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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We’ll close the week with an article from ManageSmarter.com titled Building Client Relationships: Use Sales Psychology to Create More Lifetime Clients.  The thrust of the article is how to use DISC styles when selling.  This tool is one of four assessments we incorporate into our hiring process.

The author is correct - knowing your prospect or customer’s style should be part of any saalesperson’s repetoire.  This isn’t the Jedi mind trick but rather a focus on clear communication.  If a sales rep doesn’t know how to sell, understanding a prospect’s preferred style will only make the salesperson clearer in their failure.

However, an effective salesperson who learns and uses the styles becomes far better at qualifying and closing.

Some good tips from the article:

How to Put This Knowledge into Action During Two Key Stages of the Sales Process

Opening the call:
€¢ Customer behavior type D: Be clear, specific, brief, and to the point.
€¢ Customer behavior type I: Be friendly. Listen for both facts and feelings. Make time for relating and socializing.
€¢ Customer behavior type S: Be genuinely sincere. Create a non-threatening environment for them.
€¢ Customer behavior type C: Ask lots of questions and be patient while they answer in minute detail.
Obtaining commitment:
€¢ Customer behavior type D: Briefly highlight their key options and ask for the order assertively.
€¢ Customer behavior type I: Inspire them to action. Keep the close relaxed and friendly.
€¢ Customer behavior type S: Detail how they can take practical action and confirm without pushing or rushing them.
€¢ Customer behavior type C: Create a scheduled approach to implementing action with step-by-step timetables. Point out guarantees.

We have more descriptions of DISC styles on our website.

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Here is a fascinating survey regarding customer service from large companies. The article is from ManageSmarter.com - Return to Sender: Responding to Customers.

I think you will find the format quite clever:

Every year, our organization conducts a customer service survey by sending the following one-sentence e-mail to our list of respected and admired companies: What is your corporate policy regarding the turnaround time for e-mails addressed to customer service? The subject of the e-mail is “Customer Service.” The goal of the research is to see who actually answers the question, which is different that simply responding and how long it takes them.

The results:

Here are highlights from this year’s survey:
€¢ 33 percent of companies answered us within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63 percent in 2002.
€¢ 51 percent answered us, regardless of time frame from 2002’s high of 86 percent.
€¢ My favorite response: “Thank you for your inquiry. [Our] corporate goal is to respond to ninety-five percent of all inquiries within twenty-four hours. I know that seems strange as I’m responding to you seven days after receiving yours€¦I apologize for that.”

This is not a game and we were not trying to trick anyone. We are simply looking at companies through the eyes of a humble customer, because the proof of dedication to customer relationship management is what happens to one individual’s e-mail; it’s where the rubber meets the road.

And I can’t top the closing paragraph:

Based on the dismal results of our annual e-mail survey, the common thought seems to be, “We would have a great business if it weren’t for all those annoying customers.” This begs two important questions: How responsive is your company? How do you know?

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Retention is on everyone’s mind with the job-hopping world we now live in. I have to admit, if we see a candidate who has been locked in with a company for 10+ years, we start to wonder about their overall development. Today Kevin Wheeler offers an excellent article on the ERE website that deals with strategies to implement to improve employee retention.

Money Won’t Hold Them starts with a quick history lesson on how we got here:

But somewhere in the early 1980s, things began to change. The first crack came with the advent of the 401(k) and (b) plans that freed employees from the corporate retirement programs. The 401 programs are, in effect, portable pensions. In effect, you take your accumulated savings and add to them somewhere else.

The pension fund is toast for we Gen Xers and younger. Workers now freed from a loyalty-inducing pension plan now look for opportunities more freely.

I often hear managers, CEOs, and supervisors promising this and that and making speeches about how committed they are to their workers.

When it comes time to allow workers some say in their work, or the opportunity to transfer to another department, or the chance to try something new, they just as often hesitate. Words can take on many meanings and can be twisted to fit any occasion. Deeds speak for themselves.

We’ve seen that approach all too often. I think he is spot on in that commentary.

Finally, he provides 6 suggestions for improving retention that are must reads. I’ll pull a couple of pieces from the article as a tease:

4. Pay at market rates or more. Don’t think that your benefits or loyalty will keep employees happy. Err on the side of generosity when you offer pay increases and never let pay be an excuse for an employee leaving. Pay is never the real reason people leave a firm, but it sure makes a great excuse for employees. Most organizations can’t defend themselves on this issue because they don’t pay that well.

6. Remember that we have entered a time when the employees are in charge. They can cripple your success and they know exactly how. They own the tools of production, and management needs to understand that the best companies, those that are most financially successful, have employees who enjoy “just enough” management and a lot of freedom. Today’s employees are better educated, more independent, less afraid, more secure, and far more entrepreneurial than those of even 10 years ago. This means that HR policies and management styles have to radically change.

As they say, read the entire thing.

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This CareerJournal.com article can only be categorized as good news - More Employers Are Basing Raises, Bonuses on Results.  Of course, none of this is surprising for salespeople since the vast majority are compensated based on their successful selling.  For other positions, this may be a bit of a surprise:

Employers have turned to tying pay to performance to shore up costs and to try to retain their best workers. “There is a limited amount of money that people have, and they are trying to get a better return on those compensation dollars,” says Steve Gross, Mercer’s global-reward practice leader.

I am a passionate proponent of merit-based pay structures and raises.  I was drawn to sales due to the fact that you could increase your pay by simply performing.  What a fantastic idea!  Of course, the financial guys hit the nail on the head in terms of why companies are drawn to this approach:

For one thing, he says, “companies like to move away from fixed costs to variable costs.”

One caveat we often encounter is financial team members who look at a high-performing salesperson’s commission with a skeptical eye.  This approach is reprehensible to me.  The assumption becomes that the revenue would be coming in whether the salesperson was on the account or not.  That belief then leads to the salesperson being viewed as an expense and their commission plan gets tweaked.

Big mistake.  The salesperson will have their resume on the street that evening.

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We continue this week with another mission-critical sales manager trait.  This measurement reveals a manager’s ability to take responsibility without using excuses for a lack of team peformance.

Accountability For Others
The capacity of a sales manager to take responsibility for the consequences of the actions of those under their management. This trait encompasses taking responsibility for the decisions and actions of subordinates and not shifting focus on blame or poor performance back onto them, or somewhere else. This trait derived from an internal responsibility and accountability to one€™s self as a manager. This internal willingness is to accept responsibility associated with being in a position of management. It involves understanding that it is the task of the manager to accurately evaluate and understand the abilities of his/her employees
and to set realistic goals and expectations based on the resources and capabilities available.

A sales manager with strength in this trait will not try to make excuses for a bad decision, which resulted in poor performance by an employee. Instead, they will make every effort to try and identify the cause of both the poor performance and any mistakes they made in assigning the task. Their focus will be more on correcting the problem to ensure future success as opposed to protecting themselves.

As in personal accountability, a weakness in this area can indicate a sales manager who is more concerned with appearance and image than with results and success. They will seek to place blame for a bad decision on any factor which does not lie solely with them. Taking the blame would detract from their abilities in the public image. Although achieving goals and success can be important to this person, their self-image is often fragile and protecting it is much more important.

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Yesterday I posted on a quick story regarding owners who make hiring decisions based on their gut feeling.  I want to follow it up today by clarifying this approach.

The article simply states that the owners made a yes or no hiring decision based on a gut feeling.  It does not state what they did up until their decision and this is the point I want to make.  Unfortunately, many hiring managers run down the same tired path - post an ad (the job description), sort the resume responses, interview the “yes-pile” people, follow their gut on the decision.  Then the bad hire gets through and they attempt to revisit that employee’s specific hiring process like a scent out of CSI.

We deal exclusively in the sales hiring world which means the aforementioned approach spells trouble.  Even bad salespeople can have refined rapport-building abilities that can charm the most astute hiring manager’s gut.  Almost - almost - every prospect and customer we talk to has a sales hiring horror story.  The essence of each story - their gut failed them.

Now to be clear, I am not stating that you need to abandon your intuition.  What I am saying is that you need to lower your reliance upon it.  There are steps in a sales hiring process you can take that will introduce greater objectivity and more checks than the gut-level-only approach.

• Phone screening respondents first shifts your sorting criteria away from the resume and towards the medium by which most salespeople first approach a prospect (you get to hear them in action).
• Online assessments provide an objective measure of the person that an interviewer cannot ascertain.  The focus here is how a person will handle specific aspects of a position - the information is gathered indirectly instead of relying solely upon what the candidate states in an interview.
• Resume importance is reduced in the decision process.  Let’s be honest, resumes are embellishments of possible past successes.  I suspect a hiring manager’s intuition is influenced as much by a resume as it is by the interview.  I say that because we are susceptible to this blind spot ourselves.

Again, our hiring world is limited to the sales arena so perhaps our view on this topic is a bit jaundiced.  We’ve seen too many hiring managers get fooled by a crafty, but incompetent, sales candidate.

Instead, use a process that incorporates the intuitive decision strategically (later in the process).  Assess your candidates and direct your interview based on the results you uncover.  Trust your intuition only after the process has winnowed the field down to candidates who have the right abilities to succeed in the position.

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The above term is from The Herman Group’s weekly newsletter (no link but their website is www.herman.net). I love that phrase - it is quite descriptive. Here is the excerpt that caught my attention:

Fueled by the publicity frenzy the press is enjoying, the current volatility in world financial markets is affecting many people at all levels of our societies.

From the employees’ point of view, this uncertainty engenders insecurity. What will happen to my company? Will it be in business? Will I have a job? The reaction is that they continue “corporate cocooning”, staying in the safety and sanctuary of their corporate jobs, despite their deep dissatisfaction.

A number of studies have confirmed that at least 35 percent of our workforce is unhappy. Thanks to a social network analyst Scott DeGraffenreid, we have a label for it. We call it “Warm Chair Attrition”. The shame is these employees still collect paychecks, take up space, and infect their fellow associates. It would seem to be good news for employers: their workers will not leave. However, bottom line, disaffected employees are not particularly productive.

This topic is always one for debate. I’m not a fan of the Jack Welch theory that you need to be turning over your bottom 10% annually. However, no turnover can be a sign that you have a fair amount of warm chair attrition occurring.

The long-term danger here is that mediocrity can creep in to your culture. At that point “good enough” can become the predominant approach. We’ve encountered companies with this approach and it stands out from those companies where excellence is the expectation. As painful as it is, it is best to upgrade your salesforce if you have a team settling into mediocrity.

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The Twin Cites are a hotbed for medical sales positions so we see many sales ads up here.  One of these ads caught my eye this morning for this bit of clever writing:

…what we do makes a statement about who we are. We are driven by scientific excellence and a commitment to make a difference in the quality of people€™s lives. We believe that investment in and commitment to our employees is key to our success and the achievement of our mission.

I use the word clever in the best possible sense.  We have worked with medical companies in the past in evaluating their sales teams.  Our work has consistently revealed a strong Social motivation tied to a Sense of Mission reward.  The well-written ad plays strongly to that motivation-reward combination.  I suspect this ad will draw in many salespeople with a complementary combination that will match the position’s motivation-reward combination.

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If ever you wondered why hiring is such a gamble, feast your eyes on these 4 paragraphs from Inc.com’s Survey: Hiring Often Based on “Gut Feeling”:

Most small-business owners hire employees based on likeability, rather than qualifications, according to a recent survey.

In a survey of 500 small businesses nationwide conducted by The Price Group, a Texas-based marketing firm, 90 percent of owners said they decide whether or not to hire job applicants based on a gut feeling. Many reported having no formal hiring assessment process.

The reason is that most small employers find hiring assessments too costly, according to Bette Price, president of The Price Group. “Unfortunately, they fail to look at the high cost of making a hiring mistake,” Price said in a statement.

In addition, 75 percent of employers surveyed said that didn’t offer formal training for new employees.

That is the entirety of the news brief.  My suggestion, always use an objective assessment and follow a hiring process that limits gut-level decisions.  Once you hire them, have an onramping program to get the greatest return out of your investment.

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