Salespeople will leave your company – it is an undeniable truth. Selling Power offers this short article – Recruitment Planning 101 – that covers the basic points that all sales managers should be aware of.

A couple of strong points:

Keep your pipeline full of qualified candidates. Determine the skill sets for each sales position and keep your search open for candidates with these special qualifications. However, remember that top candidates aren’t usually available for long and you need to be upfront with them about what you’re doing. “Let them know that you are building a candidate pipeline composed of individuals that your company may have an interest in hiring if or when appropriate requisitions open up,” says Pritchard. “You may also want to consider creating a position to take advantage of a great candidate.”

Maintain a network of contacts. Talk to your clients, competitors, and qualified candidates who may know other possible candidates. Join associations and network. Go to career fairs.

The window for top sales candidates, in this market, is limited and fast closing. Anyone searching for a salesperson recently has realize this fact. Part of our business is to know the pulse of the market and the approaches that are working best.

It is always difficult for companies (especially smaller ones) for jump into the sales hiring market when they have not had to search for some time. The modern market moves quickly and new channels open overnight while others close in almost the same time. One of the items we point out to sales managers is that successful sales recruiting cannot be accomplished in the margins of their day.

Far better to hire a company that solely specializes in sales recruiting.

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From Inc.com’s Not Only the Lonely Become Entrepreneurs:

Ever wondered about the kinds of people who become entrepreneurs? In a recent survey, 43 percent of entrepreneurs admit they were loners as kids, while 25 percent said they would have been described as nerds.

Isn’t that interesting? As a psych major in college, I was always fascinated by personality types. Here is an insight that helps explain this entrepreneur mentality:

“People who have the personality and motivation to be the leader and start something on their own are more inclined to feel like they aren’t part of the social structure,” said Mark Rice, Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Babson College. “Entrepreneurs by definition are different,” Rice added. “They are doing something on the fringe.”

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We met this morning with a sales manager from one of our clients and had an interesting discussion about turnover. This company is in an “old-line” industry and has an established salesforce. In fact, the newest salesperson has been with the company for more than 5 years. Most have a 10 to 20 year tenure – retention is not a problem since this is a good employer.

The problem is this – their business has had to change over the past year to match the marketplace. There has been no layoffs, but some restructuring and new management has been added. These changes, according to our sales manager, have caused much angst amongst the team.

The team consists of some strong performers, but there is much dead weight. The company has offered sales training and many of the established salespeople have openly resisted. These same salespeople have declining performance.

One significant issue in this culture is the fact that there has been little turnover. 5 years ago they did have some targeted layoffs, but no new blood has been brought into the team. As strange as it sounds, turnover often has some benefits. Much like properly pruning a plant, sales turnover can eliminate the under-performers and bring in stronger, fresher talent.

I’m no fan of the Jack Welch approach to eliminate your bottom 10% of performers every year (especially with the current market). But his approach is not without some merit. Our customer would benefit greatly from the energy that will come from new salespeople taking over old territories.

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Some subtle changes are occurring on our website today and over the weekend. Many of the changes are already up today so please take a look around.

Main areas – we’re renaming some of our services to better reflect what we do. You will see some changes in the assessing section also.

Stay tuned.

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Sales is the art of convincing other people to change their behavior. Obviously, this ability relies upon the following sales trait.

Persuading Others
This is the capacity to convince others – to present one’s viewpoint in such a way that it is accepted by others.

A salesperson with strength in this capacity can see and talk from another’s point of view. A person who has the ability to understand other’s objections and concerns and then respond to them effectively.

A weakness in this area indicates a salesperson who is insensitive to others – not knowing what they want to hear. A weakness can also be due to having excessive role confidence and in thinking that the other person needs to hear what they think is important.

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Just caught up to this SM&M article – Advise from the Field. A couple excerpts:

Rather, Feldshuh, the president of the merchant-services company, tries to gear agents to move from the lagging 80 percent into the top 10 or 20 percent of sellers. He does that through concentrated, thoughtful, in-the-field strategies, warming reps up to clients first with short, non-pitching meetings. Then he asks them to “open their mouths” and deliver a pitch just days after they’ve gotten their feet wet from dropping off BPS materials at prospects’ offices.

The tactic works, he says, and boosts their performance through gradual sales improvement rather than a do-or-die approach to closing the deal.

Yes it does work well since selling involves consistent behavior to be successful.

…feedback is the key to migrating a rep from average to stellar. Don’t just verbalize whether a call was good or bad, Johnson says. Create a feedback report on paper and write down comments the rep can revisit later, along with a rating scale of how well he performed on the job.

We offer a solution for sales managers who want to grow their team.

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A quote from JustSell.com’s daily email:

“Never tell people how to do things.
Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

-George S. Patton (1885-1945)
U.S. Army general during WWII

It is a good reminder for sales managers. One thing we discuss with sales managers is letting your salespeople fail. I’m not referring to big deals, top prospects. Instead I am referring to smaller opportunities where you know the salesperson is going to get a lesson.

Here is why it is key. We have a customer who has a sales manager who has become the closer (for lack of a better word). Essentially, he has chosen to avoid coaching his sales team and instead has them bring him in at the proposal stage. He takes over and closes the deal.

Now, this sales manager is a highly-skilled salesperson, but a poor manager. The impact of his managing is that his team has not developed the skills needed to complete the final qualifying steps and move the prospect to a close.

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Weddles.com has published their annual user choice awards. Here are their top 30 online job boards. Unfortunately their newsletter does not have a link but does have some interesting points worth noting:

• Nine of the sites are making their first appearance.
• Two-thirds are niche or specialty sites providing recruiting support in a specific career, field, industry, location or group.
• One-third are general purpose sites.

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From SM&M – The Seven Deadly Sins of Salespeople:

7. Chattering
6. Gourmandizing (never heard this word before)
5. Inactivity
4. Obliviousness
3. Shallowness
2. Presumptuousness
1. Ignorance

You will need to follow the link to read the description of each “sin.” It is well worth the time as the author has laid these out in detail. I agree with all of them though I would have swapped the order of Presumptuousness and Ignorance. My reason is this – a salesperson can effectively close a deal without having a spy (to use the author’s word) within the organization. A salesperson who presumes to know critical pieces of qualifying information will chase many bad deals.

I know this is true because I used to presume. Thankfully, I had a sales manager who would drill me for specific information about a prospective deal before it moved through the forecast funnel. It didn’t take too many visits to his office to understand I needed to gather that information during the qualifying stage of the deal.

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Many thanks to Eric for his compelling comment to this post from a couple days ago. I thought this was too good to leave in the comments.

It may come as a surprise to know that there are ways to assess the potential value of ‘professional actors’ when they show up in your selection process net. Two of my early careers were production stage manager and theatrical stage director – and key to the success of our productions were selecting the best actors for the roles and the show. If you can imagine – many actors are a lot better at auditioning than actually performing.

Anyone familiar with the process of casting a show understands that “The Audition” is the primary event used to evaluate and then to select the best possible cast, just as the interview is used by many as the key to selecting new salespeople. And, as the article suggests, companies can be fooled by great performances. Auditioning well (and being the appropriate ‘type’ for the role) does carry a lot of weight, and often lands the role. After casting actors who auditioned well and performed poorly, I learned to look at other factors to help me predict future performance – previous stage experience, favorable critic’s reviews and even conversations with directors who had worked with that person before all helped. Sometimes I would deliberately cast a less experienced actor who may not have played the role before, but who had a great work ethic (what good a great actor who can’t make it to the theatre in time for their entrance?), demonstrated a hunger for success (fire in the belly), and seemed eager to be a part of the cast (team).

Just as in the selection process for new salespeople, I would first seek out basic skills and experience as the qualifier, then look at the intangibles to evaluate the degree of overall “fit.”

Often the factors that influenced casting decisions were gathered through informal assessments – did the actor socialize in the time leading up to their 2 minute audition? Did they look you in the eye when introducing themselves? Were they dressed appropriately for the role? Had they done their research and were they prepared (reminds me of the sales candidate whose first question during our face-to-face was: “What position am I interviewing for again?”).

So for those faced with the “professional actor” sales candidates, take some coaching from that profession and assess the candidate in other ways as well – references, prior success, non-interview setting meetings (like meals or social events), skill and personality assessment tools, and observation of all the intangibles about character, work habits and social skills.

By the way, I have seen some incredible sales results from folks who once trod the boards, so don’t discount a stage or film pro when they come knocking. But be careful. In sales the phrase is: “Talks a good game…” In theatre the sentiment is the same even though the comment is “Auditions well, but…”

The unsaid often says it all.

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