I was talking with one of our clients earlier today and we were reviewing a sales candidate’s assessment results. The candidate is presently working for a small temp staffing agency for a salary only (no commission) and puts in an average of 50-60 hours per week. The candidate had a strong social motivation which is a big red flag in our world.

As we were discussing how these motivations would show up on the job, our client remembered that she had asked the candidate what gave her the greatest sense of satisfaction? The candidate’s response:

When a person comes up to me and thanks me for finding them a job and now they are able to catch up on bills. That just makes my day, when I know that I have helped someone out.

A perfect example of the Social motivation, being able to “help others out.” Obviously, I wouldn’t want to live in a world without the Social motivation. But my first thought about the candidate’s response was that’s great, but what kind of commission did the she make on the placement. Then I remembered she doesn’t earn commission. This is not the type of motivation that leads to business development success.

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At Select Metrix, we constantly preach that compensation plans should be, in part, tied to an individual’s performance. So when I was reading through my newsletters and RSS feeds, I was amazed to find stats from several different articles and feeds.

First off, CEO turnover is up. The numbers show that CEO turnover for 2005 was 15% compared to 9% just 10 years earlier. Pay is also up, this could be due to the fact that more CEOs are moving around. In 2004 CEO pay increased 14.5% and in 2005 it increased 7.1% with the median salary and bonus coming in at $2,408,665.

With this trend, The Corporate Library (paid subscription required) just published these findings:

Eleven companies that authorized a total of $865 million in pay to CEOs who led their companies to a cumulative loss in shareholder value of $640 billion last year.

Ouch! Those companies may want to think about looking for different leadership and restructure the incentives to be more directly tied to overall corporate performance.

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I’m in to analogies this week so I have had this one rattling around in my head for a while. Its Friday so let’s try it.

If you are familiar with football and specifically the wide receiver position, you know that their primary purpose is to run fast, accurate routes and catch the football when it is thrown to them. On running plays, they may run hard downfield as a decoy or they may try to block a defensive player. These activities are simply secondary at best to their role. Suffice to say, wide receivers usually have the cleanest uniforms at the end of a game (sans the punter and kicker).

Blocking is not the primary purpose for employing a wide receiver.

Now let’s look at hiring strong salespeople. Often we encounter hiring managers who want to hire a strong salesperson. If wide receivers are asked to run fast and catch footballs, salespeople are asked to prospect, qualify and close potential customers. These tasks are their primary responsibilities and the reason why they are on your payroll.

If being a decoy or blocking a defensive player is secondary to a wide receiver’s role, personality or style is a secondary piece of information for hiring strong salespeople. Don’t get me wrong, communication style is important and we assess it in all salespeople. However, making a hiring decision based solely on this information is risky.

If a wide receiver can block well, that is a plus. Yet, the critical measurement is how fast they run, how well they catch and how accurate they run their routes. Wide receivers are measured based on those last 3 items as primary factors to success. Blocking . . . it is barely a secondary factor. A bonus if they can block well, but it is not a reason for disqualifying them from consideration.

Similarly, salespeople are measured on their selling skills today, their motivations for success and their potential to become better at selling. These are the primary factors that lead to success in the position. Prospecting consistency, qualifying questions and closing abilities are strengths to search for when hiring salespeople. Focusing on their personality is not.

I don’t know if that analogy works or not, but I hope it conveys the basic point. Look for sales candidates who ask good questions, who clarify ambiguous points and who qualify the position for which they are applying. These are the primary factors that lead to success.

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From Sales&Marketing Management’s Performance newsletter (sorry, no link):

An annual survey by consulting firm Accenture of 436 senior executives at major companies around the world have identified risk management as their top concern. This is a shift from the past three years, when workforce improvement issues topped the list.

Here are the top 10 current business issues for senior executives:

1. Managing risk
2. Achieving growth while increasing profitability
3. Acquiring new customers
4. Using IT to reduce costs and create value
5. Changing organizational culture and employee attitudes
6. Increasing customer loyalty and retention
7. Improving workforce performance
8. Increasing shareholder value
9. Applying innovation to stay ahead of the competition
10. Attracting and retaining skilled staff

I’m always suspect of polls, but this one is interesting. I would have expected Attracting and retaining skilled staff to be ranked hire than tenth, but at least it made the list.

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This week’s series stops on an important aptitude for success is selling. There is nothing more clumsy than a salesperson with bad timing.

Sense Of Timing
The ability to accurately evaluate what is happening in such way that their statements, decisions and actions are effective, accurate and timely. This capacity evaluates a persons ability to look at the whole picture and effectively evaluate how their immediate request or action fits into the current timeframe.

A salesperson with a strong aptitude in this capacity will be able to effectively interact with others by adjusting the timing with which he/she presents ideas, suggestions, criticism or solutions.

A salesperson with a weak aptitude in this area will tend to take inappropriate action, take the appropriate action at an inappropriate time or a combination of both.

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Imagine your goal is to lose weight so you sign up for a 1 year membership to one of the large health clubs in town. You pay the steep initial fee and the monthly amount. In the first 6 months, you go to the club and workout a total of 5 times for 30 minutes each time. Suffice to say, you have not lost the weight you expected to lose. In fact, you have actually put on 5 pounds in those 6 months.

You could call the club and complain that you have not lost the weight you had intended to lose. They will probably pull up a record of your visits and mention that you have only visited the club 5 times in 6 months. They might also mention that all of the equipment is there in the club for you to use. They might also mention that they are open 24/7. At this point, you would have difficulty looking externally for an excuse.

Now let’s apply a similar situation to a sales manager. Suppose they spend their time working on their own accounts, sitting through management meetings and meeting with their own team once a week. If a new salesperson, with many skills and talents, joins the team and does not perform well, one place we have to look is the sales manager.

Many sales managers prefer to hire salespeople with experience in their industry or market. I am convinced that one of the major reasons for this approach is that the sales manager believes they will not have to spend as much time training this experienced salesperson. This approach would work if every competitor approached the market in the exact way (same value proposition, market niche, product/service offering, etc.).

Obviously they do not. A strong salesperson with direct industry experience still needs consistent interaction with their sales manager. I don’t think sales managers consciously decide to ignore new salespeople, but I do believe they underestimate the amount of time needed to properly ramp a new salesperson into high performance. Much like the health club, successful sales management requires frequent, consistent work with each member of the sales team.

Sales managers have to be a motivator, a coach, a disciplinarian, a guide, a psychologist, a sales star, a communicator…I could keep going, but you get the point.

The one thing they cannot be – absent from involvement.

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It has been a hectic customer day with many things happening. I was a bit worn out and then I caught up to this great quote from the justsell.com newsletter:

“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses and some don’t turn up at all.”

–Sam Ewing (1920-2001)
American writer & humorist

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Okay, as I have said before, I can’t help myself when it comes to lists and trivia. So when I heard on the news this morning that today was “Walk to School Day”, I started to pay closer attention.

Interesting to note that this is an international awareness day to promote safe walking and driving habits and to provide safety for our children that need to walk to school each day. The awareness day started in Britain back in 1994 and became International Walk to School Day on October 4th, 2000 with Canada, Great Britain, United States, Ireland, Cyprus, Gibraltar and The Isle of Man participating.

They even have a website if you would like to learn more. I know you do.

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We prefer quality. We often tell our prospects if we do our job perfectly, you will only interview one candidate. If you think about this approach, we are confident in our process and our tools to find the most skilled and talented candidate for the position.

Some people are uncomfortable with this approach. They require interviews with multiple candidates before making a decision. But is this the best approach?

If you are hiring for a specific position and the first candidate you interview is a strong fit for the position, is there any reason why you wouldn’t hire them? Most people prefer to have options so they seek interviews with other candidates as a comparison. That is a reasonable approach.

But what if the strong candidate had other opportunities to consider beyond yours? Now it does make sense to complete your hiring process quickly and get to an offer. We have seen the strongest candidate “get away” because the hiring company was hesitant to make an offer without seeing another candidate. The delay was only one week, but it was long enough for the candidate to complete the process with another company.

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Anthony Meaney from Recruiting.com has a great post today unpacking a CareerJournal.com article titled Acing a Dicey Interview Question:Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?

Straight from Anthony’s keyboard:

Work-life balance has become a key issue for people these days with employees striving for it and employers gushing about how their company supports work life balance. Yet we are supposed to look askance at candidates who want to knock two hours of commute time off their day? The only person who can legitimately scoff at shorter commute as a reason for leaving is someone who is doing a longer commute.

I couldn’t agree more. We are located in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul which features some of the worst commutes in the US especially with our large metropolitan area. The desire to shorten a commute to allow for more time away from work is a hallmark of Gen X and certainly for Gen Y.

One other quote from the CareerJournal article:

If you list money as your main reason for leaving a current job, the hiring manager may think you are fishing for a counteroffer to win a higher salary, recruiters and hiring managers say.

A candidate motivated most by money may be tempted to jump ship if another offer with a higher pay came along, says Melissa Fusi, a partner at Executive Staffing Inc. in Miami. Recruiters want to avoid placing “job hoppers,” she says.

This approach may work in staffing, but we appreciate salespeople who are money motivated. The vast majority of strong salespeople are motivated by earning more money. I would have no qualms about a sales candidate who is looking to make more money.

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