We are gradually moving towards instant messaging for our internal communications at Select Metrix and away from email.  Speed is a big part of this move for us, but email spam is also driving the change.  I have a difficult time imagining email disappearing all together, but this article from Inc.com provides some insight:

Due to increasing levels of spam, companies may soon have to look beyond e-mail as the primary method of communicating with employees and customers, according to a new study.

In 2007 alone, it is predicted that nearly 97 billion e-mails will be sent daily worldwide, 40 billion of which will be spam messages, the study found.

In a recent report forecasting worldwide e-mail usage over the next five years and published by Framingham, Mass.-based market-intelligence firm IDC, this is the first year that spam e-mail volumes are expected to exceed person-to-person e-mail volumes sent worldwide.

Unbelievable.  We can attest that spam is a real problem for blogs too.  Our comments section is inundated every day with hundreds of spam comments.  We have to sift through them to find the real comments to approve (and I apologize for any legitimate comments that accidentally get deleted).

Comments(0)

If you have noticed in our posts, we are paying more and more attention to retention. (say that 10 times fast!) The employment market clearly indicates that it’s a hot topic.

Over the years, two compensation moves really set off the negative alarms in my mind. They also made me, as a sales manager, more aware of how compensation impacts salesperson performance.

Increased quotas.
When quotas are increased (which isn’t necessarily “bad”), the first thing I always looked for was the corresponding compensation. If the message was “We need you to sell more,”that’s fine as long as everybody in the organization wins. However, trouble developed when the message came through as “We need you to sell more and you’ll have to sell more just to make the same amount of money.” At that point the sales group had the perception of losing while be singled out as the sacrificial group within the organization. Bad move.

Commission rate changes/overall compensation.
Again, not necessarily bad, but potentially a dis-incentive. Any respectable sales person immediately reacted to a commission rate change by figuring out the impact on their personal compensation. If the changes appeared to be positive, the best sales people behaved accordingly. It’s called “working the comp plan.” If the changes appeared negative, well, another bad move. I fired up the sales hiring process since I knew I was going to lose someone, I just hoped it wasn’t my best salesperson.

May I suggest a good move? Ask individual sales people what topics the organization should consider when reviewing compensation. Done correctly, this type of input will have significant, positive impacts for sales management and ultimately retention.

Comments(0)

We at The Hire Sense have been focused on employee retention this year. Pretty smart of us, I know (especially when the national unemployment rate is 4.4%). Michael at Hidden Business Treasures pointed us towards the Herman Group’s Trend Alert e-newsletter and I received my first one this week. The topic – wellness programs and their impact on benefits.

This shocked me:

The financial impact of healthcare spending is indisputable. Starbucks spends more money in one year on health insurance for its employees than it spends on coffee for its customers. The US automakers will spend more money this year on health insurance than they will on the steel that goes into their automobiles.

Amazing, but then I read this nugget:

Also, employees who are in the middle of a weight-loss or smoking-cessation program are much less likely to leave. Reducing employee turnover also decreases benefit costs, mostly because there is lower utilization of the healthcare system. When you bring on new people, they have often avoided visiting doctors, because they had no coverage. Once on your system, it€™s time to visit the doctors. This increased system usage produces higher insurance premiums.

Yet another reason to put an increased effort into your retention programs. Turnover is expensive unless you have underperforming salespeople (then it is needed).

We have seen benefits enter the interview process earlier in the discussions. This approach used to be a flag for us back around 2001. Now we consider it a standard aspect of qualifying opportunities. If your company offers a strong benefits package, introduce the package early in your hiring process.

Comments(0)