Patience + Perserverance = New Hire Sucess!

One of our clients right now has a new sales rep who is about 60 days into her job, has a proven track record, and will most certainly get up to speed in this new position. However, this is an industry change for her and her domain knowledge is lacking with respect to this particular product that the company is offering. This requires a little bit of extra patience from the client to allow for this person to come up to speed on the learning curve.

It's important for us to remember that just because a person has great skills doesn't mean that they're going to immediately going to be able to apply them to a new circumstance, new product, or a new market/industry. Sometimes, we tend to get anxious about how fast we can get through the learning curve and up that learning curve to results with new hires. We need to apply some level of patience and persistence when working with the new hire to make sure that we're bringing him or her up to speed in an orderly fashion and allowing for that person to assimilate the information that they need in order to be successful at their job. It’s very easy to be sixty or ninety days into a new hire and feel like you're not getting to the results that you're looking for. Allowing that anxiety to creep into your thoughts, actions, and discussions with that individual.

Yet, new sales hires want to be supported in their job and want to know that they have management's confidence so it's very important as a sales manager to maintain an even keeled approach to scrutinizing and verifying their activities and their progress while at the same time being supportive and instilling confidence in the new sales hire as they work towards getting ramped up. There is a lot of finesse involved in managing the relationship with a new sales hire. It's not easy work but when done right, you'll have the shortest possible cycle to get the person ramped up and you'll get the best possible results.

A Good Sales Recruiter is Worth Its Weight In Gold.

Often times we come across companies that are looking to hire sales people but don't recognize the value of an outside sales recruiting service. The reason is because they are experienced hiring managers. Certainly most sales managers, one of their key capabilities is to hire good people, but getting to those people is half the battle. This is where a good recruiting company can help. A good head hunter knows how to go in and access the best talent, where ever it may be, including companies which you could not approach directly and can make the difference between hiring B and C players for your company, those who are out looking for a job, and hiring A players, those who typically aren't out looking for a job.

The results between hiring a B or C player and hiring an A player can be truly astounding. Particularly in the sales arena, a top produce is one who can produce several times the amount of sales as a B or C player. Getting to those people is no easy task and that's where seeking outside assistance can make a real difference. What's the bottom line impact? Sometimes it can be worth several million dollars of incremental sales for your company per year. Can you afford not to hire the best in your business? If you really are trying to grow and take your company to the next level, it's important that you don’t settle for less than the best. This is why a head hunter is so critical to bringing you the talent that you need in order to grow your company.

recruiting
career search

Focus Your Career Search

If you are a top sales and marketing producer at the executive, mid-level, or frontline, and looking for a new job, make sure that you have a laser focus in your resume on what your career objective is. Spell out exactly the ideal job you are looking for at the front of your resume in succinct terms so that anybody who sees your resume understands exactly what you're looking for, why you would fit the opportunity that they are screening for, and how they can help you find what you want.

A good career objective includes the following elements: position, title, size of company, industry focus, duties and responsibilities, and overall cultural fit. By spelling out these elements, in clear, succinct, short sentences, you'll be doing yourself a great favor. Most recruiters and people who are looking for talent are really trying to figure out who lines up exactly with their requirements. They are trying to do a quick screen and a job match. By giving people a precise idea of what your career objective is and how it lines up with your experience; you will be setting yourself apart from most resumes which define their skills in very broad terms. Likewise, by doing this you'll also be able to get much better help from your colleagues and associates when you are out networking, looking for that next job and looking for referrals to that next job.

Why? Because people who you meet with to network are usually happy to help, but they need to know exactly what you are looking for, and you need to paint a picture for them in their mind that gives them a precise idea of the ideal situation that you'd be looking for in a new company. If you do that, and when you do that right, well connected people who are trying to help you will immediately know who to send you on to who might be able to help you land the job of your dream. Make sure your career objective is very well focused on your resume and that it covers the essential elements of your ideal job scenario. If you do this well, what are the chances that you'll get that ideal job? Well, a lot better than if you don't do this right.

recruiting
career search

Online Tool For Recruiting Sales People

I understand that a lot of companies out there don't feel that they need to use outside recruiters, even if they specialize in sales and marketing or other types of outside support resources. If your company is planning on going it alone with the regard to hiring new sales people, consider using an outside sales profiling tool such as the one that we use at Objective Management. The express screen tool is a very helpful tool that will help you to determine whether or not a particular candidate can and will sell for your company and whether or not their selling style and experience is aligned with the profile of what it is that you are looking for in a top sales person. This tool, while not providing the only information that you need for the hiring process, will give you yet another set of inputs and data which will make it extremely helpful for you as you make your hiring decision.

All of us have blind spots when it comes to hiring sales people. Often times, we bond with the candidates and we tend to hire people that we like or have the same style as we do, yet a lot of miss-hires come from this exact flaw. This is why it is so important to get an objective, outside read as to whether or not a candidate is really suitable for your company's need before you make an offer.

An online sales profiling tool should be used as a compliment as opposed to a substitute for other parts of your interviewing process. Those interviewing processes should include behavioral interviewing, team interviewing, and sales achievement tracking to name a few, but by using this outside tool, it will greatly reduce your risk of a miss-hire when it comes to hiring sales people. I suggest that if you're not using an outside tool such as this as a part and partial of your sales hiring process, you're missing an opportunity to adopt a widely recognized best practice when it comes to hiring sales people. So, even when you don't want to use a recruiter, consider getting outside support and looking at the tools that are available on the internet today.

recruiting

Candidates: Focus Your Message

If you're a sales and marketing executive, you've probably spent a good portion of your career developing and refining specific positioning and messaging that you've used for the companies that you've worked with with your customers, right? Well, all I'm saying here is, before you go out to market yourself, make sure that you're properly packaged, just like any company would be properly packaged in its marketplace. What that means is that you've got to make sure that your marketing message is clear, concise, and lines up perfectly with what you want to be doing.
This is where a lot of executives fall down. They say, "Well, I'll be happy to take anything in sales and marketing, I'll do just about anything." Again, that's not good enough.

If you're passion is working in manufacturing automation software, focus on that. If you are looking for a VP of business development position, make sure that's part of your message. If you're looking for that kind of an opportunity in a start-up or emerging growth company, make sure that's part of your career objective as well. Instead of saying I'd take anything, approach you’re networking with, "I'm looking for a VP of business development position with a start up or emerging growth Software Company in the manufacturing automation sector." That kind of career objective is something I can get my arms around and start helping somebody along the way to find the opportunity they're looking for. So, make sure if you’re a sales or marketing executive to eat your own dog food when it comes to honing your own message before you get out on the search beat.

recruiting
career search

Tips for Candidates Working With Recruiters

We gets lots of sales and marketing executives, mid level and front line job seekers who come to our office and we're happy to spend time with them to get to know them and to understand their skill sets, what they're looking for, and to put their resume into our search database. We make sure to follow up with every candidate because we feel it's important that we get to know them so that when we do have a search that's relevant to their skill set, we can immediately consider them for those opportunities.

Many candidates come to us not actually understanding exactly how a search firm works. As a result of that, they continue to pound us for opportunities, even when we've already told them that we aren't working with anything that is relevant to their skill set at a given time. Candidates need to remember that executive recruiting and sales and marketing search firms like ours are client retained. Our clients are the ones who pay our bills and therefore we focus a very large part of our effort on sourcing, screening, interviewing and presenting candidates that line up with exactly what our clients are looking for at any given time. This does not mean that we're not interested in meeting candidates. As I've said before, we are happy to network with them and get acquainted, but it's important for a candidate to remember that if you approach a search firm, if they are willing to give you time, don't keep following up too often with the search firm if they don't have something that fits your skill set right now.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, the reason why we spend time to meet candidates is so that we can develop a very good profile of their skill set, exactly what they're good at and what they want to be doing, so that when a search does come up, we're actually capable of presenting them with those opportunities. We make it our business to know candidates specifically so that when the right opportunity comes along, we can jump on that with good talent.

Does this mean that if you're a candidate, I'm saying, "Don't call us, we'll call you?" Well, partly. The best candidates that we see understand that once they're in our system, what's required is just from time to time, an email or some sort of touch base communication telling us what they're up to, how their job search is going, whether or not they're still available. What this does is it serves to keep them in our minds which is important so that we can make sure that we do give them a shot at any opportunities that are relevant. The worst candidates are constantly harping on us, trying to get us to give them a job, and it just doesn't work that way.
If you are a candidate and you're approaching recruiting firms looking for a new position, practice the following rules:

1. Get the appointment and make sure that you've brought an up to date resume with a very clear depiction of the kind of position you're looking for.

2. After the appointment, make sure to follow up with the recruiter, and thank them to remind them what it is that you're looking for.

3. Then, periodically, once every four to six weeks I'd say, ping them via email or call them and leave them a voicemail and just let them know what you're up to and how your search is progressing, and remind them in a nice way that you're still looking and that you appreciate any consideration of opportunities that are relevant.




recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Behavioral and Performance Interviewing for Sales Achievers

If you are a CEO or a sales manager and you're in the process of interviewing top sales talent, you probably have been trained on standard behavioral interviewing techniques which are used to make sure that you are getting to the heart of a candidates past behaviors as to predicting future performance. The other critical component that's probably even more important is to make sure that in your behavioral interviewing process, you're integrating performance based interviewing questions that really get to the heart of whether or not a candidate has the track record of consistent achievement that is an accurate predictor of their ability to achieve their sales goals once they come to work for you.

Performance based interviewing means that you need to integrate a number of specific measurements of metrics into the actual questions that you ask to a sales interviewee. Those include providing a summary of sales achievements by year against their actual quota, and then moving upstream from there to look at their activities in terms of daily and weekly customer visits, call counts proposals delivers, face to face customer visits, percentage time spent at the sea level versus at the front line decision maker level, etc. A good sales candidate should be able to rattle off these types of measures from previous positions.

Performance based interviewing also means that you're going beyond just asking a person how they faced and won in a difficult sales challenge. What it translates to is asking the candidate how they've consistently beat their sales goals. Those are the kind of people that you're looking to hire anyway, and by asking performance based questions, you'll have a much better chance of weeding through a pile of resumes and a pile of potential candidates to get to those true top performers. After all, the true top sales producers, those who are in the top five percent of their class, can outsell the next ten to twenty percent of sales people by a factor of two fold. So why wouldn't you invest in hiring only the best?

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employment
executive search
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There is Still a Role for Farmers in Your Sales Organization

I have a sales person who I've been working very hard on coaching to improve her ability to get new business for our company. After investing lots of time and energy, what I've really come to as a final decision is that this individual is not going to make it as a hunter. Now the question is, what do I do about it? Well, one of the things I believe in is always looking for the best in people and looking to play to their strengths. This particular sales person is an outstanding troubleshooter, problem solver, and a champion to the customer. She is also a very good relationship builder and has an uncanny ability to help our organization to mobilize itself in order to solve customer problems when they do arise. What better role for this person than a job as an account manager, straddling the fence of sales and customer service? I'm redeploying this person into this position, knowing full well that she's not going to do a great job of finding new business, but will accomplish a very important task for us, which is to manage our current accounts and to maximize our customer retention.

If your organization isn't expending some of its resources on customer retention, there's a good chance that you're digging new pits to fill old ones. What do I mean by this? Well, your organization could be spending time acquiring new customers to replace the ones that you're losing. For this reason, an account management or customer service function is extremely important to the overall mix of your sales organization and to your customer facing operations in general.

Some people would choose to terminate this type of non-performer, but I believe that everybody has their utility and in our particular organization, we have lots of need to make sure that we are working to retain our current customers, so it's very easy for me to move this person into an account management role and thereby improve our overall ability to satisfy our existing business as a foundation for more growth.

If you have a sales rep who is not making it in his/her job, sure that you don't decide to terminate without at least figuring out if there's another role for that kind of person in your company. What you'll find is that the DNA of a relationship builder or account manager can be very useful to your overall organizational success.
sales
marketing
executive search

Integrating Your Passion With Your Career

Do you wake up every morning excited about the prospects of going to work? Are you generally smiling during the day as you go about your activities? Do you love what you do? Do you love the people you do it with? These are all questions that I ask of people or try to uncover as I interview them for sales and marketing leadership roles. The fact is, there is a very high percentage of the population in today's workforce who views their work as "just another job." In fact, the level of discontentment amongst most people with respect to their daily work is really quite astounding; particularly given the fact that people spend more time at their work than any other activity.

When we interview people who are looking for sales and marketing positions, we always start by trying to understand what gets them excited. What do they love to do? What are they really good at? How do they plan to carry that passion and positive energy forward in their career? Unfortunately a lot of job seekers fail to make the connection between what they really love, what they're good at, and what they want to be doing in their job. A lot of times they follow a career path that someone else tells them to pursue, like their parents. You'd be surprised at how many people pursue a particular career in order to subconsciously please mom or dad.

The fact is, that people do best in their jobs when they really love what they do. When they get excited about the work they do every day. When it connects to their inner core and their own sense of purpose. That's when people perform best at work. That's when the days go by quickest and that's when people have a smile on their faces all day long.

If you work in sales because your dad did, or because you thought it might be a good career or because you couldn't figure out what else it was that you wanted to do, and you really view it more as a job than as a career, you might want to think about this. We see sales people come through our offices that view their job as just that - nothing more than a job. You can tell that's how their attitudes have shaped their career. As a result, they move from job to job. They jump from company to company and from industry to industry, searching for something they can't quite find. Their sales achievements are typically poor to average and they're not capable of really sticking with a company. We see sales people that come through like that and my best advice to them is, "Don't be a sales person because you've been told to, or because somebody thought it might be a good idea for you. Be a sales person because you love it."

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Recruiting Top Sales & Marketing Talent: It's All About Momentum

We're working with a client right now on a sales search, and unfortunately she has dragged out the recruiting process to the point where we are considering whether or not we can complete this assignment. In particular, I'm concerned that this client is about to lose a candidate that we've worked very hard to put in front of them, who is ideally suited, and who is very interested in taking the job.

Every once in a while we run into clients that lack a sense of urgency when it comes to completing a recruiting project.

This troubles me because when we work with these kinds of clients, we can see that they become their own worst enemy. Sometimes, clients go very slowly and methodically because they've been burned in the past and they want to avoid a miss-hire. Other times, the person who's responsible for making the decision has too many things on his/her plate, and is not able to continue forward at an acceptable pace.

Whatever the case may be, top sales and marketing candidates have a short "shelf life" for a specific position, and that shelf life can expire if the recruiting process is not proceeded through with haste. (When I talk about the word haste, I don't advocate making a hasty decision. A good recruiting process, particularly in sales and marketing, always requires a very deep level of diligence and a very rigorous process as I've advocated throughout this blog and in other materials in our website). Having said that, proceeding with a lack of purpose and a lack of momentum tends to send a message to top candidates that you're really not that interested in bringing them aboard.

The best sales and marketing candidates enter and exit the job market quickly, so you need to be willing to move quickly to recruit them onto your team.

The recruiting process needs to be looked at as something that has a start and an end. The end is either a yes/no decision and an offer letter, and in the middle, there's a series of steps that you pass through or phases of the process that you have to go through in order to get to that conclusion. My advice to companies that are trying to hire the best, is to make sure that you proceed purposefully and swiftly through each phase without skipping any steps and always move towards finalizing the process as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If you do this you'll have the best chance of capturing the kind of talent that you are looking for to drive the growth of your business. If you don't you'll end up losing the best candidates and have to settle for B or C players in order to staff your sales team.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing