In case you ever wondered why your marketing campaigns were not working:

(h/t Seth Godin)

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I haven’t heard this term before, but I absolutely love it.  From the Wall Street Journal’s How Stay-at-Home Moms Are Filling an Executive Niche:

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

What a fantastic idea.  The differentiation:

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

The work world becomes more flexible every day.

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Isn’t that the truth?  Entrepreneur.com has an excellent archived article (from 2002) titled Hire and Hire that discusses hiring salespeople during a recession (no, we’re not in a recession).  The point is valid – economic downturns are the best time to upgrade and/or expand your sales team.

Pick the right talent, and your new salesperson will pay for himself or herself many times over. After all, Buckley points out, because your ability to make sales is the “engine that drives growth,” salespeople are “pay-for-themselves-type expenditures.”

That “pick the right talent” piece is not so easy, but it is the keystone of the approach.  Run a hiring process and make sure you use objective assessments.  This thinking does run against conventional wisdom, but it is an opportunity that many companies simply miss.

“If you can add to revenues, then there’s no need to cut costs,” he explains. “Companies that perform well in down markets, like outplacement firms, hire salespeople in recessions all the time.” Even if your company isn’t one of the few directly benefiting from the slowed economy, hiring new salespeople may still be a good way to boost revenues.

You can read the short article to see some of the qualifiers for this approach, but generally speaking, adding revenue through strong sales hires is the ideal way to handle an economic downturn.

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