven to be successful in our environment are invited in for an interview.

Adopting this approach has protected our time—everyone’s most precious resource—by limiting our interviewing time to stronger candidates.

Almost as important, we protect ourselves from our own subjectivity.  In our first couple of years in business, we found that once we interviewed a candidate (particularly when we really, really needed to hire someone), we were much more likely to build a case on how they would work. We’d think to ourselves:  “Animal trainers can teach squirrels to water ski.  Surely an Inside Sales Coach like me can get this guy to be productive.”

We only had to make this mistake a couple of times before we realized that there is a place for the impersonal black-and-white in candidate selection:  before you start the interviewing process.

Contact us if you’re interested in having memoryBlue assess your inside sales candidates or your existing team of inside sales professionals.