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Archive for February, 2007

How To Recover From A Big Mistake

Yahoo Hot Jobs offers Bounce Back After A Big Mistake. The article provides 6 steps for recovering from a significant error. This topic is of great importance in hiring strong salespeople. Sales requires people who have a unique ability to handle rejection and move on without flinching. Similarly, strong salespeople take responsibility for their actions, including failures. And let’s add one more – strong sales managers hold their salespeople accountable and do not accept excuses. You can see how interrelated all of these topics are to sales success.

This article offers straight-forward advice for dealing with a big mistake. Here is the one that caught my attention:

1. Own it.
While many of us would prefer to forget our mistakes, initially you need to acknowledge to your supervisor and everyone involved that you’re accepting responsibility for what went wrong. If you do this right (that is, seriously and sincerely), you’ll only have to do it once.

There is no more important advice than that – the first step is to take responsibility. We have encountered many salespeople who simply don’t. They possess a myriad of excuses and blatantly use them to provide cover for themselves. Don’t let them do this. A strong sales manager needs to put an end to excuse making and focus the salesperson on owning up to their personal responsibilities.

Here are the 6 bulleted suggestions from the article:

1. Own it.
2. Take the heat.
3. Don’t beat yourself up.
4. Learn from the past.
5. Keep it in perspective.
6. Move on.

I’ll close with a good quote straight from the article:

Failure is not in the falling down but in the staying down.

Time To Source Salespeople

There are certain windows for sourcing salespeople that are better than other times of the year. Right now we are in the best window for sourcing salespeople for the entire year. The reason is that many salespeople are on commission plans that pay out the highest total after the year is completed. In many instances, that commission payout occurs towards the end of January.

I spent many years selling on these types of plans and can tell you that I would not leave in January since I was waiting for my largest commission check of the year. The different variations of commission plans I sold under usually had some accelerated clause or a cumulative commission that increased through the year with the Q4 payout being the largest.

The most dangerous time for any employer to retain a strong salesperson is right after they receive their big commission check and are staring at a new quota. We have seen this play out recently in the sales positions we are sourcing across the country. The response rate has ticked up dramatically over the past few weeks as salespeople eye new career opportunities for 2007.

If you are thinking about hiring salespeople this year, now is an ideal time to start the process.

The Emotional Ad

I just read a sales ad this morning that opens:

Wouldn’t you like to be in the Caribbean right now, relaxing by the ocean, with palm trees all around you? Well, next year you might be able to…if you work with us!

I guess that is some form of an emotional word picture. I think it is lame – the reward speaks to not working (a Caribbean vacation).

Believe me, I’m sitting here in the Twin Cities where we haven’t been above 0 degrees for 4 days. A tropical beach sounds inviting. Yet, if you are looking for a new salesperson, I believe the approach this ad takes will draw in candidates who are looking for a fast buck and a long vacation. That profile isn’t necessarily one that invokes a solid work ethic.

Sales success is normally achieved by consistent, skilled behavior applied over time. Far better to take that approach with a sales ad.

Note: The ad ends with the worst possible line you can put in any sales ad – No phone calls please.

Job Discrimination Increasing

I’m not sure what to make of the numbers from this short article:

Job-discrimination complaints filed by workers against private employers rose in 2006 for the first time in four years. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Thursday that complaints increased to 75,768 during the 2006 budget year from 75,428 the previous year.

I suspect a part of the rise complaints is due to the increased hiring that has occurred over the past few years. A 340 complaint increase out of 75,000+ total does not seem greatly significant. But it is the first increase in 4 years.

Super Quote

I just read a great quote from Peter King’s article on the SI.com website. This quote is from Peyton Manning’s press conference earlier in the week:

“Chuck Noll said, ‘Pressure is something you feel only when you don’t know what you are doing.”

If you are feeling pressure to hire a strong salesperson, we can help.

What’s In A Name?

We’re still getting over the Super Bowl this morning so I thought we would start out with some lighter fare. Our local Pioneer Press offers up an interesting article on names – What’s in a name? Maybe your next job. The thesis is the fact that “old-fashioned” names tend to scream older applicant. I think the author is correct on this topic.

Case in point:

Larry, Mary, Linda, Lisa, Michael, James, Robert. … If one of these names is yours, you are apparently shouting to the world, “I’m at least 40, and probably closer to 60.”

On the other hand, names like Taylor, Sidney, Ethan and Jacob all have baby rattles attached to them. These are the popular names of more recent generations.

I agree. We see many resumes here at Select Metrix and I have harbored similar thoughts. In fact, I was just thinking the other day that the name Mike is far less common today than when I was younger.

This is lame:

…after speaking with an HR person who admitted that she will put a résumé at the bottom of the pile if the applicant has a complicated name. This unintentional discrimination came from her fear that she would mispronounce the name when she called to set up interviews.

Fear of mispronouncing a name? I wouldn’t recommend HR as a career choice for that individual.

This is funny:

I vote for the tradition found in some cultures of using several names – maybe at least five or six – for every child. With luck, they’ll have one for every career change, and maybe an extra to use when they start a retirement business.

The Underpaid CEO

I am all for people making as much as they can in their careers which is why I do not understand the emotional attachment to CEO pay. If those CEOs can make that kind of money, more power to them. It doesn’t bother me that Bob Nardelli made big money at Home Depot – good for him. If I could make that type of money I would.

Now you know where I stand, check out this article from American.com – Why Do We Underpay Our Best CEOs? That’s right – “underpay.” The article is a thorough explanation of the trends occurring in CEO hiring due to the national witch hunt for CEO pay.

In fact, there’s strong evidence that, far from being paid too much, many CEOs are paid too little. Not only do the top managers of multibillion-dollar corporations earn less than basketball players (LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers makes $26 million), they are also outpaced in compensation by financial impresarios at hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment banks. Should we care? Yes. If other positions pay far more, then the best and the brightest minds will be drawn away from running major businesses to pursuits that may not be as socially useful – if not to the basketball court, then to money management.

There is a trend amongst CEO hires that has been afoot for some time.

They start with the observation that big businesses in recent years have been hiring more outsiders – that is, CEOs who don’t work for the company that is bringing them on, or even in the same industry.

General managerial skills like finance, marketing, and strategy are increasingly more important than firm-specific skills, such as understanding the drug pipeline of a pharmaceutical company or knowing how to negotiate with a steel company’s suppliers, unions, and big customers. In the 1970s, outside hires accounted for 15 percent of all new CEOs; in the 1980s, there was a small increase to 17 percent; and in the 1990s, a larger jump to 27 percent.

Corporations are hiring based on skills and talents of the CEO as opposed to pedigree or experience. This approach is consistent with our hiring process too. Today’s market requires a broad range of abilities as opposed to internal or industry-specific experiences.

As markets grow increasingly globalized and information – thanks to the Internet – becomes more accessible, it’s not hard to see why boards of directors are going outside their companies and industries to find CEOs.

Finally, the one piece of information that has always captured my attention regarding people who are upset over CEO compensation:

An able leader has an enormous impact on the success of a business. Certainly, some excessive corporate pay packages are outrageous, as Bogle and other critics claim. But even more outrageous is a system where Dr. Phil makes more than twice as much as Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, the world’s most valuable company; where Jessica Simpson makes more than the average earned by the CEOs of America’s 500 largest corporations; and where hedge fund managers who make the right bet on the yen-dollar relationship can take home ten times as much as the head of the nation’s largest exporter.

Again, I’m all for Dr. Phil making as much as he can in the marketplace. But where is the outcry over his compensation? Or LeBron James? Some CEO packages are excessive but the market corrects them over time. A strong CEO brings a tremendous return on investment that average investors like myself can be a part of by owning stock in that company. That income possibility, to me, is far more interesting than watching LeBron James make $26 million a year.

Top 10 Sales Movies

I stumbled across this list on Amazon. I thought it was a fairly good list, but I would have moved Glengarry Glen Ross up to number 4.

Top 10 Sales Movies

  1. Tommy Boy
  2. Boiler Room
  3. Wall Street
  4. Jerry Maguire
  5. Tin Men
  6. Glengarry Glen Ross
  7. Disclosure
  8. Other People’s Money
  9. Working Girl
  10. Cadillac Man

Candidates Who Have Been Coached

Further proof of why we put limited importance on the face-to-face interview:

I recommend that you answer difficult questions with SANDWICH technique.

Practice writing out your answer – be sure to sandwich the negative with an emphasis on the positive.
(+)
(-)
(+)

Here is how you should fill in the blanks:

(+) Begin with a positive statement
(-) Slip in the negative (or weakness)
(+) End with a positive statement

Most likely the new employer will request only confirmation that you worked at the company. We always change plans, so it is okay to change your plans – maybe you were planning to go to college??? I don’t think this is anything to worry about.

So all you interviewers out there – be wary of the “sandwich” technique.

Bosses Gone Wild

Super Bowl week leads to this article from CareerJournal.com. I am a big Tony Dungy fan and the article provides an interesting look at his managing/coaching style (an excellent style in my opinion).

The excerpt that I enjoyed:

The vice president of marketing at a Silicon Valley company attributes rapid turnover at many West Coast technology companies to what he calls “screaming-bully bosses.”

One such boss, a body builder who liked to show off his strength to managers by doing 25 pushups at the start of meetings, called him at all hours to scream about things that had gone wrong. A second bully boss, the CEO of a semiconductor-network start-up, ridiculed him and his colleagues publicly. “He’d pick up something I’d written and say, ‘Who wrote this? A second grader? It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read,’ ” the marketing vice president says.

On a trip to Japan, the CEO exploded after the marketing vice president spent two hours on a Sunday looking for a gift for his wife. Back at headquarters, he was told he’d report to a lower-level executive. “It was my boss’s way of punishing me,” says the marketing vice president, who quit. Also quitting, in quick succession, were the vice president of engineering and the vice president of human resources, who were also tired of their boss’s harangues.

Pushups! What a riot. I would love to attend just one of those meetings – guaranteed I would get thrown out laughing.

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