Last week we covered Self-Starting Ability. This week we look at a complementary aptitude – Personal Drive. Most salespeople work within the framework of a company but their actual performance takes place on a one-to-one level…salesperson to prospect. To be successful, salespeople have to have the internal drive to succeed without excessive, external, surrogate motivation from their manager.

Personal Drive
A gauge of personal motivation to achieve, accomplish or complete tasks, goals or missions. This drive can take many forms (e.g., tasks, knowledge, career, physical, etc.), but it involves the level of personal motivation a person is capable of bringing to bear on any given task which they feel is important.

A salesperson with strength in this capacity tends to focus considerable intent on the completion of a task or objective once they are convinced of the benefits involved in its completion.

A salesperson with with little strength in this area may have difficulty committing substantial internal resources towards the completion of a task, even once convinced of its importance.

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I found this story amusing – One in Three Workers Writes Down Computer Passwords, Study Says. For all the security measures taken by companies, a third of the works still undermine it.

Staff still had a tendency to jot down passwords either on a piece of paper or in a text file on a PC or mobile device.

Great analogy here:

“This is really a lot like mom and dad buying a great new system for the house and junior leaving the combination under the door mat,” David O’Connell, senior analyst at Nucleus Research, told Reuters.

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This article – The Hottest Industries For Sales Jobs – comes from the daily SM&M Magazine enewsletter. The market demand for salespeople is strong right now (we can attest to that fact) and is going to remain high:

The trend for hiring shows no signs of stopping, according to Cindy Hazen, the founder of Sales Executives, a recruiting firm based in Nashville, Tenn. “We have been booming for the last two years in sales and project to be booming for the next five,” she says.

And now for the hottest topic in hiring:

The aging U.S. workforce is also changing the sales profession. Companies soon will need to replace a generation of baby boomer salespeople. For the pharmaceutical and medical industries, this also means a growing market for their services.

The medical market is not lost on the younger generations. A good majority of the younger sales candidates we encounter mention an interest in the medical market. The boomer generation will definitely push that market to a new level within the next 10 years.

“Companies are in a very strong recruiting mode for every level of salesperson,” he says. “We’re seeing a talent war at every level.”

We are seeing that war also. I think this war is always taking place since talented salespeople are always difficult to find and hire. That issue is probably accentuated by the currently booming economy’s demands for more salespeople.

One note about the present situation – sales candidates typically do have more than one opportunity they are considering. The Rock Star mentioned this yesterday and it is crucial in this market. If you identify a strong sales candidate, it is imperative that you keep your hiring process moving at a decent clip. Any stalls, oversights or delays provides your hiring competition a window to close the deal with your candidate.

One final note from the article regarding a predicted decline in manufacturing employment:

The sales industry has shifted to the service side, Hazen says. “It’s about solution selling, not catalogue selling.”

We can confirm this from some of our manufacturing clients. Hiring doesn’t have to stop when a sector has declining employment. Instead, it is important to make sure the current team consists of strong, solution-selling sales reps. An upgrade of the salesforce may be in order if the revenue numbers are simply not there. You do not want to be selling in an increasingly difficult market with an inferior team – sounds harsh but it is the truth.

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There has been a lot written on Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) in articles and in the blogs. Everyone seems to have an opinion about this type of work environment and if it could work outside of Best Buy. One article specifically addresses the point of the adaptability of Best Buy’s culture in other companies. I found a couple of points of interest that I would like to share with you.

“Best Buy’s culture is very young,” says Washington, D.C.-based flexibility consultant Paul Rupert of Rupert & Co., who has worked with clients ranging from Wal-Mart to Xerox. “They have a lot of significant managers who are still in their 30s. It’s very appropriate for them, with the breezy style and the humor and the slogans. But the headquarters at a typical company is filled with managers in their 50s and 60s-a different generation.”

Some aspects of ROWE, he thinks, might clash too strongly with the core principles upon which some conservative companies have been built. “You can ridicule an obsession with face time, for example, but some companies have a strong belief that having people at the same place, in the same time, creates synergy that is valuable to the company,” he says. “You’re going to have a hard time changing that.”

Age and generations definitely does play a factor in why companies would have an easier time embracing this culture style. We have written numerous posts (here, here and here)and articles regarding what the different generations look for in their jobs, careers and employers. As Paul Rupert comments, the leaders need to embrace the culture they are trying to implement, which is why Best Buy has been so successful with ROWE. In fact, it has been so successful they are in the midst of trying it out in one of their stores as a pilot program.

I found an interview with Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, on FastCompany.com’s website that really talks to the leadership’s role in making this program work. He was asked if he spent more time in the stores now, and part of his response drives on the importance leadership has in embracing and implementing a new culture:

Actually I’ve spent less time in stores than ever. This strategy [is] so challenging to the infrastructure of the company, so the first work is to get the infrastructure ready to embrace it. Key concepts like servant leadership [have to be enforced] that are very different from the examples we’ve set over a lot of years. That first has to get modeled at the hub of the enterprise.

One of the things I hate about all this terminology is that it has standard meaning which tends to denude the value of the principle. At the fundamental level, at the core, servant leadership is seeing — whatever your job and whatever your title is — that you’re actually in service to the people you lead. That the real measurement of whether you’re effective is if you helped increase the energy of the people who you’re engaging with and leading. If you’ve done that — if the energy level is higher than it was when you started — than you’re probably evidencing some servant leadership.

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A few days ago the Velvet Hammer provided some pointers on putting together offer letters and I wanted to chime in on the topic. I have just a couple of general reminders as you deliver the offers to your sales candidates:

1. Your position is probably not the only opportunity they are looking at so keep the process moving along – timing is everything.
2. Qualify the total compensation package with the candidate. Will the offer be in the candidate’s range or will it be out in left field?
3. Expect to have some negotiation with the candidate on the offer. Again, this is probably not the only opportunity they are pursuing.
4. Make sure the offer has a date the candidate needs to respond by, do not leave it open ended. As we like to say, it doesn’t take longer to say yes. The longer they take to respond, the more likely they will decline the offer.
5. This sounds rudimentary, but make sure you follow up with the candidate after the offer has been given. We had one customer, who after tendering an offer and telling the candidate they would follow-up in a couple of days, never did. They almost lost a very strong candidate because they got busy and forgot to make the call.

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Wall Street Pay Averages $300,000 Per Year. “Averages” is the word that hooked me into the article. The straight-forward article simply relays the stats and how an improved Wall Street helps NYC. Today’s news that the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 12,000 line for the first time ever bodes well for that average pay moving up.

I enjoyed this rather dry statement from the short article:

“Wall Street is recovering,” Hevesi said in a statement.

I guess so.

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Selling Power has a short, but valuable article titled The Two Things You Must Do Well to Succeed as a Sales Manager. I’ll cut right to the chase:

1. Manage the Sales Process
2. Leading the Salespeople

That is it. Sounds simple but rarely do we see it in action. Instead, we normally see some variation of this:

…managers are compensated primarily on their salespeople’s sales revenue, which leads many managers to jump in and act as “super closers,” taking over the relationships in the most critical accounts – and in the process, often undermining the motivation of their sales reps.

Super closers – I like that. Most sales managers were top salespeople who were promoted into the manager role. They revert to what they know best and that is selling.

Thus when a rep needs help with an opportunity, the manager falls back on what he knows best and can do the quickest: he swoops in to fix the problem.

A suggestion we often offer to sales managers and it almost universally questioned: Let the salesperson fail. Now, we’re not talking about letting a salesperson clumsily lose a golden opportunity. No, instead, coach them up on a small opportunity but let them handle it themselves. If the succeed, great. If they fail, spend the time to perform the postmortem on the opportunity to make sure they learn the lesson.

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We are working through some offers for sales candidates with multiple clients this week and thought it would be helpful to discuss some general points.

Salary – we’re big believers in a modest/decent salary. The best plans we see provide a salary to cover the basic needs of the salesperson. If they are worrying about basic bills, they are not as effective. I know there is an old school belief that commission-only plans are the best – purest form of selling, you eat what you kill. The largest drawback to this approach is that sales managers often leave the salesperson to their own devices. Their rationale – the salesperson will either sink or swim. This is not a good investment of the company’s hard-earned leads.

Commissions – offer a realistic, uncapped plan. Often we come across commission plans that are set so astronomically high the space shuttle orbits them. Salespeople know this. I like to say, “If they make their number, they should own the company.” Keep the commission plan real. It is best to leave it uncapped and the best way to do this is to pay a percentage of gross (bid) margin. The margin reward is the tonic to the discounting disease. If you pay on revenue, the salesperson has no incentive to maintain high margins. Worst case, they will discount to below cost to get an easy sale.

Ramp Incentive – we always recommend offering some form of an incentive during their ramp up time. Here’s what we don’t recommend – don’t start them at a higher salary with the plan to lower it after the ramp period. This is always perceived by the salesperson as a pay cut no matter how clear the plan. Also, a guaranteed draw/commission is risky in that the salesperson receives commission dollars without earning them through closed deals. This approach is synonymous to feeding bears in the park. Pretty soon, they stop hunting on their own and wait for handouts. We recommend you provide them with a ramp incentive but that they earn specific commissions by completing specific tasks (market analysis, value proposition, first few deals, etc.).

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First, a confession – I am a huge fan of Battelstar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. I’m not talking about the old 1970′s version which is still entertaining. No, the modern version is quite gripping. Anyway, if you watch that show, you will chuckle at this email cover title:

Do you need a frackin’ awesome worker?

As much as I enjoy the show, I am not impressed by a candidate who uses the show’s f-bomb derivative in their cover email.

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Opening sentence of a cover email:

I need work.

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