Late on a Friday and we need some levity so it is anecdote time. The set up – I am conducting a phone interview for a consultative service company where excellent listening and verbal skills are required. After asking a candidate (that was doing quite well) some preliminary questions about their general experience, I started asking more sales process-oriented questions. My first sales-specific question was “What is your typical length for one sales cycle?” His response, “I have been in this industry for almost 6 years but looking to make a change.” I was utterly baffled. I apologized to the candidate and mentioned that my question was not clear and… Read More
Continue ReadingKnow Your Competition
Just over 10 years ago, I was a Regional Sales Manager for a high-tech company in a competitive market. There were 5 major players in this market and each of us incorporated different technology in our capital equipment. The Internet was a fledgling concept in the business world at the time. We needed to know what our competition was developing since they all had different technology. We had admin people call in to our competitors, pretend that they were prospects and request information packets. Our competitors obliged. We then passed the information around to the team and filed it in a huge lateral file for future reference. Outside of trade… Read More
Continue ReadingA Hiring Riddle
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein Here is a riddle we constantly encounter yet have difficulty solving. Let’s say you are the sales manager for a somewhat complex product sale and you have an underperforming salesperson. The salesperson is well below quota, has an ethereal forecast and is not making enough prospect connects to turn it around. What do you do as a sales manager? My solution – pull them from their territory for 1 week of intense product training. I’m talking deep training down to the part production, software coding, product assembly nether regions of operations. If you can pump… Read More
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