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

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

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?

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

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

Remember The "Give/Get" When Networking For A New Job

This morning I had a top VP of sales candidate in my office. This person came to us because he's looking for a new career position. He asked us to spend some time with him to help him talk through his career search as well as do some networking and also give consideration to him for specific positions that we're searching for right now. We spent about 45 minutes together and through the conversation after hearing about his search and the direction that he was going I gave him several specific contacts, phone numbers and referrals that I felt would be useful. I also assured him that we would continue to keep him in consideration for positions which were appropriate as they became available.

At the end of our conversation this individual said, "Now I'd like to ask you: what can I do for you? You folks have been very gracious with your time and giving me ideas and some great referrals. What can I do to help you in return for your time and all of the good will that you've established here?"

This was an excellent example of how professional sales people understand that in any relationship there needs to be a positive "give/get" for both parties. This individual obviously understood this, because he took the time to ask us what it was that he could do to help us. I, of course, gratefully responded that we would be very anxious to get any referrals that he has to top sales and marketing candidates for the positions that we're filling right now. I also told him that we would love to get referrals for any companies which need to retain the services of a firm like ours in order to hire sales and marketing talent.

If you're out there looking for your next great job, make sure that you're a giver and not just a taker. If you simply ask how can you help in return at the end of every networking interview, you'll go a long way toward establishing good will. You'll also build relationships that last beyond your job search.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Good Recruiters Do The Right Thing

I have a situation developing today whereby a client of mine is avoiding engaging us in a recruiting project, while at the same time going through the final interview process to hire somebody who got introduced to him from me through my network. Both the candidate and the client are uncomfortable with this situation. In particular, because they're worried they're going to ruffle my feathers and I’m going to lose my recruiting fees from this project.

Well the fact is that we are going to lose our recruiting fees, but there is nothing I can do about it except take the high road and accept that when I do the right thing and help people, they will ultimately reward me by maintaining our relationship. I expect that over time those relationships will be far more important than the transaction fee or the recruiting fee that I just gave up in this particular instance.

Some recruiting companies are so focused on working for their fees that they forget who they're really working for. Some recruiting companies are so focused on closing deals that they forget what the primary purpose of their job is. It's really easy for recruiting firms to become very transactional and money driven. In fact, right now is a perfect time for people to be that way because the market is booming and there's so much opportunity, but the fact is that the best search firms are the ones that treat both their candidates and clients with the utmost dignity and respect, and look beyond the value of their monetary goals towards the value of their relationships, and how those relationships over time will reward them.

I believe a good recruiter, particularly in sales and marketing, has a long-term perspective. In our niche of this business, what we find is that good candidates end up becoming good clients. When I introduce a VP of sales candidate to a particular client and that candidate ends up being placed in a position, often times he/she will become my client. As a result of that, anything that I've done to maintain the integrity and value of my relationship with that person through the process will pay me back in spades.

If you are in the process of looking for a good recruiting firm to outsource your hiring process in sales and marketing to, make sure that you go beyond the surface and explore the values and ethics the firm has, before you decide to retain them. I believe that if the values and ethics of the firm are aligned with your own, you'll have the best success in getting the kind of results that you're looking for.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

How to Decide When a Sales and Marketing Job is for You

Today I had a 45 minute conversation with a very senior sales and marketing leader who wanted my advice regarding her decision on whether or not to take a VP of Sales and Marketing job at a leading company in the technology space. I spent time walking through her decision criteria and helping her to work to a conclusion on this subject. One of the key things that came out of our discussion was she was having serious trepidation about whether or not this particular job was a good fit with her career goals. While she liked many attributes of the job, she wasn't really excited about it, and so we talked a lot about why this particular position was not something that sparked her passion. At the end of our discussion, I said, "I'm going to let you make this decision on your own, but my advice to you is that if you are right up against the edge on whether or not to take a job opportunity, even if it's highly compensated like this one is, if the answer is "maybe," then it should be "no."

The reason why, is if you're not completely passionate about an opportunity, you're not really excited about the prospects of joining the company, and if you're not visualizing exactly how you can make a difference to help the company grow it's top-line revenues and transform itself, why would you settle for just another “job?”

The most precious thing you have as a career-minded professional is your time, and how you decide to devote it. We spend most of our waking hours working, and if we aren't excited about the work that we're doing, if we aren't passionate, if we don't feel the drive ignited within us when we go to work every day, the only question I have is, "Why are we doing it?"

So if you are faced with the hard decision about whether or not to accept a job offer, whether or not it's the only job offer you have, my advice to you is, if the answer is "maybe," and if you're not totally excited about the opportunity, then pass. Pass and keep looking for that special career move that's going to get your juices flowing, ignite your passion and get you totally committed and totally jazzed about how you're spending your day. That's something worth working for, and that's a hell of a lot more than just a job.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Recruiting Marketing Talent: Hire the Artist or the Scientist?

Following my last blogs, let's talk a little bit more about the difference between the artistic and creative side of marketing communications and the science of marketing and what's more important to a successful company.

When you are recruiting a marketing executive, you should be looking for somebody who much more resembles a scientist than an artist. Why? The scientist is the one who's going to bring you the analytical, quantitative, and strategic thinking skills that are necessary to properly target the right markets and reach the right customers with the right products. This requires more technical and scientific skills than it does artistic/creative skills, such as what you'd find in a marketing communications person.

Many of the top marketing people we meet and who we place, have deep quantitative analysis skills and often times come from technical backgrounds. In the technology sector, many of the marketing executives we place actually come from an engineering background and have moved up through product management or product development into a marketing executive role. These are the kinds of "scientists" who have the quantitative and analytic skills that are so important to modern marketing effectiveness.

The "empty marketing suits" we meet may have the ability to develop flashy ad campaigns and be very polished communicators, but often lack the substance to analyze, create or manage a company's core strategy. For this reason, if a company has to pick between marketing disciplines (the strategic and quantitative side vs. the creative side), it should focus on the former and outsource the latter.

Why is this? Well, there are thousands of creative agencies out there that are capable of taking your company's messaging and positioning and translating it into effective sales tools, advertising copy, brochures, collateral, etc. But there aren't lots of people that can actually lead a company's strategic marketing effort internally.

If you are up against a decision on what kind of person you hire to lead your marketing efforts, I would opt for the quantitative, analytical, scientific marketing type and I would outsource the creative, qualitative, marketing communications types of activities.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Hiring Marketing Executives With Substance

If you're a senior executive looking to add a key member to your marketing staff, but you've never hired marketing people before: buyer beware! Why do I say this? While there are a lot of talented marketing executives out there with an excellent repertoire of skills and experience, there also are marketing people who lack the substance, the training, the skill sets, and the understanding of marketing dynamics in order to really have a positive impact on your business.

What is the profile of an empty marketing suit? Well, typically it's somebody who dresses well, is very polished, speaks nicely, and uses all the latest fancy buzzwords, but who has little/no track record of actual execution or success. This person is great at "wowing" a CEO through the interviewing process, but that's about all they're good at.

What you should be looking for is a marketing executive who's got true substance and capabilities.

What I want to outline here are some of the key hiring criteria when you're looking for a good marketing executive:

• They should have outstanding quantitative training with a strong background in mathematics, which translates into being able to do budgeting, forecasting and tracking.

• They should have proven analytical skills that are used to survey and analyze complex sets of data, do market segmentations, sizing, competitive analysis, etc.

• They should have strong strategic thinking skills and a strong grasp of marketing strategy, as evidenced by previous challenges they have faced and dealt with in their career.

• They should have formal training in strategic marketing planning, product planning, new product development, etc.

• They should understand the modern methods for marketing communications for both awareness building as well as lead generation. In particular, a marketing executive of today needs to have a very strong grasp of Internet marketing since that’s how so much of today’s successful marketing gets done.

• A marketing executive needs to be able to lead. That means they have to have very strong collaborative and influencing skills, that can be brought to bear on setting a direction for an executive team. They also need to know how to instill good marketing discipline.

Today's "best in class" companies are both market and customer driven. The marketing leader needs to be the voice of the customer and the marketplace as it relates to setting strategy on target markets, new product development, gross margins, sales channels, messaging, etc. – the list goes on. Given this level of complexity in skills and experience, making a good hire can be a real challenge for the untrained eye. This is why bringing in a recruiter or executive search firm which specializes in marketing is so important for many firms who lack this expertise in-house.

If you are in the process of looking for a member of your marketing team, make sure that you follow a rigorous process to clearly understand what's under the hood with the people who you are interviewing. If you don't, and you end up with an empty marketing suit, it'll cost you tremendous amounts of money, lost market share, and lost opportunity.

Can you afford that?

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Career Search Considerations for Top Sales People

If you are in the midst of a transition and thinking about making a career change and you’re a top sales producer for your company, it can feel very risky to make a move; particularly if you’ve established a real strong track record in your job. Yet all of us reach a point when we know its time to move from a very good situation into the next phase of our career. I personally have experienced this on several occasions over the span of my professional life and I’m sure you have as well.

So what is it that you’re looking for as you search for that next great sales position? Well, a number of things. First of all, think about the following factors:

• How stable is the company?
• What are its growth opportunities?
• What is managements vision for building a successful business?
• What is the company’s unique selling proposition?
• How much intellectual property does it have to back its ability to compete effectively in its marketplace?
• Is the company well funded and capitalized and can it take advantage of the opportunities that it has?
• Is the leadership principled and do they have the kinds of values that you can get excited about being a part of?
• What's the quality of the team member that you would be working with?
• How’s the compensation plan?
• Is an opportunity for upside if you can exceed your annual revenue goals?
• What sort of distribution channel partnerships are there that will help you to facilitate the growth in your territory?
• What sort of career growth opportunities does the company offer?
• Is the company willing to hire and promote from within, or do they go outside to recruit their top talent?

These are some of the considerations I would be looking for if I were thinking about a career change in sales. The key is balancing what you see intellectually as you examine an opportunity, with how you feel emotionally about it. Ultimately a gut check is a very important part in making a career change decision.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

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.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

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.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

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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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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Tap The Power of Your Network

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

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


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Competing For Top Talent In A Tight Labor Market

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

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

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What Employers Look For In Salespeople

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sales And Marketing Recruiting Business Growing Rapidly

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Packaging Yourself As a Job Candidate

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

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

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

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Planning For Your Next Great Sales & Marketing Job

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

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

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It’s A Great Time To Change Careers

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

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Marketing Your Employment Skills In The Internet Age

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

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

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

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Build A Great Sales & Marketing Resume That Sets You Apart

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

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

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

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

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

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Sales & Marketing Executive Search (Part 2)

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

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

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

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

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Sales and Marketing Executive Search (Part 1)

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

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

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

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

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Networking for sales & marketing job searches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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Types of Sales & Marketing Recruiting Engagements

Internet marketing professionals, sales people, lead generation specialists, marketing communications specialists, graphics designers, inside sales, telesales, sales operations, director-level sales or marketing people, strategic marketing talent, product marketing managers, product managers. Those are all the kinds of positions that a good sales and marketing search firm will hire for, and which they will develop candidate pools from. By tapping into these pools you can ensure a much higher level of success in making critical hires for your company, and when it comes to hiring sales and marketing talent, if you don’t hire the best, the risk is too high that you’ll hire people who can not get you the results that you’re looking for. So why compromise when it comes to building the most important asset base of your company, the human capital asset base.

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How To Select A Sales And Marketing Recruiting Firm

There are lots of staffing companies, executive search firms & headhunters in the marketplace. If your company is looking to hire sales or marketing talent, how can you distinguish between these different service providers to determine who will do the best job of finding you the top candidates that you need?

One of the key things to look for…probably the top thing to look for in fact, is a company that specializes only in sales and marketing engagements. Search firms that specialize in sales and marketing are few and far between.

There are a lot of staffing and recruiting firms out there that specialize in finance, accounting, IT, etc, but very few that actually have a focus in the sales and marketing arena. Why is this? Because sales and marketing searches are the most challenging recruiting assignments to do correctly. It’s much more difficult to measure the skills, experience and ability of a salesperson than it is to measure the experience of a programmer or an accounting professional. This is why a lot of companies that are in the staffing business shy away from doing sales & marketing search assignments.

Sales & marketing search specialists are staffed with VP’s of sales, and or sales and marketing executives who have lots of experience in hiring this kind of personnel…so what you’re really doing is hiring their expertise at having done the same thing over and over and over again. They have much more rigorous processes, sales profiling tools and proven techniques to get at the heart of whether or not sales and marketing candidates are really capable of producing the results you need for your company. Likewise they have large databases and pools of talent that they draw from, since they make it their business to track the top candidates and make them available for client searches.

So if you’re considering going outside or outsourcing your sales and marketing recruiting to a search firm, make sure that the one that you select is focused in sales and marketing only. If you do, you have a much better chance of attracting and retaining the kind of top talent that you’ll need in order to accelerate your company’s sales growth.

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Recruiting Fees & Why People Gladly Pay Them

If your company is not used to paying recruiting fees to an outside firm in order to attract talent, you need to ask yourself the following question: can you afford not to pay fees, if you can’t fill a position or make a mis-hire. Not filling key sales and marketing positions when your company is trying to grow will constrain your company’s revenue growth potential. Even worse, if you make the wrong hire and settle for less than the best, you could end up spending lots of money without getting the results that you’re looking for. This is why so many companies in a full employment economy turn to recruiting companies that specialize in finding, recruiting and placing top sales and marketing talent. It doesn’t matter whether your company is looking for VP or executive level sales, marketing or business development people, sales or marketing management or frontline sales or marketing individual contributors. It really makes sense to consider outsourcing to a recruiting firm.

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How To Hire Top Sales And Marketing Talent In A Full Economy

The economy is at full employment levels and it is a real challenge if you are trying to grow your company, to find and attract the best sales and marketing talent in this environment. No longer is it easy to place a Monster ad or put out the word to a couple of friends and expect to find qualified candidates coming to your door.

Today it is a much more challenging proposition. You need to be able to identify, promote and attract A-level talent to your company. This is not an easy task, because all of the top sales and marketing people are already working.

That is why now more than ever, it makes lots of sense to retain the services of a sales and marketing recruiting company that specializes only in sales and marketing. By retaining an executive search firm to find your people, you will have a much better chance of locating the kind of proven performers who can produce top sales results for your company and help you grow.

Many of our clients find that placing ads on Monster, CareerBuilder or other websites is simply not yielding any positive results, so they are looking for new ways to attract talent. Frequently, the best way is to use retained executive search. We are seeing a large increase in the number of sales and marketing recruiting assignments in our company. We are providing a very important service to a variety of different clients.

Other clients outsource the recruiting function simply because they are too busy to follow the rigorous process that is required to hire top sales and marketing talent.


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Why Sales And Marketing Recruiting Is Different From Other Types Of Recruiting

Our company specializes only in hiring sales and marketing people, from front line contributors, to mid-level and all the way up to the executive level. We hire sales representatives, account managers, national accounts executives, directors, and vice presidents of sales and marketing. Through that process, we’ve developed a tremendous amount of expertise in these two functional areas that most recruiters don’t have. In addition to that, our sales and marketing team expertise comes from accumulating over a hundred years in the trenches of sales and marketing, actually working for companies and building and leading many successful sales and marketing organizations. When we approach sales and marketing, we approach it with deep experience. This is what you should look for in a sales & marketing recruiting firm.

Most recruiters don’t have that kind of experience in this particular domain. In fact, a lot of executive recruiters or headhunters are generalists. They hire CFOs, CEOs, CTOs and CIOs and they may be very good at the executive level in performing those duties. But when it comes to hiring sales and marketing talent, there’s nothing like having a recruiting or executive search firm which is focused in sales and marketing. We believe that it offers a powerful advantage to companies that are trying to make sure that they make the absolutely right hires for their company. We hire sales and marketing talent on a national level for clients who seek us out, looking for that special headhunting or recruiting firm who only focuses on making critical sales and marketing hires. They seek us out because many of them have suffered the burden of having made mis-hires.

In our Recruiting Guide, we quote statistics showing that 53% of all sales hires are mis-hires. This number is so high because most people don’t have the skills or the experience to hire sales & marketing employees, and so they get “sold” through the interviewing process, as opposed to determining whether or not a candidate can and will sell for their company. In particular, executives with backgrounds in finance, operations, engineering, manufacturing, or other non-sales and marketing fields are easily duped by slick, well-dressed, smooth-talking sales and marketing folks. While many of those people are actually very capable, often times the smoothest and the slickest ones who are the best at selling themselves in the interview aren’t necessarily the best people to represent and sell for your company. This is why outsourcing your recruiting function to an experienced sales and marketing recruiting company can have huge value for your business.

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Interviewing Salespeople

One of the most common mistakes that I see with employers and recruiters, is taking a person’s résumé at face value. This is particularly fatal when it comes to hiring sales people. Why? Sales people are masters of the spin. When I see a résumé that comes to me full such spin (for example increased pipeline by 82%, doubled bookings, tripled revenue, etc), and I don’t see absolute revenue or booking figures, I become highly suspicious. That’s why one of the first things I do when I interview a sales candidate is to ask them to put together a “sales achievement history”. This is a very simple spreadsheet that recaps a candidate’s actual achievement against goals over the previous number of years, in absolute dollar figures. It’s very easy to ask for, and most successful sales candidates are willing to produce it. Ask them to open up an excel spreadsheet and make a list and table with the year, their annual sales goal, and their actual achievement in columns. Ask them to go back about five years in their history.

As you can imagine, the good candidates are happy to produce this information for you and fully capable of doing it. Why? Because they have built and maintained a track record of success and they’ve tracked those numbers, because it’s part of the badge of honor that they wear as a top sales producer.

Salespeople who have not consistently hit their numbers are not capable of producing this kind of information for you, as a part of the interviewing process. They will usually make excuses and say “Well, I’m not sure if I remember those numbers, I’ll have to dig up and see whether or not I have that data. I didn’t keep those records.” Typically, what that means is that the sales rep who you are interviewing has not had the kind of track record that you’re looking for.

Make sure that you can pull a “sales achievement history” from the candidate as a part of the interviewing process. If you do this, you’ll quickly separate the performers from those people who claim to have performed and have embellished their résumé with lots of fancy sales speak but can’t produce the cold hard facts.


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