Assigning Sales Interview Homework

Here are some of the tasks that you can easily assign to a salesperson to follow up on:

One task can be to assign them the task of developing a sales achievement history and sending it to you via email. A sales achievement history should list their annual sales quota and achievement against that quota for the preceding several years.

Another homework assignment is ask a salesperson to go away and think about the opportunity that you’ve discussed with them during the interview, and then come back to you with a specific email or letter which outlines why the opportunity is a good one for them, how it matches with their skills, and why the career growth that you’re offering in your company would match with their needs.

Another easy homework assignment is to have them come back with a simple task such as completing a writing assignment or sending you samples of their previous correspondence with customers, sales presentations they’ve created, or something else that will demonstrate their communication skills. Another simple homework assignment is to have your sales candidate put together a sample sales presentation for you, and have them pitch it in order to show you how they would propose to go to work for your company.

All of these homework assignments are opportunities for you to assign work to a candidate prior to hiring them and watch how they fulfill their tasks. It’s a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to hiring top sales performers. If a candidate is unwilling or incapable of following up on those tasks in a professional manner, then they clearly should not be considered as a candidate to go to work for your company.

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Observe Sales Candidates’ Behavior

So often, as a hiring manager or in the process of interviewing salespeople, we get caught up in a sales candidate’s natural ability to speak smoothly and to sell themselves in the interviewing process. The real question is, how do they behave through the interviewing process? One of the key things that I do is to step back from the eloquence and the good speaking skills that I hear in an interview and actually watch to see how a candidate performs when I assign them simple homework duties. If you’re in the business of hiring sales people, always assign homework and follow-up tasks to sales candidates at the end of each interview. Then watch and measure closely whether or not a job seeker actually performs the assignments that you’ve given them. You’ll be amazed to see how many sales people actually don’t follow up and follow the instructions that you’ve given them, even once you’ve spelled out exactly what you want them to do.

Salespeople who don’t follow up on homework assignments through the interviewing process should be immediately set aside or discarded as candidates for sales positions in your company. Why? Because how they behave and how they perform with assignments in your interviewing process is a direct reflection of how they will perform and how they will behave when following up with your clients if they come to work for you! That’s why it’s critical to be very objective on this subject and to measure and watch for the right sales behavior. Make sure to set clear standards of discipline for this as a part of your sales interviewing process.

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Take The Wish And Hope Out Of Hiring Great Salespeople

If you’re like most hiring managers, you may have made the mistake in the past of hiring a sales person because you had too few candidates, and as a result of that, you “wished” and “hoped: that the candidate that you did have would turn out to be a great sales performer. We all know that when we wish and hope that someone is going to turn out to be a superstar, this often comes back to bite us. I’ve experienced this in the past, and I know a lot of other sales managers and vice-president’s of sales who have experienced this in the past as well.

One of the key things that we absolutely have to do when we have too few candidates is to be doubly rigorous about the process that we put our few candidates through, in order to make sure that they’re fully vetted. This means adding more people to the interviewing team and pushing back on our own natural tendency to want to justify a hiring decision by scrutinizing and playing devils advocate with ourselves regarding the candidates skills, abilities, experience, domain knowledge, and their actual sales achievement history.

Oftentimes the best way to do this is when you only have one or two candidates for a position, step back from the process and let it rest for a while. Don’t make an immediate or hasty decision. Why should you hesitate? What happens if you lose the one candidate that you have? The fact is that by stepping back from a decision for a little while, often times it will allow you to gain the clarity needed to make the right decision.

What’s the alternative? Making a hasty decision and wishing and hoping that a candidate is going to work out will often lead to huge expense, many months of lost time, and tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales. The best way to avoid making a mis-hire is to make sure that you don’t make a decision if you think there’s a chance of a mis-hire. If a candidate goes through your interviewing process and your conclusion is “maybe,” then you should conclude that the hiring decision needs to be “no.”

If you are a hiring manager who’s been wishing and hoping that that one candidate that you have for a sales position turns out to be the right person, make sure to eliminate wishful thinking by following these easy steps:

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What Does It Cost To Make A Sales Mis-hire?

Think about how much time and energy it takes to hire a good sales person. Think about how much it costs to carry a good salesperson on your payroll, and then think about the amount of revenue needed for your company in order to help you accelerate your sales. Finally, add in the opportunity costs for your company if during a given period, particularly a long one, instead of selling a million dollars a year, you have an under performing rep. When you add in all of these factors, it’s very costly to make a mistake when it comes to hiring sales people.

This is why hiring sales people is best left to the experts and why bringing in a good recruiting or search firm to do this kind of work makes absolute economic sense to your company. Most people resist bringing on recruiters and executive search firms because they don’t want to have to pay the fees. What are the fees for hiring a sales person? Well, the range is between twenty and thirty percent of the base or total annual salary, which typically means you could be paying a fee of somewhere between $10,000 and $40,000 in fees. Contrast those fees against the actual cost of salary, benefits, travel, and training time, particularly during the time when you’re waiting for a new salesperson to come up to speed. Analyze how many months it typically takes before you can see results from a new salesperson. Is it 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 months? A lot of that depends on the sales cycle and learning curve in your particular market.

The rule of thumb for the ramp-up of a new sales professional to hitting their sales target is typically the sales cycle, plus the learning curve, plus 3 to 6 months.

Suffice it to say that you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and potentially lose millions of dollars in sales if you make a mis-hire. By contrasting that with making a successful hire and the fees associated with doing it right through a good sales and marketing recruiting firm, you quickly find that it makes good economic sense to outsource your sales and marketing recruiting. The return on investment in making such a decision cannot always be assured versus doing it yourself, but often times it can.

If you don’t consider yourself to be an expert in the hiring process, consider brining in an expert to help you out. What you’ll find is that the value really equates to an insurance policy for your company…one that many companies, particularly in this market, are finding to be a worthy investment.

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Using Online Sales Tests (Part 2)

When do sales tests work? The people who sell them would advocate that you should use them as a screening tool prior to ever considering a candidate. I advise against that. I typically use the tool if I suspect that a candidate is viable and I’ve interviewed them and developed my own sense of their profile and achievement history. Wait until you have enough evidence to justify investing in the online sales test.

Is a sales test a panacea? Absolutely not. Oftentimes we’ve overruled the conclusion of the sales test and made a different decision than the conclusion that was given to us. What the sales test does do, is give you another set of objective information and another view of the candidate. Typically what I do, is use it to catch any blind spots or expose other issues that we may have missed as a team through the sales interview process.

If you’re thinking about using online sales profiling tools or tests, my suggestion is that it should become an integral part of your sales hiring process. The one that we like the most is the Express Screens from the Objective Management Group at www.objectivemanagement.com. It’s not the only one…there certainly are others, but it’s the one that we’ve used with good results.

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Using Online Sales Tests (Part 1)

With the proliferation of the Internet, it’s become quite common now for people to use online testing or profiling tools in order to further test the skills and abilities of potential sales candidates as they go through the hiring process. Many people ask me whether or not these tools are valid, and what they’re utility is.

Here are my thoughts: First of all, there are lots of different tools out there and we’ve experimented with several of them. Some of them work and some of them don’t, so you need to be careful when you’re evaluating online sales tools. What you’ll find is that not all of them are up to snuff. Generally, using an online sales test or profiling tool is a best practice for recruiting sales professionals. Many people go through the interview process solo and fail to diversify the sources of information they are obtaining as they interview sales candidates. The online sales profile or test is a great way to counteract this, by bringing another source of info the picture, as you evaluate a person’s sales capabilities.

What do online sales tasks and profiles typically accomplish? My feeling is that they should accomplish three things: First, they should tell you whether the salesperson can sell. “Can” really refers to whether or not they have the ability or skill necessary in order to perform a sales job. Second, will the person sell? “Will” is really an issue of whether or not they’re motivated. There are a lot of people out there who actually can sell, but won’t. It has nothing to do with their ability or skills, but everything to do with their motivation. A good sales test will tell you not only whether the person can sell, but whether are they motivated to sell for your company, e.g. that they have they possess the key traits, skills and motivations in order to be able to sell. The third and equally important element which good online sales tests measure, is whether or not a candidate’s sales skills, style, and system of selling matches up with your company needs. This relates to the kind of market you’re in, the number of competitors you have, the type of the sales cycle, whether or not the salesperson is going to maintain current accounts, only hunt for new business, or both. All of the different attributes of your particular job should get profiled by the tool, and then match experience and skills of the person against your particular requirements and selection criteria.

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How To Search For Top Sales And Marketing Talent

Most companies follow the traditional rules of recruiting. You write a job description, you place an ad on Monster, and you hope that you receive some good résumés to look at. You then sit back and wait for candidates to come to you.

This method doesn’t work very well right now, because most of the good people don’t necessarily look for jobs that way and don’t post their résumés on Monster. They network with their friends and their close associates within their industry in order to keep abreast of great job opportunities. They also follow their managers and leaders to new companies.

As an employer, you need to shift tactics. Think about where people are going and how they’re building their networks. You need to break into those networks so that you can find the best candidates. If your company has traditionally posted ads on Monster or any other employment websites, you might want to reconsider your approach and start networking with people in your industry, so that when the time comes to find the people you’re looking for, you’ll already have a great Rolodex to tap into, in order increase your sales and marketing staff.
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Recruiting sales and marketing talent in a full employment economy

It’s no secret that the economy continues to hum along and is growing at a very nice pace. Barring any catastrophe in the Middle East or any oil shock, we expect this to continue for the next few years at least. What does this mean for companies that are trying to grow their businesses? It means it’s a tough sell out there to get top sales and marketing employees to make a job change. Why? All of the good talent is already working elsewhere, and making great money!

If your company is constrained in its ability to grow its revenue because of a deficit in its employee ranks, you’ve got to find new ways to think about how to attract and retain employees. Retention may be tough as well. If you’re a sales and marketing employer, you’re going to find more turnover happening amongst your sales ranks, particularly among employees that have waited out several years at your company while the economy has been slow. They’re going to start looking for and finding great opportunities for increased pay, so there’s going to be more churn in your employee ranks, meaning you’re going to have to focus more of your time and attention on employee retention programs.

Bad managers and bad leaders will no longer get away with driving their employees at overly aggressive levels for too few rewards. Companies need to continuously attract their current employees to stay with them by offering a combination of strong leadership, great vision, outstanding go-to-market strategy, wonderful products and services that outsell the competition and a culture and environment that fosters employee growth. If your company is trying to hire more sales and marketing talent in order to grow its business, make sure that you’re doing everything you can to retain the talent that you have, because you’re more vulnerable in this economy to losing key employees.

Because the job market is so tight right now and so many firms are out trying to recruit and hire sales and marketing management and frontline producers, you are competing actively against those other employers for a limited pool of talent. This means that you need to have a very aggressive recruiting process…one that will allow you to outshine your competition. Outshining your competition is not just dependent upon the wages, benefits and incentives that you’re paying, but also how strong your company’s growth strategy is.

Also, it’s crucial to create stakeholdership amongst potential employees so that they can buy into the vision and are passionate about what they do and love where they work. This is the job senior management in sales and marketing is tasked with: retaining top talent and in order to do so, you’ve got to have great strategy and great vision.


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Grow Your Own Sales & Marketing People

Another way to think about recruiting new sales and marketing talent to your company is to “grow your own.” Growing your own is a longer term strategy, but it can pay great dividends for your company, particularly in a sustained long-term growth phase of your business’s life cycle. Most people want to find opportunities for career advancement and growth inside a single employer, so if your company can develop career growth paths, define them to employees and provide the training for growth inside your company, that will be very attractive to most job seekers.

If you’re going to pursue this route, you’ll need to focus on looking for candidates who have the most important skills and traits…the DNA for your position, even if they lack the relevant industry or technical experience. Find talent that’s a little younger and less experienced. Attracting smart, articulate, ambitious, energetic people who are willing to learn and who desire to grow, is a great way to build your company.

We’ve had many experiences building top talent in our businesses while reaping the rewards of that investment over time. What is your company doing in this area? Is there an opportunity for you to recruit raw younger talent and groom them? Think about that as a potential strategy for overcoming the short-term problem that we all face… a shortage of sales and marketing talent.

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Promote Your Great Opportunity

Second, consider ways to more attractively promote the position that you’re offering through your company. It’s no longer sufficient to provide a job description to potential candidates. When you post on monster.com or hotjobs.com, think about the posting process as one of proactively selling your company, your vision and a great opportunity to top candidates. How can you more attractively position your company as the leader in its field? What’s the management’s vision to achieve market leadership? What sort of goals do you have for growing the company? What sort of enthusiasm and excitement can you weave into a job posting so that it will catch the eye of top candidates and attract them to apply for a job with your company?

We see lots of companies who provide very flat, unexciting advertisements about their positions and as a result they struggle to find the kind of candidates that they’re looking for. Make sure that when you develop a job posting, that it actively challenges top job seekers to want to enquire about the opportunities without your company, by the way you describe the position and the opportunity.

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Tap The Power of Your Network

First of all, remember that the most important tool that you have at your disposal for finding top talent is your network. When you start thinking about hiring new sales and marketing people, plan and execute a communication strategy to all of your friends, associates, and colleagues throughout your inner circle, as well as all of your industry contacts. Develop a job posting for the positions that you’re looking for and send a personalized email with the attached posting to all everyone in your network. Ask each person personally for their help in recommending any individuals who would fit the specific position that you’re trying to fill. Ask each person to forward your email on to their friends and colleagues who might know of individuals who are searching for a new opportunity in sales and marketing.

This technique seems simplistic, but it works. What you’ll find is by going out to your network in this manner, you’ll be able to tap a very effective resource, since most great recruiting is done through your friends’ business colleagues.


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Competing For Top Talent In A Tight Labor Market

It’s no secret that it’s a buyer’s market out there right now and the buyers in this economy are job seekers, who are in a position to be very choosy when it comes to deciding which job they take and what sort of compensation they’re going to accept. As the job market tightens, there has been a monumental shift towards the candidate being in a controlling position of deciding what sort of job opportunity to take. Every company is looking for top talent in sales and marketing for their businesses to grow. And to the extent that they can find it and retain it, they can grow. In this tight job market, traditional recruiting techniques no longer work.

If you are an employer looking to recruit top sales and marketing talent, consider some of the following innovative ways that you might go about recruiting people:

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What Employers Look For In Salespeople

We’ve talked a lot about how the economy is hot right now and we’re in a full employment situation, and the fact is that what employers are looking for right now in good sales people is having a strong “hunter” profile. There are lots of different types of sales profiles out there, but the individual who is really talented and passionate about finding and closing new business, opening new accounts and generating new market share for a company provides the most value. If you are a true hunter with strong prospecting and qualifying skills, you have the best opportunities to get ahead in your sales career. Account mangers and people who are classified as “farmers” on the sales continuum are easy to develop from within. In fact account management for handling existing business with existing customers often is a customer service role.

The true new business development professional is much harder to come by. Why is that? Because not everybody likes to spend their time hunting down new business, beating the bushes for new prospects, and cold calling into new accounts. This particular skill requires a different DNA than an account manager or farmer. A hunter’s DNA is based upon a high degree of desire for approval and a strong willingness and ability to overcome rejection as they look for new business. A farmer’s DNA is more made up around the notion of satisfying current customers and building relationships, whereas the hunter’s DNA is really about conquering the new prospect and bringing them home.

So, if you are currently looking to find your next sales position and you’re a hunter, make sure that your résumé and all of your materials related to your career history strongly highlight your new business development skills. If you do, you’ll find that you’ll get the best opportunities when it comes to your career search and you will position yourself uniquely against other job seekers.

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How To Land A Top Sales or Marketing Job (Part 2)

Most importantly, when you’re asked questions, provide succinct and relatively short answers. Don’t ramble on and on. Lots of sales and marketing people are extroverts and as a result they tend to like to talk a lot, but there is nothing worse than having somebody who talks too long and provides overly embellished rambling answers to each question. So make sure that when you prepare your responses for each interview question that they’re short and to the point.

As you prepare for a job interview, develop a series of stories around your core skill sets, and around specific experiences, situations and accomplishments that you had in previous job positions. People don’t want to hear the answer to whether or not you’re a good sales person; they want to hear examples of how you’ve shown your sales talent in different situations. Demonstrating your skills by telling true stories from your past will help you to stand out in a crowd.

If you can follow these simple tips as you prepare for interviews, you’ll find that you can increase your chances of being strongly considered for sales and marketing jobs. There’s a huge difference between those who are experienced and skilled in interviewing and those who aren’t. If you’re getting prepared to do your first job search in a long time, perhaps it makes sense for you to get some coaching from some career professionals or counselors before you actually initiate your search. This will greatly increase your effectiveness as you prepare to go out and find that next great job.

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How To Land A Top Sales or Marketing Job (Part 1)

Here are a couple of things that you should think about as you’re preparing for an interview with a potential employer:

First of all make sure that as you prepare for the interview, you learn as much as you can in advance about the company. What are its core markets? Which customers does it target? Who are the competitors? What is the company unique selling proposition? What is management’s vision & values? What does the leadership stand for? What is the culture about? These are all things that you should study and research prior to going into your interview.

You should also prepare questions to the hiring manager on these issues. Their answers will help you to determine the fit between yourself and the company as you explore the job opportunity, and it will demonstrate an advanced understanding of the company to the interview team. This will give you a leg up on other interviewees who don’t do this advanced preparational work. I’m amazed by the number of candidates I meet who can’t think of one intelligent question to ask about the company or the opportunity!

When you’re preparing for a sales and marketing interview, make sure that you have a clear set of responses that are prepared for standard questions, such as “what are you looking for?,” “where do you see your career going?,” “give me an overview of your career”, “tell me about your achievement track record?”

Prepare a succinct profile that outlines your specific achievements and experience in the position that you’re looking to be hired for, and how those skills and experience are relevant to the exact job that you’re interviewing for. This can best be done on a sheet of paper using bullet points and can be a complementary document to your standard resume. Employers are impressed when you come prepared with a fact sheet that lines up your skills and experience with the exact criteria that they’re looking to use in order to fill a job.

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Sales And Marketing Recruiting Business Growing Rapidly

Here at Cube Management the demand for our recruiting services has risen rapidly over the last several months, and we expect for it to continue to grow. Why? Many of our clients have a hard time finding and retaining top sales talent. So we’re focusing on helping them through that process as an engine for growth of their companies. On the other hand we also have found that lots of top candidates are having a difficult time finding great job opportunities, and so the mission of helping people to find great work is one that’s important to us – we like helping people find great jobs.

There are lots of people out there searching for top sales and marketing jobs right now who come to us because we’re uniquely positioned as a sales and marketing recruiting firm. The reason why they come to us is because we also provide sales and marketing consulting, outsourcing and interim management, and so our recruiting services fit very nicely with the rest of our service offerings, focused on helping companies in the technology, manufacturing, health care and business service sectors.

We expect the economy to continue to stay on an even footing and move even closer towards full employment, which means that more and more companies are going to be fighting for fewer and fewer sales and marketing people who are actually looking for jobs. Candidates who are engaged in a job search are going to find it easier to entertain multiple offers, which means that they can be more selective about the kind of positions that they are looking for and how well those positions match their core skills and core interests.

Since the job market is going to stay tight like this for the next several years, what it means is that companies that are looking to recruit salespeople, marketing specialists or marketing management are going to have to do a better job of finding, locating and extracting potential employees from their competitors or from other companies. This means that they’re going to need to engage executive search firms, recruiting and staffing firms that specialize in sales and marketing to do this very job. Candidates as they become more selective are going to want to spend more time focusing on points of leverage in their search. A great point of leverage that search firms can offer is that they have multiple job opportunities under one roof, where a candidate can interview once and then be considered for a multitude of positions.

That’s exactly the situation that we have going on at Cube Management right now…we have several searches going on for senior sales representatives where we’re able to interview one candidate for multiple job opportunities and then place them accordingly.

So, the landscape has changed a lot when it comes to recruiting and staffing in sales and marketing. The economy is roaring and we don’t expect it to change anytime soon. Cube Management is strategically growing it’s sales and marketing recruiting functions in order to keep up with the demand and also fulfill this important mission.


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Packaging Yourself As a Job Candidate

Make sure that you have rehearsed and tuned your “elevator pitch” to that you can quickly describe exactly the kind of position that you are looking for, the industry, the size of company, etc. The more you focus your search criteria and your message, the more effective you will be in making a lasting impression on people you meet with. Likewise, this clarity will help them to be more effective in thinking about how to help you.

I meet lots of candidates who lack this focus in both their search and their messaging. A lot of them are very experienced sales and marketing executives who have a vast array of experience over a 15-25 year time span. Since they’ve done so many different things, they are qualified for many opportunities. Yet if they are open to doing just about anything, its hard to help them.

Even if you have lots of experience, you need to figure out what your focus is for seeking your next job. Employers and recruiters are looking for candidates who are absolutely clear about the type of position they are seeking, and they are looking for a perfect match.

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Planning For Your Next Great Sales & Marketing Job

A well-orchestrated plan starts with doing a skills and career self-assessment to understand what it is that you’re good at and what you truly love to do. Figure out what kinds of companies and what kinds of industries you’d like to work in. Also, figure out exactly the job duties and responsibilities that you’re best suited for, making sure that you zero in on all of these criteria to have a clear definition of what it is you want.

Once you’ve done this, it’s easy for you to develop a list of key network contacts and people who you think might be able to help you. Contact them and set up time over coffee or a meal to share your career search plans and seek their feedback.

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It’s A Great Time To Change Careers

If you’re a sales and marketing executive with many years of experience but you’re tired of the current work that you’re doing, now is a great time to consider changing your job and looking for a new position. Searching for a sales and marketing position -- whether it be executive, mid-level or front-line has never been better than it is now, and the reason is because we’ve now reached full employment. During full employment, companies are actually competing against each other to find and retain the best talent in order to grow. Finding and securing that talent is a major constraint to their ability to increase revenues. If you’re thinking about making a career change, now is a great time to put yourself together a career search plan and a résumé. Start networking while doing research on key companies that you’d like to go to work for.

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Marketing Your Employment Skills In The Internet Age

In today’s day and age, using the power of the internet to market yourself is an absolute must. Many candidates fail to recognize the tremendous power that is possible to be gained from using online marketing techniques in order to place their résumés and gain potential visibility from would-be searchers. The starting point to this is making sure that you’ve got your résumé placed on all of the major job boards, including Monster, 6figurejobs.com, Yahoo Hot Jobs, Career Builder etc. Recruiters subscribe to these databases and do boolean and keyword searches in order to find the best candidates that meet their search criteria. If you are interested in getting a job and a great job and finding the best possible opportunities out there, you’ve got to be listed on all of the databases where the good recruiting people search. If you don’t, you’re going to miss the opportunities that you’re looking for.

Here’s another idea: consider building your own personal website – one that focuses on you! It’s very easy to build an online resume these days, using standard web tools and hosting (iWeb and .MAC are a great combo if you are a MAC user, but many other tools exist). You can have pages dedicated to your career history, testimonials and letters of recommendations from previous employers, a graph that showcases your sales achievement history, links to former companies, websites that you built, etc. What an impressive way to highlight your skills, and set you apart from the rest of the crowd!

How about subscribing to a social networking program, such as LinkedIn? It’s a great way to build your online career profile and create ongoing connections with former colleagues and people in your network. It’s also a great way to seek introductions to people who can help you find your next great job.

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Build A Great Sales & Marketing Resume That Sets You Apart

If you’re a top sales producer or marketing genius, and you are thinking about making a job change, how do you start your career search and make sure that you stand out as a top candidate? Recruiters and executive search companies are always looking for the best. If you are interested in working with them, you need to understand their rules.

First, make sure that your resume is clean, concise and to the point. Get rid of all of the percentage increases and replace them with absolute achievements that are clearly measurable in terms of actual dollar value, number of new customers gained or impact in hard numbers, as opposed to percentages.

Second, target your resume to the ideal job that you seek. Highlight your most important skills as they relate to the specific position that you are looking for. If you are looking for a sales position, focus on sales, if you are looking for a marketing position, focus on marketing. Be as specific as you can, relative to the exact position that you want. Are you looking for a management position, or an individual contributor role? Each resume that you build should be focused on exactly the type of position that you’re looking for so that it’s easy for a sales and marketing recruiter to pull the information they need from your resume, and measure you against their job requirements.

Third, make sure that you focus on bringing out exact information about the industries and types of customers that you have been involved in selling or marketing to. What key relationships have you developed? If you’ve sold to Fortune 500 companies, list examples of the names of the clients where you actually developed the client or the customer from scratch. In a competitive job market, recruiters are looking for demonstrated domain expertise.

These are just a few thoughts about how to stand out as a candidate when it comes to building your resume.

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Sales & Marketing Executive Search (Part 2)

It’s very costly, very time consuming and very difficult for somebody who’s running a business to go spend time to actually identify, locate, find and extract potential employees from competitors or other companies. This is where an executive search firm ads real value.

The fees involved can run between 25 and 35% of a person’s total compensation in the first year, which is a lot of money. You’d ask yourself, how can I justify that? The answer is, how can you justify not spending that money if it makes a difference between hiring an “A” player and hiring a “C” player? An executive recruiting firm possesses the ability to find top talent and put them to work for you.

Think about how the following would impact on business: hiring a person into a position to sell $1 million in annual revenue, versus hiring a top performer who can achieve $3 million worth of annual revenue. If you hire a recruiter who can bring this kind of incremental revenue to your company by finding top talent, why wouldn’t you pay for the best? They’re going to pay for themselves over and over and over again throughout the years.

So think about hiring a sales and marketing recruiting company, or a sales and marketing staffing company as a strategic vehicle towards growing your business.

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Sales and Marketing Executive Search (Part 1)

The field of headhunting is a very challenging one when it comes to finding and recruiting top sales and marketing talent…whether they be executive, mid-level, sales management, marketing management or front line sales and marketing producers. Searching for these types of top candidates is no easy task.

If your company is trying to find the best, make sure to bring in an experienced sales and marketing recruiter who can help you. They are worth their weight in gold, and their fees are easily justified. By outsourcing to a search firm, you can reduce your hiring time, improve the process and avoid the risk of mis-hires.

I see lots of companies that have made mis-hires over the years, and it’s not because they haven’t done their best to find good candidates. The problem is that their best is just not good enough. Often times, Presidents or Chief Operating Officers or VP’s of Sales rely on the same tools as everybody else to try to find candidates, which includes posting ads on Monster.com, Careerbuilder or one of the other major career sites. This just doesn’t cut it anymore.

If you want to find the best talent, deploy the best talent to find those people for you, which means hiring an executive search or retained recruiting firm that specializes in sales and marketing. If you don’t, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Now you may ask yourself, why should I spend money to go find candidates when I can just find them myself by posting on the internet? The fact is, the best people, the top talented people are not looking for jobs, they already have jobs. So they’re not going to see your job psoting because they’re not actively looking at online listings. Recognize that those talented people are already working, happy and making good money in a job somewhere else. You’ve got to go find them, and the best way to do this is through a professional recruiting firm.

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Networking for sales & marketing job searches

If you are a sales and marketing professional thinking about initiating a new job search, make sure that you focus on the power of networking. If you work in sales and marketing, you already understand how important the network effect is for getting new business, or finding new prospects. So as you start your job search, use that knowledge to your advantage by developing a very strong networking plan that will multiply the number of opportunities for new positions that come towards you.

In the world of networking there are people who know how to do it right and people who do it wrong. Here, we’ll be exploring a lot of the do’s and don’ts. But I’m going to start with the most important “DO” and that is as follows: Make sure to remember that networking is about building relationships, and relationships require a balanced give/get. If you are a taker and not a giver, you won’t get very very far, particularly when it comes to networking. The best way to get referrals from people is to give them.

So if you’re looking for a job, always remember the following in the relationship-building process:

First, every contact becomes a relationship that you want to retain over the long term. If you’re seriously interested in building a network through your job search, why wouldn’t you want to retain it once you found a new position? Maintaining your network after you’ve completed your job search is a very powerful tool for continuing to enhance your career profile. Keeping these relationships can help you throughout the duration of your career. Lots of job seekers engage in networking only as long as it takes for them to find a job and then quickly lose touch with all of the people they met along the way. What if you could harness the power of those relationships and bring them along with you into your career? That’s the real power of networking.

Second, remember that when you’re out there networking with people, you’re asking people to share their time, their contacts, their ideas and suggestions. You’re asking for their help. If you want to ask a stranger for help, what would be the number one thing that you could do in order to make sure that stranger is willing to help you? Well naturally the answer is to offer to help them. So make sure that every time that you complete a networking discussion with an individual that has just given you help, or perhaps given you a lead for a new job opportunity, make sure to ask them “what can I do to help you?”

In addition, when you’ve landed in a new job, make sure to follow up with everybody who’s helped you along the way and thank them for their assistance in your job search. Make sure to send them your new contact information and let them know where you’ve landed.

I have numerous candidates that come through my office, asking for contacts and referrals and after they’ve taken from me I never hear from them again. I find those kind of people to be the ones that I really don’t want to help. They are takers and not givers.

If you really want people’s help, think about what it is that you’re going to do for them, and proactively ask them: “how can I help you?” These are some of the basic give-get rules of networking, which if applied properly to your job search will help you to get better leads, better referrals and better job opportunities in your chosen field.

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How to improve your job search if you’re a top sales and marketing executive (Part 2)

Always prepare a clear profile of the kind of company that you’re looking for, both in terms of size and culture. Do you want to work for a big company? Or do you want to work for a smaller, start-up or entrepreneurial-oriented business. Those two environments are completely different. Clearly it’s difficult to help somebody look for a job in a large company if all they’ve done is work for small businesses in the past, or vise versa. So make sure to define the size of the company as a key parameter.

Also, do you want business to business sales and marketing or business to consumer? It’s important to articulate the selling channels and end users for the products or services of the company that you’d like to work with.

What sort of sales and marketing channels should your target employer have? Direct, or indirect? Is your experience in direct sales and direct marketing to end users, or is your experience working through third party channel partners and resellers? Finally, what sort of growth opportunity are you looking for, and what are your long term goals?

These are all the kinds of things that are very important for you to think through before you start your job search. If you do this first, you’ll find that the job will be a lot easier. Why? Because individuals who you contact will know exactly what you’re looking for and it will give them a clear idea of who they can send you to, and what kinds of opportunities they should be thinking about on your behalf.

Candidates who come to me with no clear understanding of where they’re going and what they want are candidates that I can’t very easily help. Candidates that have a clearly articulated understanding of where they’re going and what they want are the ones that I can send to the right people. So, if you’re interested in getting help from others, remember they want to help you, but you need to help them to help you by clearly articulating what it is that you’re looking for.


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executive search
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How to improve your job search if you’re a top sales and marketing executive (Part 1)

We talk to dozens of sales and marketing candidates every month as we perform executive searches for top technology manufacturing companies in the Pacific Northwest. As we talk to these individuals there are a few things that we see that candidates can do to improve their chances as they’re out networking and interviewing for job opportunities.

The first idea I’m going to talk about is “knowing what you’re looking for”. Everybody wants to help a potential candidate with their networking and to improve their job search possibilities. But frequently, when people come to me looking for a job, they aren’t able to clearly articulate what it is they love to do and what it is they’re looking to do. In other words, they really haven’t developed a clear understanding and profile of what it is that they’re looking for in their next job, and as a result of that, it’s more difficult for people like me to help them, to get them what they want.

So, if you’re a top sales and marketing candidate and you’re looking for a new position, before you even start to talk to people who you think might be able to help you, take some time to focus on developing a clear profile of the exact job that you would like to have, or the exact types of jobs that you would like to consider. You will find that your networking will become a lot more productive, because people who you meet will have a clear sense of how to help you.

It’s real easy to do this. Take out a clean sheet of paper and write out a clear set of parameters about the kind of job that you’d like to have. What sort of position should it be? Is it a VP or Director level? An individual contributor position? Do you want to manage people or do you want to work as a lead salesperson? Which industries are you interested in, and how do they map to your previous experience? It’s very important for you to be able to show how the industries that you want to work in relate to the industries where you already have experience. If not, then you’ll need to focus on your transferable skills.


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executive search
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