My clients are seeing a lot of "re-treads"...

Once again I am hiring sales people for my clients and there seems to be a huge shortage of real talent.  All we seem to see are lots of sales people who have a great deal of experience on their resume but very little "gas in the tank" when we interview them.  In all good conscience I have been unable to see any of these people having the enthusiasm to consistently prospect and generate a pipeline of business.  They seem like worn out tires that will be a real risk to your business if you rely solely on them.

I am not exactly sure why there are so many people like this on the market. Perhaps it was the "dot com bubble" that made selling too easy and many people just became order takers and lost the ability to prospect or build a pipeline of business. Or perhaps it was the downsizing of so many large corporations where sales people were used to having all their leads generated for them by the marketing department or their "greater selling team".

So what's the solution?  I would suggest building (or outsourcing) a strong inside sales team and marketing department to generate leads for these sales people and then utilizing their progressing and closing skills (which are often quite good) to follow up on leads provided to them.  But definitely not to rely on them to generate enough leads on their own to meet quota...

...But I would love to know what others think...