Dealing With Truth In The Interviewing Process

If you’re a sales professional and have had at least on career misstep, how do you deal with that when you’re interviewing for your next great job? This is an important question because we interview top sales candidates all the time and while there are many people who have had a smooth career without any bad decisions or failed startups, inevitably, most people have probably encountered some difficulty in their career along the way, particularly if they’re risk takers. Those of you who have worked in startups for most of your life in particular can appreciate this. As we know, 8 out of 10 start-ups fail, so the probability that you’ve been involved along the way with a business that has not gotten off the ground is pretty high if you’ve had the kind of risk profile.

How you deal with this on your résumé and through the interviewing process is very important. First of all, its important that even if you had a mishap with a particular company that you still listed on your résumé, there are ways to de-emphasize your participation in a startup, particularly if it was shorter than one year, by listing all your sales accomplishment at the top of your résumé and only having a brief chronological history of your actual employment relationships.

Probably more important, when people ask you about a particular job where you can't point to any particular successes, its very important through the interviewing process that you be up-front with the interviewer. Don't provide too much information at the outset, but if you are asked to provide the details of what happened in a particular situation, how it happened, why it happened, and what you learned, then you should focus on making sure you give clear, explicit answers.

Interviewers want honesty above all. They want to see evidence that a person is willing to take ownership and responsibility for any mishaps that they’ve had in their career, particularly as it relates to startups.

One thing that you’ll want to avoid is blaming only the external factors related to a job situation that was negative. Employers want to know that a candidate has actually learned from a particular situation and takes some level of ownership for what did or did not happen in a business failure. So if you are about to go out on a great interview and you've got a few chinks in your career armor, make sure to not hide from or avoid the truth, as you go into the interview process. You’ll find that you’ll commend a lot more respect and receive more opportunities if you deal with those kinds of situations in an honest and up-front way.

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Social Networking for Your Job Search

The internet has brought some wonderful new tools over the last few years, that can help you to rapidly accelerate your job search through the use of social networking programs such as Spoke, LinkedIn, and others. These programs allow you to establish linkages between yourself and different people who you are associated with in business and in personal pursuits, and to also build your network forward and backward from a particular point in time, in terms of relationships that you’ve had over the span of your career history. When properly used, programs like LinkedIn can have a powerful network effect and allow you to rapidly harness the power of your network connections to enhance your career search. If you’re a sales and marketing professional at the executive or the mid-level and have lots of contacts, consider using one of these programs as one of the foundation strategies for your job search. It’s very easy to sign up for them and you’ll be amazed by the number of people in your network who already subscribe. We like LinkedIn in particular.

By using these programs build a web of connections, you can gain introductions to many people who you would not otherwise be able to gain access to. This is a very powerful tool when it comes to targeting companies and individuals that you’ll want to be approaching as a part of your overall job search.

If you are an employer and in the process of recruiting sales and marketing talent, using these programs to advertise your job postings is a wonderful way to attract top talent. We've successfully posted several jobs on LinkedIn and had great results, in terms of responses from people in our networks who are interested in the jobs we’re advertising for.

Other Programs such as Jigsaw also provide an outstanding platform for social networking and for developing contacts that can help you in your job search. We are a regular participant in Jigsaw and have found that a multiplier effect on our marketing efforts has been created as a result of having used this program.

So if you’re considering looking for a new career position or making a career move, make sure that you’re signing up for a social networking program. Talk to your friends to find out which ones they’re using. It will help you to greatly leverage your contacts for an enhanced career search.

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Job Seekers: Make Sure That You Do A Good Job Of Contacting Recruiting Firms

Often times we get jobseekers in the local market who submit their résumés to our firm for specific positions, but they’ve never taken the time previous to the job listing to actually post their résumé with us. This causes us to ask ourselves why job seekers are not doing a better job of contacting companies like ours that specialize in sales and marketing recruiting.

If you are looking for a new job or starting a new career search, make sure that you take the time to research all of the local recruiting firms that specialize in sales and marketing positions in your local market, and that you systematically contact each one of them in order to get your résumé into their database.

Also make sure that you’ve had a personal discussion with whoever it is who's responsible for talking to candidates. Why is this? Well the fact is, that recruiting firms tend to review candidates that are in their database first, relative to positions they have open and only start sourcing candidates outside of their database after they’ve already looked at those internal candidates. Also, they tend to give preference to people who they’ve met face-to-face and are impressed with. So you want to make sure that as a job-seeker, your résumé is on file and that you’re personally known to each sales and marketing recruiter in your local market. This will give you a much better chance of being considered for the opportunities that recruiters are working on at any given time, and it’ll multiply your chances of short-term success in finding the job that you’re looking for.


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Map Your Reference Checking Process To The Job You’re Recruiting For

A lot of times when people do reference checks on candidates, they fail to adapt the reference checking process to the type of position that they’re looking to fill and therefore ask very generic questions. This fails to uncover the kind of information that you really need to have in order to understand whether or not a specific candidate is a good match with the specific job you're trying to fill.

Prior to performing reference checks on sales and marketing candidates, make sure that you come up with a specific list of questions that you're going to ask each reference that are aligned to the exact hiring criteria that you've set for the position that you're trying to fill. If you're looking for a market research person, and you’re trying to check references on a candidate, make sure that you go into depth regarding their market research capabilities, their analytical skills, and other aspects of the candidate’s qualities that would indicate whether or not they have the right DNA for a market research position. If you’re hiring an internet marketing person, make sure that you ask questions relative to their knowledge of search engine marketing, their understanding of email platforms, their ability to manage pay-per-click campaigns and other job-specific hiring criteria.

So, as you check references on sales and marketing candidates, make sure that you adapt the questions that you ask each reference to the job you are trying to fill. What you’ll find is that you’ll uncover much more relevant information than whether or not the person is just a good person or whether or not they’ve just worked at the company. What you really want to get to is the heart of their achievement, there aptitude and their match with your specific position.

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Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople (Part 2)

A third idea is when you are speaking with references, ask if you can have an offline discussion with them, during the non-working hours when they’re not in the office. The reason for this is to try to get candid information from the references about the individual, as opposed to the company’s official stance on the types of information they will or will not give out during a reference check discussion.

One of the most important things you need to do when you’re checking references on sales people, is to actually tell the reference the specific sales achievement history that you were given from the candidate. in order to verify that those facts are correct. Make sure that you take sales achievement history and quota data that you got from the candidate, and verify these figures with their ex-supervisor. A lot of times, if we don’t check references and specifically verify that the candidate achieved a certain level of sales, we're really missing the opportunity to verify the objectiveness of the data we've been provided through the interviewing process.

Another very important tip when you are talking to a sales candidate's references, is ask them about key accounts that the candidate actually brought to the company. If you’re looking for a hunter, you’ll want to make sure the supervisor can remember big wins that the candidate had when they worked for them.

Another tip is to ask the references whether or not they would hire the candidate back into their previous position if they had the opportunity. A good candidate would always be welcome back to the company, and a poor sales producer wouldn’t be. So these are some of the things that I suggest that you talk about when you are checking references on sales candidates.

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Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople (Part 1)

We see lots of companies that skip reference checking at the last stage of their recruiting process, before they hire sales candidates. As a result, they make mis-hires. We also have witnessed companies that realize their reference checking is inadequate, because they didn’t get to the right types of references as they made their final hiring decision.

Here’s a couple of suggestions to follow when it comes to checking references on sales candidates, before you actually make a job offer:

First, make sure that the candidate’s references are all direct supervisors whom he/she worked for in previous sales positions. Why is this important? Well, a lot of sales people, particularly those who haven't produced very well, give you references from colleagues and other friends of theirs without giving you the people they actually worked for. If a person can't produce references from their previous sales manager or supervisor, it’s probably a good indicator they’re not hirable. Those kinds of candidates usually should be rejected outright.

Second, make sure that you dig deeply to get the references that are missing from a candidate’s list. If you have a sales candidate that gave you one supervisor from three jobs ago, but not the supervisors from their past two jobs, ask for those references as well, and if they say that they can't find them, ask why and tell them you’re going to need to have them track them down. You need to talk to a number of direct supervisors in order to really get a rounded perspective of the candidate.

When sales people are hesitant to give you references from any/all of previous sales supervisors, that should set off an alarm in your mind and you should make sure that you try to get those references, even if they haven’t been listed.


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Retained Verses Contingent Search For Sales And Marketing Talent

If you’re in the process considering using a recruiting firm in order to find sales and marketing talent for your company, you may know that there are at least a couple of options out there for you to consider when it comes to the type of arrangement between yourself and an executive search firm. One is retained and the other is contingent. By retained we mean you are working exclusively with the search firm and you’re paying their fees as you go for performing those services. Contingent means that you only pay the fees at the time they successfully place a candidate in the position that you’re looking to fill. The notion of exclusive verses non-exclusive is a different one though in contingent search. Many companies do contingent search, but they want to know that they are building an exclusive partnership with their client for the assignments that they’re taking on. If you are thinking about outsourcing your recruiting to a search firm, you should consider doing it on an exclusive basis as opposed to hiring several recruiting firms to do it simultaneously. Why? Because you’ll get the best results.

Many companies make the mistake of outsourcing their searches to a group of firms, thinking that they’ll get better coverage of potential candidates, but in fact, the results is a number of search firms are really giving them no quality attention on their job orders.

If you want a recruiting firm to do a great job for you in finding the best talent for your company, then you should consider giving the assignment to a firm which you believe has the best overall candidate pool and skills in the functional area that you’re looking for. In particular, you should retain the services of the company that focuses on sales and marketing if that’s what you’re looking for, in finance or IT or whatever the specialty is according to your search. But as you retain the services of the search firm, make sure that you’re willing to invest yourself in the process and in the relationship that you’re creating with its people. That will give you the best potential to find top candidates.

Why is this? It’s simple. Recruiting firms that don’t work exclusively on their assignments tend to take on a lot of searches simultaneously, and their efforts get diluted to the point where they are doing a little bit of a lot for everybody, but nothing really well in particular. This is the risk that you run when you pull in multiple recruiting companies to do a single search for you, particularly for higher-level positions in sales and marketing. Now it might be fine if you do this for staffing administrative positions, but when it comes to finding that A-level candidate for a very specialized sales or marketing position, you really want to make sure that your search firm is a partner of yours, that they understand your needs deeply and are willing to take a very focused approach to finding and vetting candidates according to your detailed search criteria. That’s why it makes a lot of sense, whether you go contingent or retained, that you pursue an exclusive partnering approach with the recruiting company that you decide to work with.


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Pursue A Career In International Sales

If you are thinking about or are interested in pursuing a career in international sales, it's a wonderful opportunity. In fact, with globalization, there's an increasing demand for people who have international skills to fill these kinds of positions. Unfortunately, most Americans of traditional descent are not aptly prepared for such a profession. So a lot of international sales positions go to foreign nationals who already speak different languages and come from different regions of the world. If you want to prepare for an international sales career, my advice to you is this: first of all, learn a foreign language – or several! Don’t just take a year or two of language in college -- actually become fluent, or bilingual. Immerse yourself in the language. In order to do that, you’ll need to follow my second piece of advice. Go live in the area of the world that you are most interested in and become completely immersed in that culture. Become a local in that area. If you do that, when you come back to the United States, being fluent or bilingual and having a deep appreciation of the area which you are interested in, you will be very attractive to potential employers which are targeting that area or already have operations. Third, if you want to pursue an international sales career, make sure that you gain overseas work experience.

Traveling abroad, moving around with a back pack while in youth hostels doesn’t count for practical international work experience when it comes to pursuing this kind of career. My own background: I spent 4 years traveling and working in international sales in Latin America, Europe and Asia before I came back to the United states for my first US-based international sales job. As a result of having that experience working in sales abroad, I was very easily employable and got snapped up by a great company. It was my language skills and foreign work experience that made this possible.

So, if you are thinking about pursuing a career in international sales or marketing, make sure that you move overseas, get practical work experience, and learn at least one foreign language related to the region that you are interested in. Those are the key attributes to pursuing this career. Wondering how you can get an international sales job or get international work experience? There are management internship exchange programs that allow for recent college graduates to get overseas work experience in their field of study. One of those is AIESEC, which offers an internship exchange program worldwide.

Look into study abroad programs as well, if you can’t find an internship or work experience. While it’s not as powerful as working overseas, it’s another path for gaining an international background that is attractive to global employers.

An international sales career is a very interesting and rewarding job and one that I would recommend highly. You get to travel the globe; you get to experience the wonder of diverse languages and cultures; you get to grow a lot faster than most people would who are pursuing a domestic job, because of the diversity and skills you acquire.

An international sales position is a great fast track into general management. Why? Because people who work in international typically have a much broader set of responsibilities than people in domestic positions.


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Exploring A Sales Career (Part 2)

One of the most important things that you can do for yourself to determine whether or not sales is an appropriate career move is to talk to different sales people -- people who are already in the profession. Find out what their daily routine looks like. Understand more clearly the kinds of challenges, problems and issues that they face in their work. Spend a day job shadowing with them to understand their daily routine.

So, if you're thinking about exploring a career in sales, make sure to do a lot of information interviewing with different types of sales people to get their feedback and to understand really what their jobs all about.

Another thing that you can do is get yourself prepared by taking a course in sales or a sales training course or consider getting yourself into a routine of reading some books on sales. There are many great books out there that cover the topic and will easily give you an idea and an appreciation of what sales is all about.

If you are thinking about moving into sales directly out of college, one of the most important things to do is to find a good sales team to work with and a particularly good sales manager who you can learn from. If you can’t find a good sales manager, make sure that you pair yourself up with somebody who has a lot of sales experience and is a true professional so they can mentor you. Why is this important? Well, just like any other career pursuit, becoming successful in sales is all about learning from the best and developing positive work habits and behaviors. Sales is not something that you can do just any old way. Its requires a certain methodology and system. A successful sales person and management knows that building and executing that system day in and day out is what produces consistent repeatable results.

So, if you want to get into sales, make sure that you find a place where you can learn from the best. It’ll make all the difference in terms of your achievement, you earning power, and your ability to advance in your sales career with some of the best companies out there.

Also, if you are thinking about a sales job, make sure that your first one is in a place where you can get lots of training. Why is this important? Because most employers actually don’t offer good sales training programs, but the good ones do. What are some of these companies? Well, IBM is legendary for its training, so is Xerox, just to name a few. The point is that you want to be looking for a company that has strong entry level sales training programs, and where you can get the education you need in order to learn the right skills to become successful in a sales career.

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Exploring A Sales Career (Part 1)

If you’re a recent college graduate and are getting ready to launch your career and are thinking about pursuing the field of sales, congratulations! It’s a great profession. Here are some practical considerations that you should think about as you explore whether or not sales is right for you. First of all, in terms of preparation, sales like any other career can benefit from many different tracks of educational background and you don’t have to be a marketing major in order to get into sales. The most important attributes of a good sales person are that they have good critical thinking skills and that they’re very strong at both verbal and written communications. If those are part of your DNA, then even if you’re biology major or have a degree in science, you still may very well be at the aptitude that’s necessary in order to be good at sales.

What’s It Like To Work In Sales?

Well, it’s a great profession, and the reason why it’s a great profession is because you get an opportunity to stay very active and to meet lots of people, to travel and to solve problems for people. So if you have a high degree of interest in doing these kinds of things in your day job, you may be well suited for sales.

On the other side, if you are going to pursue a degree in sales, you need to be aware that it’s not all fun and games, and its not easy. Sales is one of the most difficult games out there and isn’t just for anyone. It requires an incredible dedication to the pursuit of excellence, continuous learning, to facing rejection, to developing your technical knowledge and to long hours in the trenches. There’s a number of different things that you have to be good at in order to be a professional in sales, particularly in today’s day and age.

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Inside Sales Is A HOT Career Area

If you’re a young professional thinking about how to break into a great career, you should consider a career in inside sales. Why? There’s huge demand for top sales talent in companies that span all types of industries including technology, manufacturing, healthcare, and business services. Right now, the demand for talented inside sales people far outstrips the supply. So, it’s a buyers market out there and the buyers are the employees who are shopping for the best possible career opportunity.

If you’ve been in any form of high volume calling environment and been successful at it in the past, you might want to consider a shift over to selling products and services over the phone using classic inside sales techniques. The mortgage brokerage industry right now has slowed as interest rates have gone up. So if you’ve been a mortgage broker and you’re thinking about how to improve your income, you should consider a move over to inside sales. Why? The same skills that you’ve honed in making high numbers of phone calls to potential prospects and qualifying them over the phone -- those very skills are the same ones required to be successful in technology telesales. We think there’s a great opportunity for people to transfer their career even when their old area may have lost some favor and money-making opportunities aren’t quite as strong. They can transfer their career into inside sales selling for b-to-b companies. If you’re interested in figuring out how to do this, click here to send us your résumé and we’ll talk more with you.

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Take Your Company or Career International

We’re in the age of globalization, so if your company is not selling it’s products in the international marketplace you’re missing major opportunities and ultimately you may not remain competitive in North America.

I spent the first 15 years of my career building and leading international sales and marketing organizations in Europe, Latin America, and the Far East. It was some of the most rewarding work I ever did. What was my preparation for that career? Well, I had a keen interest in over seas languages and cultures and a desire to travel the globe. That was my foundation. Second of all, I moved over seas as soon as I got out of college and I got practical in country experience where I was immersed in a foreign language doing work in business. Those two levels of preparation made it easy for me to find an excellent job with a leading firm in international sales and marketing once I returned to the United States after living initially almost four years abroad after college.

I’m going to talk over the next few blogs about what it is to build and lead an international sales and marketing effort and I’m going to share some of my experience as it relates to how companies can best prepare themselves to go international.

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What Is The Role Of Online Sales Profiling Tools In The Overall Hiring Process?

A good online sales profiling tool will actually provide you with a recommendation as to whether or not you should or should not hire a particular candidate and how well they are aligned with the requirements of a specific job.

Often times the most troubling aspect of a search is being hot on a candidate and believing he or she is a good fit for a specific job assignment, only to have those hopes dashed by a non-hire recommendation coming back from your profiling tool. In those circumstances what do you do? Well, the real issue is that such a tool should not be used as the only set of information on which to base a hire/no hire decision. When we get back a no hire recommendation from our sales profiling tool, often times we still may make an offer to the candidate, but we’ll do so after following up with the candidate and using the areas of concern that uncovered in by the tool as a cue for asking more probing questions, and uncovering more information.

An online sales test is not a panacea for making an effective hiring decision. What it does do is provide you with another perspective as you go through the interviewing and hiring process. Why is this important? Well, all of us as interviewers, despite our best efforts, have blind spots when it comes to things that we miss through the interviewing process. In addition we often bond with a candidate as we go through multiple interviews, and start wishing and hoping that the candidate can and will be successful for a particular job. The more we like a candidate, the more we become oblivious to the potential weaknesses or pitfalls of that candidate’s sales profile relative to the position that we’re hiring for. This is why an online sales test or online sales profiling tool is so effective. It allows us to uncover other information that we may have missed through the interviewing process. and it allows us to circle back around with the candidate to probe more deeply and to confront them with some of the weaknesses that we’ve uncovered.

As a result of our experience we’ve used a variety of different online tests, but the one that we like the most is the Express Screen from Objective Management. http://www.objectivemanagement.com/expressscreens

This particular tool focuses on telling us whether or not a candidate can and will sell, what are some of their attitudes and beliefs that could potentially get in the way of their ability to be successful in a specific sales role, and it provides an exhaustive matching of each candidate’s exact sales experience with the position that we’re hiring for. It also allows you to understand, what is the growth potential of the candidate? Are they trainable? Do they have any significant chinks in their armor, which would lead you away from making an offer to them?

For all of the reasons I mentioned above, no one should view an online testing tool as the only way to a clear hiring decision on sales candidates, but it certainly does add value as a part of your overall sales interviewing process. When it’s integrated properly into the other aspects of your recruiting process, it can help you to reduce the number of mis-hires and improve your overall hiring effectiveness.

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Using Online Sales Testing To Improve Sales Hiring

We get lots of questions from clients of ours about the role of online sales testing in the overall candidate selection process for hiring sales people. Many clients ask us whether or not we use these tests and what role they play. I’ll try to give you an idea of how we view them here.

Over the last several years there’s been a proliferation of online sales aptitude profiling tools that have developed and which have been commonly adopted by many companies. We subscribe to their use as a part of our own sales recruiting process at Cube Management. Why do we do this? Because they provide us with another set of data regarding the candidate and because that extra set of data gives us a more completely rounded view of the candidates skills, abilities, and aptitudes.

What does an online sales profile or sales test typically tell you? Probably the most important thing that we find is that an online sales test gives us another set of values related to the individuals ability to sell and whether or not their sales capabilities are well aligned with a target company’s sales process. A good online sales test will tell you those three things. Can the candidate sell? Is he/she motivated to sell? And can he sell for this specific company?

There are a lot of people who use other types of personality profiling and behavioral testing to hire sales people. such as Myers Brigs Testing or others. Many people ask us why not just use those tools? The reason why we feel that an online sales profiling tool is a better choice, is because they are specifically adapted to the type of questions that really need to be uncovered and resolved in the sales hiring process. Myers Briggs tells you more about behavioral attributes and characteristics of a person – their personality – but what it doesn’t tell you is whether or not that person’s personality will fit with a specific type of sales job. We believe that certainly there are generic personality types that fit very well with selling and being successful in sales (such as extroverts), but personality testing alone doesn’t give you enough information to be able to determine whether or not a person is closely aligned with a potential job you’re considering offering him/her.


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Follow Up!

Finally, establish a clear expectation of follow up communication with this individual and stick to it. I see so many people come through my office, and I’m happy to help them network and send them along to appropriate people. They tell me that they want to stay in touch, but they seldom do. I then find out several months later that they actually found a job, and many times I discover they found a job from a referral that I gave them. Yet many job seekers fail to follow up or to tell me that they’ve landed.

Make sure that if you’re going to build networking relationships, that you do it for the long haul and that you stay in contact with the key people whom you’ve met along the way during your job search. Why? This can add lasting value to your career and also lasting value to your ability to network and maintain relationships that can help you down the road.

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Ask How You Can Help Them

Next, ask the person whom you’re meeting with what you can do to help them. Show an interest in what their needs are. These needs may not be looking for a job, but it could include giving them referrals to potential new clients. It could be helping them out with a community service project. There are a number of different ways in which you could offer to reciprocate in your relationship building with this person.
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Ask For Referrals

Once you’ve been able to cover those topics on the agenda, one of the things that you need to do is to ask the person whom they know who could help you along the way with your search. What you’ll be amazed to find, is that a lot of people are willing to open their Rolodex to help you.

The key when you’re seeking introductions is to have them introduce you personally to their suggested contacts, as opposed to just giving you the name of a person. Why? If they introduce you personally, you’ll have a much better chance of actually making contact and meeting with the people that they’re referring you to.

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State Your Career Goals Clearly

Next, tell the person very specifically what you’re looking for in your next career position. Give them the ideal. Help them to see a clear picture of exactly what it is that you’d love to be doing in your next job. Make sure that you spell out the size of the company, industry, geographic location, title, position, the actual functions that you’d like to fulfill, etc. Give them a clear idea of what you’d really love to do, what you’re really passionate about, and what you’re really good at. If you’re able to articulate that very clearly, then a person in an information interview will be more capable of helping you.

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Networking Warm-ups

Start by asking the person lots of questions about their career history and their company.
People love to talk about themselves, particularly if you are genuinely interested in them.

Next, ask what views the person has about the market, the economy, hot sectors and companies that are doing well in the area. Ask broad questions about the person’s view of the local economy, where things are going and where the opportunities might be.

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Building Networking Relationships

Not everyone is going to be as helpful as you’d like them to be as you search for a sales and marketing job, but many people are actually willing to help; particularly when you’ve shown your desire to build a relationship. My best advice to you, is once you’ve created your target list and created an agenda, is to actually go about each of your discussions with those people as if you’re trying to create a friendship. If you start from that premise as opposed to coming across as being a person who’s just looking for a job, what you’ll find is that people will be more engaging and more willing to help you.

What kinds of questions would you ask and how would you engage in a conversation with someone who you’re exploring a friendship with? Those are the kinds of questions that you should be starting with in any networking discussion.

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Networking For Sales Positions

If you’re a top sales producer looking to find that next great job, tap into the power of your network and make sure that you practice the same things that you do in your job, as you start looking for your next job. This may sound like foolish advice, but I see quite a few salespeople who actually start their job search and neglect to use the very tools that they used to be successful in their sales career! So this is something that you need to really think about.

The first thing that you want to do as you create your plan, once you decide on the type of job, size of company, industry and geographic location you are focusing on, is to start making a list of key people who you’d like to contact in order to light up your network and start bringing yourself opportunities. Typically there are 10 to 20, maybe 30 people who you need to be talking to in any given town in order to really start building the network effect to find great job opportunities. Think about key people who are network nodes, both in your industry and beyond your industry, and who are in positions of business leadership throughout the community. In particular, think about people who are well networked and who make it their business to know everyone and maintain relationships with a broad spectrum of business associates. Those are the people who you want to put on your top 20 list as you start thinking about a job search. Target as high as you can, to get to people who can really help you.

Then, once you’ve created that top 20 list, rather than going out and just having a quick cup of coffee with them and asking them for ideas, create an actual agenda for your discussion. That agenda should be much broader than just saying, “I’m looking for a job, can you help me?” The agenda should be to engage that person and to rejuvenate or develop a relationship with that person.

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Market Your Numbers

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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Great Salespeople Are In Very High Demand

Right now we have a full portfolio of clients that are desperately looking to add additional salespeople and sales management to their teams. There’s no question that the companies that are trying to grow are constrained by the number of salespeople they employ right now and they’re all out there competing for limited resources. Why? The limited resource is the salesperson that can consistently produce results. Of course everyone who’s worked in sales says that they can produce results, but we know better. The top producers are those who can actually show objective, consistent achievement or overachievement of their sales quotas, month-to-month and year-to-year. These people win sales awards, President’s Club and other types of recognition, proving that they are consistent top producers. These people are in short supply in this economy and are what everyone is looking for right now.

Wages are going up, particularly base salaries, and in addition to that, the top candidates are being more choosey about which opportunities they would be willing to consider. Many people stayed in the same job through the last several years struggling along, but being forced to keep their job because the economy was not doing very well. Now, as they think about busting out and moving to the next position, they want to make sure they’re actually upgrading their career and taking advantage of the job market to do so.

Companies that want to attract these candidates have to have a very compelling growth story, strong leadership, a strong culture, a compelling definition of the market opportunity, and competitive compensation.

If you’re a candidate and you’re thinking about making a move, it’s a great opportunity now to do so because there will be multiple companies that are chasing you. If you’re a job seeker, the number one thing for you to think about is back to what I mentioned previously: career planning. Make sure you really understand both the hard and the soft criteria which you will use to evaluate any opportunity, and really focus in on building a plan that pinpoints what it is that you want to be doing in your next career move.

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Sales/Marketing Career Planning Elements

What are the elements of career planning that you need to be thinking about? First of all, think about the kind of industry that you want to be in, and target the industries that interest you the most. If you don’t know what they are, go out and do some research to find out which industries are booming, have the best sustainable growth, and afford the advancement opportunities that you’re looking for. Information interviewing is perfect for this.

Second, think about the size of company that you want to go to work for. This is critical. Lots of people want to go to work in startups, but the fact is that if you’ve worked in a large company all your life, the prospect of getting that first job in a startup as a vice-president of sales and marketing is probably not very good. So think about the size of the company.

Third, think about the exact position that you’re looking for. I see lots of people who have done a little bit of everything, and as a result they say, “Oh I’m open to doing anything in sales and marketing.” Well that’s just not good enough. If you want help locating that next great job opportunity, you need to be able to visualize it in great detail and specify openly to people exactly what you’re looking for. That will give them the tools to help you go find a great job and lead you down the right path. Think also about other things like culture, compensation, geographic location (would you be willing to move or not). These are all considerations that most people really don’t give enough thought to before they initiate a career search.

If I have one piece of advise for you, if you’re looking for that next great sales and marketing job, it’s to take the time to create a plan, put it on paper, create a search summary (a one page document which you can use as an accompaniment to your résumé) and then think about taking your show on the road. If you do this, you’ll find that a lot more people that you’re networking with will be able to help you with concrete suggestions, as opposed to just sitting, listening, and empathizing with you as you think about your job search.

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Have A Career Plan

If you’re a sales and marketing professional, you’ve worked in and around the planning process your entire career. It’s no secret that your ability to successfully deliver the numbers for your past employers has probably been predicated on having a sound strategy and knowing your plan of attack.

As you think about starting a career search, it’s absolutely critical that you also have a personal plan related to what it is you hope to accomplish, as you look for that next great position. Lots of people enter the job market with no specific strategy other than to prepare their résumé, post it on all of the major job sites, and start doing some networking. In order to be effective at your job search, you need to be a lot more systematic than that. I see sales and marketing executives come through my office on a regular basis who really don’t even know what they’re looking for. As a result of that, it’s very difficult for me to help them achieve their objectives.

Most people that you network with want to help you, but they want to know how they can help you. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they start a new career search: not spending time to think through what it is that they want in their next career move. Before you pick up the phone, or post a résumé on any career websites, or start networking with people, start by setting aside some time for yourself to do some career planning. If you need help in this area, there are plenty of career counselors and there are also recruiting companies that help candidates to figure what it is that they want to do. There are also career guidance companies and also many great books, including What Color Is Your Parachute? which will help you go through a systematic process to figure out what it is that you want to be doing.

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How To Search For A Top Sales And Marketing Job

If you’re a top sales or marketing professional working in the business to business technology, manufacturing, healthcare or business services industries, I’ve got some advice for you on how to best go about optimizing your career search. I’m also going to talk about the job market now and the new way of looking for great positions which or often times not advertised. I’ll also give you a number of other tips and tricks regarding interviewing, résumé building techniques, and other useful ideas that I hope you will put to work in order to improve your ability to find that next great position that you’re thinking and dreaming about.

It’s a full employment economy

It’s no secret that the economy is fully employed right now with unemployment running less than 5% in most areas of the U.S. Most companies are finding that they are constrained to grow by the quality of the people that they can actually hire or recruit into their businesses. As a sales or marketing candidate, you need to recognize that times have changed. It’s a lot easier to make a move now than it was one or even two years ago, and certainly a lot easier than during the dotcom bubble back in 1999-2001. It’s a great time to be looking for a job as a sales and marketing executive, midlevel manager, or front-line sales or marketing contributor. All of the top people are working and that means that companies are starved for the kind of A-level talent that they need in order to grow their businesses. This bodes well for anyone who’s thinking about making a change or is initiating a new job search.

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