Straight from the resume pile:

Got Sales Leads? I Can Close Them!

If that hasn’t piqued your interest, I’m sure the rest of the cover email will:

-References
-Quick product knowledge
-Reliable transportation
-Available immediately

A salesperson with confidence is a prerequisite, but they have to be able to back it up with more than “reliable transportation.”

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I’m sourcing for a non-sales position and am trying to email a candidate the job ad. He has a common provider with a strong spam blocking program. This program asks you to go to a website and enter the letters displayed in the box. After that, your email address is approved and your email will go through.

The website cannot display the letter image – it simply shows the red x meaning it can’t get the image from it’s own website. I have no way to get the email through to the candidate. Now I have a voicemail in to him and have to wait until it is resolved. Utterly frustrating.

Irony in this fiasco – I’m sourcing for a technical position.

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Sales requires the ability to balance time and quality in a practical manner. Sales also requires a person who knows how to get things done. This week we focus on a specific trait that measures this ability in a real-world manner.

Practical Thinking
The ability to make practical, common sense decisions; to see and understand what is happening in a common sense way. This trait realistically identifies problems and solutions in practical terms rather than in theoretical or conceptual terms.

A salesperson with strength in this trait will be able to properly balance getting things done in a timely manner with getting things done in a quality manner.

A weakness in this area might indicate an inability to balance the two needs thus overfocusing on either time (results at any cost) or quality (perfection regardless of time or expense).

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This week I have been reading a lot of different posts and articles that try to answer the question how many jobs is too much on an applicant’s resume? I run into this topic all the time with our clients. Some clients will even try to disqualify a candidate if they feel they have held too many jobs based on their resume.

Let me be clear, I am not saying that you should ignore their work history, but don’t use it as the sole means for disqualifying. That statement usually leads me to answering this question from our clients — How many jobs is too many? I never really had a third-party reference point to give them. Well, now I do. In Monster and DDI’s webinar titled Thanks but No Thanks, they found that 63% of all Job Seekers have had multiple jobs over the last 5 years. Here is the breakdown of those surveyed on how many jobs they have held in the last 5 years.

37% have held 1 job
52% have held 2-3 jobs
8% have held 4-5 jobs
3% have had 6 or more jobs

If you are looking for someone who has only had 1 or even 2 jobs in the last 5 years, you are going to eliminate a significant portion of the talent pool. I recommend that you use the number of jobs as a discussion point. Ask questions regarding why they changed jobs, did the jobs live up to their expectations, what skills did they learn, etc. You will learn far more about them as a person and a potential employee by asking these questions than by attempting to divine answers from their resume.

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NY Times to Sell Ads With Monster from abcnews.com is worth noting if you source and hire in the northeast.

The deal will put the Monster brand on 19 of the publisher’s newspaper Web sites, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe. The co-branded sites will appear in March.

The declining circulation of the “paper of record” makes this announcement seem like a yawner. But hey, if it improves responses in those areas, I’m all for it.

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Last week I put up a second post, What Candidates Look For In A Job on a webinar conducted by Monster and DDI. In that post I highlighted the disconnect between what the candidate is looking for and what the employer believes they are looking for. Age is a factor in the responses and I promised to share that information with you. So here you go, the top 4 reasons by age group in order of importance:

Less than 20 Years Old
A creative/fun workplace culture.
A compatible work group/team.
A good manager/boss.
Opportunities to learn and grow.

21 to 30 Years Old
Opportunities to learn and grow.
Opportunity to advance.
An organization you can be proud to work for.
A good manager/boss.

31 to 40 Years Old
Opportunities to learn and grow.
Opportunity to advance.
A good manager/boss.
An organization you can be proud to work for.

41 to 50 Years Old
Opportunities to learn and grow.
A good manager/boss.
An organization you can be proud to work for.
Opportunity to advance.

Greater than 50 Years Old
A good manager/boss.
An organization you can be proud to work for.
A compatible work group/team.
Opportunities to learn and grow.

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I am speechless:

Graceful Services recently started offering a BlackBerry Finger Massage that promises to help eliminate neck, back and finger-cramping caused by excessive typing on tiny BlackBerry keyboards.

A repetitive-stress injury informally known as “BlackBerry Thumb” may also affect people who spend too much time with a video game controller, television remote control or any number of handheld devices.

Graceful’s hour-long BlackBerry massage costs $60. It’s a full-body massage with emphasis on the back, neck and fingers.

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Salary.com put this article out earlier this month. It is a lengthy article written to employees in regards to 2007 areas of compensation, but there are some points to keep in mind not only as you are hiring staff this year but in retaining your current team. These points are complementary to one of our earlier posts on the top reasons why candidates take a job.

If you haven’t read this post, let me highlight the top 4 things candidates are looking for in jobs: A good manager/boss, opportunity to advance, opportunities to learn/grow and balance between work and personal life. Salary.com’s article aligns with 3 of the 4 points from that post. If you are not already doing these things, may I suggest that you start thinking how you can incorporate them into your hiring practice this year?

The first trend they see is the increase in performance-based bonuses. Salaries will not increase significantly this year as the market continues to tighten but bonuses based for performance will.

In the area of advancement, they are seeing leadership development no longer being just an executive perk. Instead, leadership training will be provided to the middle manager giving him or her the ability to develop the additional skills needed to advance.

Another trend is that external and internal training programs are on the rise. This approach gives employees the opportunity to learn and grow within the company. Our economy is a knowledge-based one and without these training programs, companies will no longer be able to be competitive in their market.

Finally, one trend is the ability to work a more flexible schedule or to work entirely from home. With the technological advances – VoIP’s, VPN’s, PDA’s – and all the other acronyms can give your employees the same abilities as if they were sitting in your office.

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Selling Power is covering topics near to our hearts this Valentine’s Day. A Primer for New Pharmaceutical Sales Managers discusses some of the challenges facing new sales managers and provides 5 key tips. Obviously the context is the pharmaceutical industry, but these challenges are consistent throughout industries.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement from the article:

“The biggest mistake new pharmaceutical managers make,” Williams says, “is failing to properly evaluate the sales team’s strengths and weaknesses prior to developing and implementing a firm plan of action for the team’s sales improvement and increased goal attainment.”

Amen to that statement. In fact, we see this error play out amongst existing sales managers also. But how do you determine the team’s strengths and weaknesses? More on that later.

The article also points out that you have to adjust your management style, albeit slightly, for each salesperson. Unfortunately, many sales managers prefer to lead by staying in their own style and replacing salespeople who do not conform to their ways. Many times we find that a long-standing sales manager has created a “clone” team – salespeople that share his or her own style, skills, talents, etc. These are not the strongest teams we evaluate.

The strongest teams we see are the ones with many different styles and skills and a sales manager who knows how to handle each salesperson individually. Some sales managers develop an understanding of each salesperson’s abilities through observation and bloody noses. But that is where we come in. We can accelerate a new sales manager’s understanding of his or her team and lessen the bloody noses by evaluating each salesperson’s abilities and providing that information to the new sales manager.

We are presently working on a new offering based on this topic so please look for more information coming from us soon.

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This article – Sell Your Team on Team Selling – from Selling Power’s Pharmaceuticals Newsletter approaches a trend we are seeing in spades these days.

“The greatest benefits from a team selling approach are what I call just-in-time factors,” he says. “That includes just-in-time technical expertise to address complex and/or outside the box inquiries, decision making to solidify the deal without self-imposed company decision making delays, and the confidence gained by being a team, especially from internal support from the potential purchaser or user.”

The “team” typically is composed of a single sales rep along with members from other departments (i.e. engineering, financial, operations, production, etc.). In today’s world, this approach makes sense. The team acts like a mini-extension of the company and places the right people in the midst of the prospect’s decision process.

A critical topic to observe in a team-selling environment:

The person responsible for closing the deal, typically the sales rep, should be the team leader.

I’ve sold in a team sale before and it is key to establish the sales rep as the point person on the call. Think of them as a point guard in basketball – they will distribute the ball to the right person at the right time.

I bring this topic up because part of my experience was selling with an engineer. This is no small feat. Engineers like to solve problems while displaying their knowledge. This approach is death to qualifying an opportunity. The salesperson needs to qualify the needs, budget, decision process and so forth before the solution gets formulated. That process seems to be a difficult delay for many engineers. I learned that you need to do a pre-call strategy meeting and stick to your plan in front of the prospect.

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