Here is a good post from Ed McLean on his Sales Itch blog – Sales Dilemma No.1:

There€™s a story in sales job hunting folklore where the smugly smiling interviewer plucks out a pen from his jacket pocket and say, €œSell me this pen€. What would you say? Here are the options I came up with:

You will have to read the post to view Ed’s excellent options.

Believe it or not, I actually encountered this interview approach when I was a young sales rep. I sat in the office of a salty old sales manager who told me to look under the chair I was sitting in. There was a box with many little trinkets and I was told to pick an item and sell it to him.

I picked a pen and attempted to qualify him. He, of course, did me the favor of being the worst prospect ever (which means he wasn’t a prospect). I worked through the qualifying and determined he had no need for my unique pen and its qualities. I got to the end of the qualifying discussion and told him I had reached the conclusion that he was not a prospect and I was moving on. The sales manager was not impressed and my interview ended right there.

At that point, I was glad I didn’t have to waste any more time with him. And I suspect that was his view of me.

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Interesting story here from Inc.com – Small Businesses Responsible for Nearly All New Jobs – that has a surprising statistic:

Businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90 percent of all U.S. firms and are responsible for more than 97 percent of all new jobs, according to a new report by the Small Business Administration.

This is just one statistic from a recently published annual report by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy based on Census data from 1988 to 2004, the most recent year available. The detailed figures quantify various indicators among small businesses, including job creation, business births and deaths, industry growth, and regional differences.

97% seems almost incredible.

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I just came across an ad this morning for a sales director that started this way:

As a Business Development Director with Idea Information Security, you will enjoy a healthy base salary…

The ad is quite long and covers more topics than needed, but the opening line is a bit of a concern. Hiring salespeople who are money-driven is a wise approach (though there are mitigating factors in that approach). The issue with the opening line is that it sounds like a reward for winning the interview process.

This point is subtle, but we have run into it in the past. We prefer to list base salary amounts in the ad, but we usually list it towards the end. The more important information is to describe the position, the traits that lead to success and the expectations of the manager. The fit you are looking for first is ability.

Compensation, obviously a part of the equation, should not be the card you lead with in the first sentence of the ad.

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