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Guerilla Interviewing

CEO tells how he uses in-your-face interviewing to find top-notch salespeople.

Rick Rose of Dataflex, the sales-driven juggernaut of the computer-resellingindustry, reveals the interview tactics that help him divine which job candidates can become great salespeople

E ditor's note: Rarely do we see an organization as aggressively and thoughtfully sales oriented as Dataflex. When Rick Rose joined the company, in 1984, it was just one of what seemed like a thousand fledgling computer resellers, with annual revenues of $5 million. Today the company, which is public, has 200 employees, sells $90 million worth of computer equipment and services a year, and habitually appears on the best-managed-company lists of every major business magazine in the country. At year-end 1991, Dataflex had experienced annualized five-year sales growth of 66%, with a 20% return on equity. It had no debt on the books.

Virtually all of this success, says CEO Rose, is attributable to a fanatical devotion to sales -- from hiring the right salespeople and teaching them well (how many companies run daily two-hour sales meetings that participants crave?) to doing everything conceivable to please customers. A telling statistic: salespeople who have been with Dataflex a year or more routinely sell 10 times what the average salesperson in the industry does.

Here, Rose tells how he uses in-your-face interviews to separate sales-recruit wheat from the chaff.

* * *

There are four characteristics a prospective salesperson must possess to have even a chance at becoming a star producer -- and experience isn't one of them. Successful Dataflex salespeople outperform the industry average by unheard-of margins, yet none of our million-dollar-a-month sellers was a heavy-hitting sales pro when I brought him or her on board.

What does make a salesperson successful?

* Confidence in his or her own abilities.

* A willingness to take calculated risks.

* A great sense of humor.

* Nimble thinking -- by which I don't mean a genius IQ. I mean the ability, when put on the spot, to take the available information and formulate the best possible response instantaneously. To do that, you have to be a conceptual thinker, somebody who can answer any question on a given topic, because that topic is completely understood. Many companies train their people off a script, but to be a true professional, you can't afford to depend on rote responses.

To spot great potential in inexperienced salespeople, we make them run the gantlet during the interview process. It starts when they answer the Dataflex ad. My assistant, Liz Massimo, has been instructed to give any callers the brush-off.

Alan Fendrick, now one of our top salespeople, tells a story about how Liz tried three times to tell him why he wasn't what we were looking for. But he was persistent. He stood his ground and said, "Look, I really think I have what it takes. It's at least worth a few minutes of Mr. Rose's time." He cleared the first hurdle.

I am deliberately adversarial in the first interview. It gives me a clear idea of what candidates would be like with a customer. I try to give them criticism and a challenge. I put them on the spot, try to see if they have convictions, embarrass them. If they're too sensitive, they aren't going to do well around here.

My first words to Alan were, "Why in the world do you have performing stupid human tricks on the Letterman show on your résumé?" Then I asked him, "Aren't you supposed to look nice for an interview?"

Alan came back with a zinger. He looked me dead in the eye and said, "Are you talking about me or you?"

I tell people, "Forget about what you think I want to hear. Forget that this is an interview." I try to shake them out of the standard interview mode. If they persist in giving rote answers, even after I've told them point-blank that that's not what I want, I know they aren't right for the job.

After the job candidates have been in my office for about five minutes, I will tell them bluntly that I'm not very impressed -- even when I think they're terrific. I'm looking for their response. I want the applicants to try to persuade me that I'm wrong about them. In sales either you believe in what you're doing or you don't. Good salespeople must believe in themselves.

When I interviewed for a sales job at Applied Digital Data Systems, in 1971, I had forgotten to pack a tie and was wearing black-and-white wing-tip shoes, which were in vogue in Florida at the time but raised eyebrows in New York City. The secretary put my résumé upside down on the desk of the vice-president of sales. He was eating a tuna sandwich when I came in. Failing to find a napkin, he wiped his hands on what he thought was a blank sheet of paper but was actually my résumé. He asked me several questions and insinuated I was not packing the goods to do the job. I remember feeling an almost violent reaction to that challenge. I was thinking, Someday you'll not only eat my résumé but eat those words as well. I ended up selling more equipment than the rest of the sales force combined, which comprised eight people. To this day I don't know whether his goal was to challenge me or whether he really thought I couldn't do the job. But I learned the value of being challenging in an interview from that man.