A few months back we posted on an article from CareerBuilder.com titled Top 10 Interview No No’s. One of the top 10 “no-no’s” is a topic that we discuss with our clients regularly. It is:

2. No Opening Monologue - It is often tempting to have a monologue at the beginning of your time with a candidate. Giving too much information about the type of candidate you are seeking, or providing a substantial amount of information about the position and responsibilities can be detrimental. Giving too many details upfront leads a candidate to tell you what you want to hear, instead of what he/she actually thinks. Do simple introductions and quickly move to your list of questions, allowing the candidate to do the majority of the talking. Feel free to share more information at the end of the interview.

Opening monologues are extremely detrimental when hiring salespeople. Why? Let’s put it into application - imagine your salespeople in their role calling on new prospects. Do the prospects open up with a monologue about their troubles, how much they have to spend and whether they can approve this size order or not? In most instances they do not. Your salesperson must ask good qualifying questions to unearth this information.

This qualifying, questioning ability is what we want to see in action in the interview stage.

If you start off interviews with a data-dump monologue, stop doing that. Let the sales candidate dig to get this information out through the interview. Pay special not to their rapport, questions, clarifications, structure and ease of ability. I assure you that you will have a much better understanding of the candidate’s qualifying process and abilities.

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Firing an employee is usually a difficult task unless things have degraded to a point where you are eager to terminate them. Nonetheless, there are some tips available for doing it the “right” way. CareerBuilder has a solid, basic article that hits the high points of terminating an employee - What to Know About Letting an Employee Go.

Here’s a good tip from the article:

It’s About Time
It used to be the general consensus that late Friday afternoon was considered the ideal time to drop the hammer on an employee. But experts in the Human Resources industry now believe that earlier in the day, or even the week, is a more appropriate time to deliver the bad news.

Guy Kawasaki goes into much more detail with some excellent points to consider in his post The Art of Firing. Two points I want to call out from the post.

First:

Be firm. Never go into a final conversation thinking that if it goes well, you might not fire the person. Decide and then implement. If you get talked out of it, the odds are that you’ll simply fire the person later. However, don’t confuse being firm with being mean. You should be firm in your decision, but kind in how your decision is communicated and implemented.

This point cannot be stated enough. I have seen this reversal first hand and Guy is absolutely correct - the person ended up being fired later. A termination is a final decision and one that should be contemplated thoroughly, acted upon with finality and done so graciously. This is not the time to have a change of heart.

Finally:

Look in the mirror. Ideally, the situation should have never come to this. You should have hired the right person. You should have set and communicated the right goals. You should have provided course corrections. Some of the fault probably belongs to you. Its too late for the case at hand, but its not too late to prevent this from happening again, so take a good, long look in the mirror.

Many managers do not like this point but they do own a part of the failure. Hiring, ramping and succeeding are all imperatives that are owned by the employee and their manager. If there is a termination, there was a misfire somewhere in the process. If so, analyze and change your process.

I was fired from my 2nd sales job out of college. The manager was a real piece of work. He hired me for an inside sales position and stuck me in an East coast territory with no product training (selling after market copier parts). The next training class didn’t start until 3 weeks after I started. Also, it was advanced training for the outside sales reps. I hammered my way through the sales calls for 3 weeks with minimal success and much on-the-job training. This manager did not like my approach or limited success. I made it to the week long training class and he pulled me out of there on a Friday morning and fired me on the spot. I’ll never forget how unprofessional the entire organization was towards a new, young salesperson. In my view, I never had a fair shot to succeed and I have shared that experience whenever that company’s name has come up in conversation.

Interesting side point - the CEO of that large company is now in jail after some creative accounting practices that lined his pockets. I suppose that speaks to the culture that existed in that corporation.

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I laughed out loud when I read this headline from CareerBuilder’s recent newsletter, 46% of Workers Have Gained Weight at Their Current Jobs. I have to admit that I am in with the 46% so naturally I had to read the article. CareerBuilder.com surveyed more than 2,200 workers from June 6 to June 16, 2006. Here are some of their findings:

• 20% say they are more than 10 pounds heavier.
• 10% say they are more than 20 pounds heavier.
• 57% of government workers gained weight.
• 54% off IT workers gained weight.
• 53% of accounting/finance workers gained weight.
• 35% of retail workers gained weight.
• 39% of sales workers gained weight.

Well, maybe I can use this as a little motivation to get out walking, running, biking or roller blading before the snow starts to fly here in the tundra.

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According to a recent SHRM article,

…approximately 60% of the 3,100 human resource executives surveyed by Novations Group (a Boston-based consulting firm) said they see signs of a talent shortage, while nearly 10 percent said they have seen no shortage but expect to before the end of the decade. That leaves 30 percent that see no or few signs of the shortage. About 20 percent of respondents said they see no signs of a talent shortage but will remain cautious on new hiring in the year ahead and ten percent said they do not even anticipate a shortage of workers in the next decade.

More than half of those seeing signs of the shortage have already taken steps to update their selection process to compensate for their loss in talent. What precautions have you undertaken? I would encourage you to be amongst the people choosing to take a proactive approach in this war for talent. Don’t be left behind like the 30 percent in this survey by being passive when it comes to this issue. The baby-boomers are looking at retirement right around the corner.

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I’m catching up on some reading and came across Selling Power’s recent Sales Management Newsletter which had this article, If You Sell to Women, You Better Clear the Clutter.

Some interesting information about selling to women.

According to a cruise ship survey women could recall details as small as the design on the rugs and the subject matter of each painting on the walls. In contrast, most men couldn’t even remember the color of those walls.

Women account for more than 80 percent of all purchases in the U.S., $3.7 trillion as consumers and $1.5 trillion as business owners.

And third and foremost in my mind was the authors final point in the article regarding personal appearance.

Always look neat, clean and well put together. This is sales 101, but it’s so important with female clients that it bears repeating. A neat, clean appearance means a neat haircut; no wrinkles in your clothes, missing buttons, or spots on your tie; shined shoes, and trimmed fingernails.

She ends with if a woman can recall the details on a cruise ship rug she’ll notice everything. Funny. I recently experienced this very truth with a candidate who did fine in the interview but did look somewhat disheveled. His appearance was one of the first items noticed by our female customer. A good tip for salespeople and sales candidates - best to overdress and be pressed. Muhammad Ali would appreciate that line.

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Price Tag for Lost Productivity: $544 Billion. I’m always intrigued about how these calculations are made through a simple survey.

How about some stats from the article?

Employees spend an average of 1.86 hours per eight-hour workday on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks, the survey found.

More than half (52%) of the 2,706 people surveyed admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours is surfing the Internet for personal use. Other distractions cited by respondents included socializing with co-workers (26.3%), running errands outside the office (7.6%) and spacing out (6.6%).

I remember seeing something about this survey since “spacing out” made me laugh. I’ve been on some phone screens where I seriously wondered if the person on the other end was spacing out as they talked. But that is an anecdote for another day.

One last finding that is certainly worth noting:

The 2005 survey also found that older employees wasted less time at work than their younger counterparts.

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Let’s keep this talent vs. experience riff rolling into a Monday. This battle is near and dear to our hearts, as you know.

Here is an experience we had recently involving a final candidate who had a strong networking ability. He has the ability to network within his industry effectively. He even networked with people incidentally - at a restaurant, in retail environment, etc. This ability was revealed throughout his assessments. He was a strong people reader, had high empathy, was people-oriented, etc.

Unfortunately during the in-person interview, the candidate wasn’t able to tactically explain his networking ability. The ability came naturally to him so he was not overtly aware of his methodology for accomplishing it. That very fact is probably the reason why he was good at it.

Natural talents can be measured using objective assessments. The talent, if used properly, should be revealed in past experiences. The aforementioned candidate had numerous contacts in his industry along with specific stories of how he met them. One thing is certain in top salespeople - their meter is always running. In the evening, on the weekend, whenever, they always have their radar scanning for a new opportunity.

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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 before I could restate it, the candidate interrupted me with this shocking statement:

“No I understood it perfectly.”

Good thing we were on the phone because my jaw literally dropped and I am sure I had a look of bewilderment on my face. Sensing a potential train wreck, I moved on and asked him more sales-process questions. The responses were just as bizarre. I can say I soon ended the call and thanked him for his time.

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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 shows, that was the only method for learning how the competition was positioning themselves in the market.

Today is different. I talked to a hands-on President the other day about one of his salespeople. They compete in a market that features a relatively new technology and competitors are coming online frequently.

The President’s comment is one we are encountering often. The salesperson does not take the time to research a competitor before going into a sales call. His salesperson knew the company he was up against (give him props for that bit of qualifying) but had not researched them in any way.

The President was beside himself and rightly so. Selling in a competitive market requires a salesperson to know their competition’s strengths, value proposition and pricing model. Failure to do so will neutralize the opportunity to thoroughly qualify the prospect.

Let me give you one of our favorite interview question patterns when sourcing for a sales position in a highly competitive market:

Who is your toughest competitor?
What makes them so tough?
How do you beat them when you are both competing for the same prospect?

Avoid salespeople who cannot speak strategically, tactically or experientially on this topic.

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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 enough product information into their brain, high-margin sales revenue will certainly follow . . . quickly.

Right? Are you with me?

Hopefully you see this approach as insanity. It is. Yet, many companies apply this logic when hiring a salesperson. Exact industry experience becomes the weighted predictor of success in their position. To make matters worse, over-valued industry experience is deduced from a resume that has almost certainly been embellished. This trap is the main cause of poor sales hiring.

The number 1 predictor of successful selling is sales skills not industry experience. Every company that we encounter has resident experts for their product or service. I guarantee it will take more time, effort and resources to teach a salesperson how to sell than it will ever take to teach them about your product or service. Some sales candidates only sale will be to land on your payroll.

Don’t succumb to the experience trap when hiring. Look for abilities that are needed in your particular sale. Objectively assess candidates. Contact us if you need assistance.

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