An interesting article ran in last week’s Selling Power Newsletter for Hiring & Recruiting titled “Why Do Salespeople Leave?”

According to Compensation Resources, Inc. (CRI), obtained turnover statistics and trends from a broad range of industries and company sizes. The results indicate that both voluntary turnover and overall turnover have slightly increased in 2006 over 2004 when the last data were collected. The report identified an important shift in the motivators for leaving noted by employees. In 2004, the top reasons for moving on were better pay and better benefits. In 2006, the top reasons for leaving an employer is the desire for better opportunities and increased responsibilities.

“More and more, employees are seeking to improve their abilities and be recognized for their work, and are no longer motivated by pay alone,” says a CRI spokesperson.

They touch on an interesting point that I actually posted last week in Attracting the Passive Candidate. Whether we are talking about candidates or employees, all salespeople are asking a similar question, “What’s in it for me?” Understanding their rewards is the first step whether you are looking to hire or retain salespeople.

The second step is to match your rewards to match the employee’s motivation-reward pattern. For example, say you plan to run fourth quarter contest to try and bolster sales. If your sales team is motivated Utilitarianism and rewarded by Material Possessions, providing a President’s Club reward may not align with their goals. You won’t see much of a buy-in from your team. Now, if you use money bonuses, you will have captured their attention and engaged their motivation-reward structure.

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From Bob Rosner’s Working Wounded blog:

Worst Employee
“I once asked one of my people to stop reading a People Magazine at her desk and to get back to work. She began to cry and went on disability for two days.”

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I just received an interesting email from Salary.com:

Do you deserve more than a 3.7% raise?
Your increasing skills are worth more than the standard 3.7% cost of living increase.Be prepared for your next salary review by purchasing a Personal Salary Subscription today.

I received a 13.25% raise because of Salary.com information
- Satisfied Salary.com Customer

I have never encountered this approach, but I am intrigued by an employee showing up to a salary review with a detailed report. I don’t know how I would take that as a manager.

Another part of the email mentioned:

“Thanks for all your help. This is an amazing tool. It has helped me to prepare for my salary negotiation and has given me the confidence to negotiate for a 10% increase in pay.”
- Salary.com Customer

The 10% raise apparently did not lead to a “satisfied” Salary.com customer like the first quote. Nonetheless, you have to love the information available on the Internet.

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CareerJournal.com has a long article entitled Get the Most Pay Out of Your Job. The article follows a typical format of 10 tips for employees and there are some solid suggestions. In the list, point #2 hit on a topic dear to my own belief:

2. Bet on yourself
Having a bonus tied to performance goals and hitting them can get you more money annually…The key to receiving more bonus money is superior performance. If you meet your goals, you should receive your target bonus amount. But at some companies, if you exceed the targets set for you, you may receive an award that exceeds your target bonus. At Biogen Idec, for instance, high-performing employees can receive as much as 200% of their target bonus amount, says Mr. Schneier.

Amen to that approach. I love the confident heading - Bet On Yourself. I have always believed that every employee should be incented with a bonus/commission plan based upon performance. Whether it is corporate or individual performance, some plan should be in place to have every member of the company working towards similar goals.

When sourcing sales candidates, we always pay close attention to their compensation questions and requests. Personally, I prefer to see sales candidates who want to discuss the commission plan as opposed to the salary. The salary range should be addressed in the ad and there is no problem in negotiating on that topic. However, I am always leery of salespeople who drive hard on a higher salary and seem indifferent regarding the commission plan. That, in our world, is a big red flag.

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I read somewhere recently a suggestion to simply punt the “Objective” section on your resume. I initially scoffed at the idea, but now I am starting to think that is sage advice.

This morning I was looking through resumes and came across this objective:

To find a position where I can contribute as part of a team that strives to emphasize the importance of effective communication through design.

Dump the objective section of your resume. More than likely, it is filled with broad, superfluous statements that may be more detrimental than helpful.

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Resumes seem to be getting a lot of air time on the internet lately, including our blog. I just read an interesting article this morning and thought I would share a couple of points that the author brought to my attention. The article is written for the job seeker, but if you would like to read it, you can find it online at the Minneapolis StarTribune website. It is titled - Don’t Sell Yourself Short.

One of the author’s sources gives these suggestions:

I like to see key words (job titles, degrees) in bold - that way I can immediately see whether the work history and education matches the needs. I prefer tasks listed in bulleted formats rather than paragraphs - it’s easier to skim key words.

Not bad recommendations or are they? It certainlly would make our job of reading them a lot easier if everyone followed this format, but I think this could inadvertantly introduce biases. I don’t want to make any presumptions, but these recommendations did make me stop and think how often do we let our personal bias affect how we look at resumes.

Working through resumes is tedious and time consuming. I am all for easy-to-read resumes, but it is important to keep the resume in proper context. In this example, if we are looking for resumes that have keywords bolded and experiences bulleted, we may give more time to the resumes of candidates who use this type of formatting. This approach could disproportionately influence who makes it to the next step in the hiring process.

The author also recommends that candidates keep in mind employers hire for “selfish” reasons - to benefit their company, as you would expect. The So What? Factor my partner posted about recently in our blog provides a groundwork for a powerfully-worded resume. This topic needs to be addressed in what they refer to as the hot zone, or the top third of the resume. Not a bad tip to job seekers and as hiring managers, we should place greater emphasis on this content as opposed to style.

Here’s what I took away from this article. First, understand what it is you need to see within the resume to move the applicant to the next stage in your process. Do not expect perfection and remember to question the veracity of all resumes you receive. In a recent study, nearly 43% of applicants embellished their qualifications on their resume. So what you believe to be a great fit may no fit at all.

Second, don’t allow your personal preferences to come into play as you are sorting through a stack of resumes. The style or format of a resume is a personal preference and should be viewed as nothing more than that. Personally, I try to keep the aesthetics focused on a few simple topics:

• Overall, does it look professional?
• How is the spacing?
• Is it easily read?
• Is it free of misspelled words?

Sorting through resumes should be a quick filter for removing the mismatched applicants. Don’t rank them, pick favorites or make intuitive presumptions about the candidate based solely on their resume. Use the phone screen as your strong filter.

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This story from BusinessWeek - Worst Jobs with the Best Pay - may only interest me. The title made it worth the read. Let’s start with a stat from the article:

A recent Salary.com survey found that 65% of workers plan to look for a new job within the next three months. The most common reason for leaving? Not enough pay.

None of that is surprising to me. In fact, that reason sounds like the easiest to provide in a survey. I would question how many are leaving due to their direct boss or the company culture. The reason I speculate on this topic is found later in the article:

In most cases, though, workers said a 10% salary increase would be enough to make up for their jobs’ shortcomings…

10%? That seems low to me.

Well, the article then turns to the worst job with a great payout - crab fishing. I am an avid viewer of Deadliest Catch on Discovery channel. The show documents the intense crab fishing season in great detail. These guys jeopardize their lives on these ice-laden boats in the Bering Sea. If you wondered why, read no further than this tidbit:

There was always a top boat where the crew members raked in $50,000 during the three- to five-day king crab season - or $100,000 for the longer snow crab season.

If you watch the show, I guarantee you would think long and hard about whether $50K is worth what they have to do to earn it.

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Many companies believe that the High D (Dominance) selling style is ideal for successful sales. First, some descriptors of this style:

Direct Daring Innovative
Blunt Competitive Bold
Risk Taker Problem Solver Challenge-Oriented
Self-Starter Inquisitive Power

These traits are all admirable in a salesperson but this style, if unchecked, if a ticking time bomb. Yes, sales requires a drive, even an aggressiveness to be successful.

In a previous post, I briefly discussed this style in regards to a current news story. The salesperson I mentioned could be a case study in High D sales behavior. Another experience from this salesperson. He used to visit prospects and put an intense sales push on them. He was effective in some instances, but he was far more acerbic than anyone in the company knew.

We helped this company hire another salesperson who was in the industry and covered the same territory as the High D salesperson. He told us during the interview that he would enjoy following the High D at a prospect’s facility. He mentioned that the easiest customers he gained were the ones who had just met with the High D salesperson and were completely upset by him. They viewed him as domineering, rude and inattentive. The High D cut down their objections and went for the hard close. The prospects often said no and then turned to this other salesperson for a competitive solution.

This is a singular example, but we have seen it play out in other forms at other companies. Some items to consider if you have or hire High D salespeople:

• Lead Pipeline. They cover much ground and are typically not thorough (depending on some other factors). High D’s enjoy making a list and then completing all of the tasks - the faster the better. You will need to have a strong lead pipeline, target market, etc. to keep them occupied.
• Transactional Sales. High D’s do not typically nurture a prospect along to close them. They prefer a direct, back-and-forth session and then the close. They can moderate this desire if the opportunity is highly valued, but they cannot maintain this adaptation for extended sales cycles (6+ months). Their style is far more suited to a transactional sale. They are the king of the one-call close. They are the clown of the 1 year sales cycle.
• Jugglers. High D’s like to have many balls in the air at any given time. They feed off of the energy of these tasks. However, they often overestimate their abilities and some things fall through. If they do not value a prospect, they may simply ignore them to focus on one of their other many tasks.
• Opinions. High D’s are opinionated (especially if they have a strong Traditional motivation) and like to win. In fact, this drive to win is so strong that they may “fire” a prospect if they feel they are losing. I am not kidding - I have seen this approach on many occasions and it shocks me every time. For the High D, saving face can be more of a driver than humbling themselves to get the sale.

As you can see from these few points, the High D selling style is the most dangerous for successful sales. We always flag this style and proceed with specific questions and assessment analysis to determine the threat level this style poses. It sounds serious, but trust me, one High D salesperson with the wrong mix of characteristics can defame your corporate name faster than a recall.

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Let’s keep the “so what?” principle going before the weekend.

Recently in a face-to-face interview for a business development role candidates were asked - “How have you developed territories in the past?” The question was purposely vague to see if they would ask for clarification to understand what we were specifically looking for before responding. Ideally, the candidates would not only explain how they went about developing a new territory, but the impact it had on their company (the so what? factor).

One candidate stood out from the rest and not in a good way. He did not ask qualify the question nor did he give it much thought. In fact, he actually answered the question before I could finish asking it:

By educating the prospects as to why we are better.

That was it. Nothing more. Even more importantly, no so what? explanation (I doubt he could have generated anything to support this statement).

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Inc.com has an article from earlier this week discussing worker loyalty in regards to age. I don’t think there are any surprises here in that older workers are more loyal than younger workers. First off, I think this analogy is one of the best I have seen to describe Gen X and Y’s approach to employment:

Kevin Marasco, vice president of marketing at Jacksonville, Fla.-based Vurv Technology, a provider of Web-based workforce-management systems, explained that younger employees manage their careers as they would an investment. Just as they want to buy and sell a stock at the right time, younger workers want to build career equity by joining and leaving the right jobs at the right time.”They are also diversifying their portfolio in many cases — trying to get experience at large and small firms or U.S. and international firms,” Marasco said. “They are taking a strategic approach to building their career by using one job as a launch pad for the next.“

Exactly correct. This investment approach explains why career pathing is a difficult sell to the younger generations. Most smaller companies do not have the right jobs available at the right times for these workers. Now add in the utter ease of locating new opportunities through the Internet and you come to this fact:

The study, released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that workers ages 55 to 64 have been with their current employers a median of 9.3 years, while workers ages 25 to 34 have a median tenure of only 2.9 years.

We fight this fact with our customers on a weekly basis. Many established, baby boomer managers struggle with a candidate who has a history of 2-4 years at each position in their career. Obviously, hiring companies are making an investment also and want that investment to offer a strong return. The key to the younger generations is to develop skill-developing positions for them and to stay involved in their development. These are old truths that still apply today. I am convinced that the majority of talented worker turnover is due to the manager’s indifference to the employee’s development.

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