If you are a top sales and marketing candidate, then you’ve probably been held accountable for years and years to produce a certain result that was measurable at your previous employers. If this is you, that’s great news! The fact is, when we talk to sales and marketing candidates, we never cease to be amazed by the number of people who really can’t provide us with an empirical or objective record of their achievements. This is a no-no. Why is that? Because if you have been a top producer and you have consistently hit your numbers, you should know what those numbers were, and maintain a record of them over the years that you can produce to prospective employers; particularly to recruiters.
One of the first things that we ask candidates to do if they’re salespeople, sales mangers or marketing managers is to tell us what the metrics were in their previous five years of work. That means what were your goals, and second of all how did you achieve against those goals. Top producers are capable of providing this information. People who fudge the numbers typically make excuses so if you don’t have those numbers at hand go get them. Go back through your old job files, your old history logs, your old employee archive or even contact your previous employers if necessary in order to reconstruct a sales or marketing achievement history for yourself that you can provide to prospective employers. This is probably the most important objective measure that people are looking for in this economy and in this job market. Can the person produce? What evidence is there that the person can produce? Well obviously the most important evidence is their track record. It’s not good enough to cite percentage increases in bookings or pipeline in your résumé anymore. What people want is the cold, hard numbers. “My quota was this, and I produced that.” Of course employers also want those numbers to be at or above quota. If you’re a candidate, make sure that you are able to produce the numbers for your past jobs as you get ready to go out and network and search for that next position. If you do, what you’ll find is perspective employers will be a lot more open and a lot more interested in your candidacy.
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Labels: career, recruiting