First, a Foxnews.com article - Tech Companies Top Survey of Most Influential Brands with this ranking:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. YouTube
4. Wikipedia
5. Starbucks

Now the lesson we have learned over time - salespeople whom sell for the market/brand leader often have difficulty moving to a company in the same market with less market share. This fact has played out time and again. The issue is simple, when you sell for a market leader, getting sales appointments is never as difficult as selling for a mom & pop competitor.

Hiring companies often think they have scored a coup by hiring a salesperson from the 800lbs. gorilla in their market. Most times, these salespeople are gone within a year once the difficulties of prospecting with a lesser-known company name becomes apparent.

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A timely article from CNNMoney.com - ‘Presenteeism’ infects businesses. Timely in that some super bug has made it’s way through Select Metrix which has knocked yours truly down this week. For some background on this phenomenon:

“presenteeism,” or going to work when sick, is a persistent problem at more than half of U.S. workplaces and costs U.S. business a whopping $180 billion a year, research shows.

Think of it as the opposite of absenteeism.

Let’s cut to the chase on the whole issue:

As often as two-thirds of the time, sick people go to work because they feel they have too much work to do, according to the CCH study.

And later:

“With corporate downsizings of the past creating a leaner workforce, employees often feel they have to show up for work, whether it’s out of guilt over staying home or concerns over job security,” Gorovsky said.

The incredible increase in productivity does have some downside (though presenteeism seems fairly minor).

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I just read a sales ad for an Account Executive that was 85 lines long. The font size was 8pt! The competencies section along covered 16 different topics.

Don’t do this with a sales ad. I realize there are many people who want to be thorough, but this level of detail is extreme overkill. A couple of years ago we wrote an article in our newsletter describing the basic layout for an effective sales ad. We have tweaked the format slightly by adding a “Job Rewards” section to better explain the rewards offered for success in the role. One thing we should have added was don’t write 85 line ads!

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “I’d write you a shorter ad, but I haven’t the time.” Take the time.

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I’m a little late to the party on this post from Spherion’s The Big Time blog. The post covers many interesting topics. To start (emphasis mine):

• 23 percent of companies are already dissatisfied with the talent available.
• One-third of HR managers mention turnover/retention as a key concern.
• On average, employers expect 14 percent of their workforce to leave within the next year.
• 31 percent of workers believe there is a turnover or retention problem at their company, and 39 percent of workers themselves expect to leave in the next year.
• Less than half (44 percent) of workers believe their company is taking steps to retain its employees.

You can see where these survey results are leading - there is a disconnect between the employer’s perception and the employee’s perception of the same company. That disconnect is illustrated in the next section of the post involving the drivers of retention. The summary from the post:

Employers and employees wholeheartedly disagree on what drives retention. In fact, employers and employees ranked every factor of retention differently in terms of priority. The most concerning of which relates to time and flexibility. Work/life balance was the most important career priority for 86 percent of workers surveyed. It is ranked first on the employees list of retention drivers after standard priorities salary and benefits. Employers on the other hand ranked time & flexibility last among all factors relating to retention of employees.

A key point to all of these stats is simple - if you have a retention problem, you have a recruiting problem. Strong companies hire the right people that are rewarded by the culture. Any misalignment in the retention factors leads to a turnover problem.

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I follow some of the career articles that the Star Tribune writes and found an interesting one titled New Year, New Career: Nine Tools for Researching Leads. You are probably wondering why would I reference a career newsletter? Well, let me tell you it has some great free resources for your salespeople to use in researching their business leads. Please allow me to highlight those that would be relevant to almost any sales team.

Just Sell - Sign up to receive detailed information on at least 50 companies that have experienced a major event in the last 5 business days which will lead to future growth… delivered straight to your email each Monday. Their website has tons of resources for you to use, newsletters, quotes, articles and a job board.

The Money Tree - It is a service of PricewaterhouseCoopers and is updated every day. It’s the only industry publication that tracks and researches private equity deals for the entire venture capital market. The weekly newsletter and daily web updates give you in-depth news on industry trends, companies seeking investors, participating firms, deal conditions and more.

Dow Jones Venture Capital - Tech, Life Sciences, HealthCare, Dow Jones Venture Capital tracks it and reports on it.

Google Alerts - These email updates delivered to your email address once a day are based on information you tell Google to watch for.

Again, I like to try and stay aware of the millions of resources available to candidates - some are good some are not. But I did find these few to be well worth the time for your team’s prospecting efforts.

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This week’s sales traits comes with an anecdote. At a previous company, I worked with gentlemen who ran their own part of the business and had responsibility for their own forecasts. I remember submitting my forecast for the upcoming - it was a reasonable number. The 2 other business segment managers submitted astronomically-high forecasts. I took much heat for my forecast since it was much less than the other 2 managers.

At the end of the year, I finished at 90% of my forecast. One of the business managers finished at 25% of his forecast. The other finished at 5% of his forecast. Honestly, it was that bad. Ever since that year, I have held the following trait in high regard.

Realistic Personal Goal Setting
The ability to set goals for one’s self that can be achieved using available resources and operating within a projected timeframe. This trait deals with a person’s ability to accurately evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses and to use this information to set achievable goals for themselves.

A salesperson with strength in this trait can clearly judge their own individual strengths and weaknesses. They are able to weigh those against the task at hand and set realistic/attainable goals to pursue.

A weakness in this area indicates a salesperson who may not have enough confidence, or understanding, of his/her own abilities to set goals where they should be. He or she may not have an accurate picture of what their own capabilities are which leads to setting their own goals either unrealistically high or low.

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If you have been in sales for any length of time you have probably heard something to this effect - “If you’re talking, you’re not selling”. I came across an article at Salesopedia that provides 10 tips for effective listening. Now the article is not written directly for salespeople, but there are some great points that are good reminders we can apply to our everyday sales life.

Face the speaker. Sit up straight or lean forward slightly to show your attentiveness through body language.

Focus solely on what the speaker is saying. Try not to think about what you are going to say next, if you do, you may not hear a very important piece of information that could help you win the sale.

Minimize internal distractions. If your own thoughts keep horning in, simply let them go and continuously re-focus your attention on the speaker. Resist the urge to jump in, let the speaker tell you in their words.

Keep an open mind. Wait until the speaker is finished before deciding what to do or ask next.

Avoid letting the speaker know how you handled a similar situation. Don’t interrupt them to solve an issue because you will be making assumptions about what the speaker is truly thinking.

And . . .

Engage yourself. Ask questions for clarification, but, once again, wait until the speaker has finished. That way, you won’t interrupt their train of thought. Be prepared to ask several clarifying questions to get to the full issue, problem, cause, etc. of what they are experiencing.

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Now this seems like a good idea - from Inc.com’s Secure Your E-mail, Mission Impossible Style:

BigString, which provides free, large-storage, Web-based e-mail accounts, allows users to send recallable, changeable, erasable, non-printable and self-destructing e-mails. E-mail senders can also track who reads an email and can control the number of times a message is read or forwarded. E-mail senders can set a time or date for e-mails to self-destruct and can create emails that can not be printed, saved, or forwarded by the recipient.

Clever. You knew it was just a matter of time before this level of security became real. Of course, it comes at a price. There are some emails that have to be forwarded. Imagine receiving some flame-mail that could not be shared with others.

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A couple of months ago we posted on an article from the Pioneer Press titled Speaking Up Helps Keep Star Workers. One of the surprising findings was that 47% of the 16,273 stellar workers surveyed are mailing out resumes, going on job interviews, even contemplating other offers.

I just recently caught up to an article from a WorkForce Management newsletter of a survey Yahoo HotJobs conducted on 5,300 people. They found that nearly two-thirds are open to switching jobs, with an improving job market cited as the chief cause for such optimism. Here are some interesting points they found:

• 39% cited unhappiness with wages as the chief issue
• 75% cited 2006 raises or bonuses were below their expectations

So where is retention on your list of priorities? You may want to put some thought into it because it is a safe bet that more than half of your employees are looking for new opportunities.

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From a CareerBuilder survey:

Sixty-three percent of HR managers report that spelling errors are the most annoying mistakes they see on resumes. Other top mistakes include:

Resumes not customized to the position (30 percent)

Lies (23 percent)

Including too many insignificant details on job responsibilities (21 percent)

Resumes that are more than two pages long (21 percent)

Lies would seem to be a “most annoying mistake” on a resume if I took the survey and spelling errors would be second.

From earlier in the article:

If you’re looking for a new job this year, be prepared for some competition. Twenty-seven percent of human resource (HR) managers say they receive more than 50 resumes, on average, for each open position. More than one-in-ten (13 percent) HR managers receive more than 100 resumes per job opening. The survey, “Resumes 2007,” was conducted from November 17 to December 11, 2006 and included 360 HR managers.

There are 2 ways to look at this information. Obviously, it is valuable to have a selection to choose from when sourcing. However, if you are receiving 50 or more resumes, my initial reaction is that the ad is not written tight enough.

Obviously, a fairly generic, entry-level position will elicit a large response. But I still believe the ad should be adjusted to use a finer filter - a more descriptive requirements section regarding the ideal candidate.

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