I may be alone here, but I found this information remarkable:

Looking at statistics from hotels and resorts worldwide, about “43 percent of business travelers were recorded to have been women”. Moreover, according to American Airlines’ director of women’s sales and marketing, women are responsible for 70 percent of travel decisions.

…

Interestingly, two key characteristics distinguish women travelers from men. First, according to Marybeth Bond, a consultant who has advised hotels on marketing to women, “Women will take more time for themselves than men if they are traveling for business. Men will rush home, but women will stay an extra day.” The second is that women appreciate the details, cleanliness in everything from the bed linen to the bath-showers. Hilton Garden and Hampton Inns, in particular, have recently enjoyed greater success by catering to women business travelers.

That information is from the Herman Group’s Trend Alert email (subscription required). I had no idea about this entire trend. I can say I do rush home when traveling for business and I have stayed in some hotels that can only be categorized as dumps. But I still stayed there.

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From the Career News newsletter (sorry, no link):

In September 2007 there were 4,270,000 online advertised vacancies, an increase of 165,200 or 4 percent from the August 2007 level, according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series released October 1, 2007.

In September, 2,934,100 of the 4,270,000 unduplicated online advertised vacancies were new ads that did not appear in August, while the remainder are reposted ads from the previous month. Online advertised vacancies were up (17.5%) over the year (September’06 – September’07). There were 2.78 advertised vacancies online for every 100 persons in the labor force in September.

I suspect this information is illustrative of the migration from newspaper employment ads to online job board ads (obviously many newspapers offer online ads too). This thought is supported later on in the same newsletter:

Seventy percent of all job seekers reported using online ads to look for employment, according to a recent study by The Conference Board, a Non-partisan and not-for-profit leading business membership and research organization.

Among respondents who received a job offer, the largest percentage (38 percent) feels that their job offer resulted from their Internet search. About one-third attribute their job offer to networking with friends and colleagues (27 percent) and “other,” including employment agencies (30 percent). Newspapers were the least likely to be cited as the source of a job offer with 24 percent of respondents citing print ads.

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We have encountered many moronic sales management moves that lead to a dysfunctional sales team.  Needless to say, this ManageSmarter.com article – How to Ruin a Sales Force – caught my attention.  The bulleted article is well worth the quick read, but let me call out a couple points I particularly appreciated:

Corrupted jobs. Decontaminate jobs that are degraded with non-selling tasks such as “fetch and get” after-the-sale customer service duties.

We’re living this one today.  We have a new salesperson at one of our logistics customers who is actually doing deliveries himself.  The reason is that the operations dept. is not reliable to complete the deliveries.  Unbelievable.

And a common issue we see when working with new customers:

Complex incentive plans. Reduce complexity by reducing the number of measures to no more than three.

We have seen plans spread out over 3 Excel spreadsheets.  Math and I have a strained relationship so I was astounded at the commission plan.  I had no clue regarding targets, goals or rewards.  Simple really is better here.

Finally, a plug for what we do:

Random recruitment practices. Maintain your hiring standards with a nationally managed recruitment model.

That’s what we do for our customers.

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