49 Selection Case Study #2 _____________________________________________________________ Selecting Top Digital Sellers I am often asked by managers what they should be looking for in hiring salespeople who will be successful selling their digital capabilities. They specifically want to know two things: 1. Does the sales assessment work for digital salespeople? 2. Is digital or traditional media sales experience crucial for success? Let’s address question one first. Yes – a great deal of research has proven that the sales assessment is equally valuable for digital salespeople. Our most recent study focused on a large media sales organization that operates radio, television, and newspaper prop- erties. We identified their top digital salespeople across the organization and focused on those who were “Million Dol- lar Sellers.” Our goal was to examine the talent profiles of those individuals and compare them with the top performer benchmark in our tal- ent assessment. We found the talents of the top digital sales- people to be almost identical to the top per- former line of the assessment (see graph be- low). In other words, the talents that we use to identify a top traditional media salesperson are the same as those we would need to look at to predict top digital performance. On to the second question, is digital experi- ence necessary? I have found that prior expe- rience selling digital is not crucial to success, and in many instances is not an indicator of future success at all. Just because someone has digital sales experience on their resume does not mean that they will be successful with your organization.