Sharing an excerpt from Positioning with April Dunford: Rethinking Sales Strategies for Modern Markets with Loren Padelford podcast, Jun 13, 2024
April Dunford:
What kind of personality traits were you looking for? I’m curious. What’s the interview like?
Loren Padelford:
So I’ll explain it this way. I was looking for things I couldn’t teach them. So I couldn’t teach them creativity.
I couldn’t teach them curiosity. I couldn’t teach them intelligence. I couldn’t teach them work ethic.
And then a big one was you can’t teach success. People are either successful people in a variety of things or they’re not. And they usually come from, success is usually driven from those other personality traits.
So this was not a totally original idea by me either. Mark Rowe-Behrs at HubSpot had written his own book at this point and had talked a lot about the same thing, right, of like, we all look at the wrong things. So fun fact, there is no statistical correlation between education and success in sales.
There’s no statistical correlation between a past history of success in sales and a future history of success in sales. It sounds like there should be, but there just isn’t, except that’s what everyone interviews for is where did you go to school? What was your last job?“ And it’s like, these are irrelevant. There is a perfect correlation between those personality traits and success. And so I looked for things I couldn’t teach you, because I could teach you how to sell.
I could teach you how to do a cold call. I could teach you how to close a deal. I could teach you how to do a demo.
I could teach you how to position something. I can’t teach you to get up and go to work.