It's aways been one of the great mysteries of the business world that salesmen make absolutely the worst buyers of any product on the planet. This is of course entirely absurd because they have been taught all of the tricks, know exactly how the salesman opposite them is gulling them, avoiding the difficult questions and skating over the flaws in his product.

Yet it always seems to work out the same: they're vastly more impressed by the presentation than they are by the product itself. What seems to happen is that they go through their own mental check list: yes, shiny hair, shiny shoes, hey, that deflected that question really well, hhm, yes, this guy's a really good salesman.

What this then means is that if you want to sell sales as a profession that someone should move into then you really need to be a salesman yourself and selling to someone who is amenable to being influenced by such tricks and methods: that's if you can't get him in as chief buyer at your greatest competitor (or customer of course).

Being slightly more serious it is necessary to realize that salesmen are something of a breed apart. They need a certain set of skills and a mindset that will help then convince people that today's widget is indeed just the widget that they have always wanted, is in fact what they have been waiting decades for.

The first and most obvious attribute is an intense desire to convince people: if you listen to sale people talking to each other even when not selling products they are selling themselves. There is then a set of technical skills that need to be learned but this is less important than the desire.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about sales people though is keeping them motivated. This is where close co-operation with your recruitment consultant at Talisman will be most useful. Each industry, each portion of one and then the firms within it have their own method of compensation: that mixture of bonuses, basic salary and so on that push the good sales people on to ever greater exertions. What you need to do as a company to sell the idea of selling for you to the good sales people in that industry is to make sure that your all over package is better than that of your competitors for their services.

Perhaps the most important point is that there should be no cap on commissions: those tend to, when prospective employees hear about them, result in a no sale.