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.

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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.

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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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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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Making Great Sales Hiring Decisions

If you’re putting sales candidates through an interviewing process, make sure that you include non-sales team members in the interviewing process each and every time. Include people from Finance, Operations, Human Resources, Engineering and/or Manufacturing. Why would you do this, you ask? Well the fact is that different members from other departments in your company have a completely different perspective and a different skill set when it comes to interviewing people. It’s the non-sales interview team members that often times produce the best perspective or provide a different set of inputs on a particular sales candidate -- which is important to your overall hiring decision.

For example, a Finance or Engineering person often times can measure a sales candidate’s analytical capabilities, such as their ability to perform simple tasks such as analyzing numbers, preparing forecasts, doing technical requirements evaluations, etc. By having other types of people from different departments in your company participate in the interviewing process, you can develop a much broader perspective about the capabilities of your sales candidates as it relates to the totality of their job. Then you won’t only evaluate whether or not they can talk and communicate well. So think about this as you move forward. Always include non-salespeople in the interviewing process.

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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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