I’ve been mining through a major job board resume database looking for a specific type of salesperson this morning which is tedious work.  The “detailed” view includes very little information about the person.  The one item that does stand out is the resume title.  Most are boring and forgettable.

However, I did find this one rather clever:

“Dry Behind The Ears” Sales Pro

That is a good approach to get noticed from a long list.

In a separate resume, the person appears to have mistyped.  Well, at least I think he mistyped.  His desired salary is $801,000.  I have a feeling that number is going to keep him out of many salary-based searches.  More power to him if he gets it!

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We’re in full-fledge sourcing mode here at Select Metrix and I am taking up the task of resume mining.  I am aghast at what I am finding.  A new trend that I have seen before, but not to this level, is writing without capitalization.  I know this is an offshoot of texting.  My dislike of this improper writing format probably reveals my lack of appreciation for text messaging.  I don’t do it - email is fine with me.

Online resumes are difficult to manage in that the formatting is often truncated and oddly spaced due to the job board’s coding.  Yet, capitalization is not affected.  I just read through a resume in which the person did not even use capital letters in their name!  Good grief.

I’m sourcing for a complex sale that involves a definite aesthetic ability.  This person’s presentation of their skills left me lacking.  You know, I think I am bumping up against the Gen Y style of communication.  However, hiring is a formal process that requires candidates to adjust their approach to the proper level of formality.

There are some restaurants where you simply cannot get in without a coat and tie.  If you want to eat there, you have to adjust your normal attire to the proper formality.  Call me old fashioned, but I view resumes and job searches in the same light.

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Selling Power’s article - Establishing a Relationship - discusses methods for establishing rapport quickly with a prospect.  This ability is critical to successful selling.  The established approach is to mirror the prospect’s “personality style” (or what we call Selling Style).  We teach salespeople how to do this and it is most effective.

However, there is one point that has to be made before mirroring the prospect’s style.  You cannot establish rapport if you are dominating the conversation.  We see this often with highly-extroverted sales candidates.  They attempt to talk through many topics in what appears to be a fishing expedition for a connection.

Bad move.  The prospect has to be speaking if you want to build rapport.  This point is spelled out in the article:

Even if you figure out personality types, sometimes things don’t click. That’s when you need to step back, take a deep breath and quickly evaluate why it’s not going well. Nine times out of ten, it’s because you’re doing most of the talking. When Parkhouse finds herself in this situation, she stops and asks a question that customers can expand on, so the focus is switched to their needs.

“Stop talking,” she says. “Take it slow and pick up cues. Smile. If they don’t smile back, the person’s guard is really up and you need to get them talking.”

Stiles agrees that people will relax if they are doing most of the talking. “When you enter a prospect’s office the scales are tipped against you, and the more you talk the more they will tip. There’s not a good balance,” he says. “The only way you can change that is to get in and out of the conversation as soon as possible.Get the prospects talking. If you’re telling, you’re not selling.”

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Online Media Daily has a news brief regarding the fastest growing social networking sites. 

AMONG TOP SOCIAL NETWORKS, LINKED-IN was the fastest-growing over the last year, according to October ratings released Wednesday by Nielsen Online.

The site geared toward professional users drew 4.9 million visitors last month, up from 1.7 million a year ago.

Other fast-growing social networks included kiddie site Club Penguin, up 157% to 3.8 million users, and Facebook, more than doubling its audience to 19.5 million in the last year. MySpace remained the top social network with 58.8 million users, up 19% from 2006.

LinkedIn was the fastest growing, but it seems like Facebook is the site to watch.  Whichever way it plays out, I would recommend putting your information on both sites.

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We haven’t seen this trend yet, but I suspect it may show up on our front stoop at some point.  From The Career News (sorry, no link) comes this abridged story from MSNBC.com:

The first step to acing the interview: Show up! I know this sounds obvious, but apparently not to everyone. “It happens all the time lately,” says Emmanuel Conde, director of recruitment for Alliant Technologies, an information-technology staffing firm that estimates about 50 percent of entry-level IT professionals they try to place don’t show up for interviews. Among senior level folks, about 20 percent skip it.

The no-show phenomenon is a growing problem for many recruiters and hiring managers, and it’s pervasive in a host of industries from high tech to health care. Career experts believe an increasingly tight labor market and the deterioration of common courtesy is contributing to the trend, but it may also be that job applicants are also being treated as commodities today.

“Companies get thousands of resumes, and no human being can read them all. So everyone is a cog in a wheel, a commodity,” says Seth Godin, author of “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).”

Nonetheless, not showing up can come back to haunt you. You’ll risk being labeled unreliable, and word could get out that you flake out.

It has been a while since I last read “flake out” in any text.  Funny to see it here.

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I enjoy skewering the mainstream media for “talking down the economy” which is a practice they condemned back in 2000.  But all signs point to a slowdown in this red-hot economy which has led the Federal Reserve to target a soft landing.

I’m no economist, but I found this article by John Sumser quite interesting.  His take on the economy is one I have not heard (emphasis mine):

The veterans, burnt by the dot com bust and the post 911 recession will argue that business will contract and layoffs will ensue. That’s the prototypical recession profile. Everywhere you turn, this scenario is forecast or implied.

…

Or, there may be a different scenario.

The people who used loose credit to finance the expansion of their lifestyles may have been unintentional evangelists of a new form of inflation. One way of thinking about the folks who “got in trouble” is that they were wrestling with an unmeasured form of inflation. Because there was no way to engineer the raises required to keep up, the second best source of income was real estate equity. Rather than “large living over spenders”, perhaps these folks were just doing what they thought it took to stay even.

Although the press is beginning to demonize people who financed their lifestyles on second mortgages, the question is “what are they going to do without a funding mechanism?”

I think they’ll be asking for raises and when they don’t get them, they’ll be changing jobs.

Imagine this trend in conjunction with a mass departure of the Baby Boomer generation.  The implications on retention, hiring and wages would be beyond significant.

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From JustSell.com:

the objections

1. lack of perceived value in the product or service

2. lack of perceived urgency in purchasing the offering

3.perception of an inferiority to a competitive or in-house offering

4. internal political issue between parties/ departments

5. lack of funds to purchase the offering

6. personal issue with the decision maker(s)

7. initiative with an external party

8. “it’s safer to do nothing” perception

Of these, I believe salespeople fall down most often with the last one.  If your salespeople are not qualifying a prospect properly, the prospect will most often allow the deal to stagnate.  They perceive no loss in waiting.  If that is true, then their best move is to wait.  If it is not true, your salespeople need to be able to articulate the costs (i.e. dangers, risks, pains) of inaction.

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CareerBuilder.com links to an Entrepreneur.com article that asked…

9 entrepreneurs take a look back at their startup days and reveal what they would have done differently if they knew then what they know now.

Great premise.  Here’s the response I enjoyed the most (emphasis mine):

“We would have spent more time and money on search engine optimization. Top placement in Google is key to any business in this day and age, and the cost of PPC gets higher every day. In addition, we would have placed more emphasis on employee commissions. We’ve learned over time that commissions and incentives drive employees to bring in more business.”

How true that is.  Compensation is a complex topic, but for sales it always comes down to commission.  We are strong believers in a mix of salary and commission with commission always being the largest piece of the pie.  If you pay only a salary with a small variable comp. plan (e.g. year-end bonus), you increase your chances of getting a stagnant salesforce.  If you pay only a commission, you tend to get lone wolves that look out for their own interests first.

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I was reading an interesting article from ManageSmarter.com titled Sales Triggers for Advantage and came across this opening:

Do you remember the old days when the sales professional’s role was easier to manage?

I’m not saying the actual job of selling was easier—none of us signed up for a sales career because it was easy—but the amount of information we had to work with was far less than today. Before the Web, you had a directory of industry professionals to cold call and some leads to follow up on. You drew from your own contacts and those of your colleagues, and perhaps read a trade magazine or journal for industry and market knowledge.

I absolutely remember those days and I’m a Gen Xer.  I still remember my first encounter with the World Wide Web on my PC running Windows 95.  So things have changed dramatically in terms of information.  The sheer vastness of information available today is staggering.  It has become so unmanageable that we recommend reading our friends over at Hidden Business Treasures blog to learn about how much of the information you are not finding.

That leads to this excerpt:

There’s no doubt that using information for profit is beneficial. But too many sales professionals spend unprofitable time looking for nuggets of information on the Web. If a salesperson isn’t careful, she can search the free Web for hours and not find credible information. And to add to the difficulties, all of the competition has access to same information on the free Web too.

The author is exactly right - there are salespeople who overemphasize research at the expense of action.  With so much information available, salespeople have to be efficient lest they become overwhelmed.  This balance in ability is measurable. 

The distinction is found in a salesperson’s Theoretical drive in comparison to their Utilitarian drive.  If you have a strong Theoretical salesperson with a lower Utilitarian drive, they will more than likely get caught up in researching prospects as opposed to actually contacting them.

This approach is not negative.  If you have a highly-targeted, complex sale with a finite number of prospects, this type of salesperson can be quite effective.  For many other types of sales, this salesperson will run the risk of over thinking in the prospecting stage.

Keep this distinction in mind next time you are hiring.  And if you are not assessing candidates, maybe it is time to start?

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Salesopedia’s topic this week is listening.  Is there a more important ability in sales?  The article - Active Listening and Active Rainmaking - discusses techniques for being an active listener.  The tips are excellent, but I particularly enjoyed this insight:

Often times the technical training and development of service providers hinders their ability to be good listeners. Due to the nature of their work, engineers, lawyers, accountants, and consultants of all types are extremely knowledgeable in their particular area of expertise. In order to get their jobs done and done well, they often need to be directive and tell people what to do to complete the tasks on which they are working. However, when it comes to active listening they are required to sit back and resist the urge to chime in with presumed solutions to problems that have not yet been fully explained. Balancing this can be a difficult task for many professionals faced with the challenge of both selling and delivering services.

That is right down the center of the plate.  I have firsthand experience selling with an engineer on the call.  Many sales calls ended with the engineer offering solutions to partially qualified prospects.  Listening is difficult.  Listening, and not solving, when you believe you have a good solution is more difficult.

So on to the author’s suggestions - the most effective one I have encountered is this one:

• Rephrase: “Just so I understand” are four very powerful words. When someone else is describing something to you, they often take a long time to make relatively few points. They may go on for 10 minutes without a breath. When they’re done, you can say, “Just so I understand, it seems that A and B are happening, and that’s creating the problems of X, Y, and Z. Is that correct?”

When you rephrase a 10 minute soliloquy into 30 seconds of summary, clients are impressed…partly by how smart you are (and you didn’t even say much), but mostly by how well you listen.

This approach is the most effective because it can only be done when you actively listen.

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