Remember when the Sunday paper was the big employment section?  It wasn’t that long ago.  I don’t remember posting any job ads on a different day – it was simply call in your ad by the Thursday deadline and approve the proof you received via fax (including the cryptic shorthand used to save space/lines).  That whole process is probably foreign to Gen Y…and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I was perusing the postings this weekend and found this title:

Sales Represenitive

The title simply cannot have errors.  None.  Period.

Also on titles, there is no simpler clue to these pyramid deals than to see a long description for a title.

$55,000 working only 2 hrs a week from home. Start today!

Some flavor of that title crops up everywhere.  Those postings are basically job board spam.  To see it out of control, visit Craig’s List and look at the sales jobs.  It doesn’t matter what city you look in, those ads are everywhere like those Tribble things from the original Star Trek episode.

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Dave Kurlan has a post that struck a chord with me.  The topic is distractions and how they affect salespeople (my editing):

Distractions can take many forms, from the call that takes them off their game, to the illness or death of a loved one that stops their game cold.  Distractions can last a few minutes or they can linger for months.  You can even understand why some, especially the really bad distractions, can interfere for so long.

You know they’ll have distractions so it’s your job to know your salespeople well enough to recognize when they are being affected.  Helpd (sic) help them cope, focus and work through them in order to get from each as close to 12 months worth of effectiveness as you can.

That is a great point he makes for sales managers.  It is important that you help your salespeople through these distractions to keep/get them on track.  Of course, this assumes that you are managing them.  Calls, coaching, forecasts, activities, territories, etc….you have to know these things first in order to help them through the distraction.

We placed a strong salesperson at one of our customers and he was selling well above quota for 2 years and then I received a call.  He no longer on his game.  He was missing calls, putting together incomplete proposals and not closing business.  Our customer, the VP of Sales, told me the salesperson was going through a difficult divorce (is there ever an easy one?).

We put together a plan for him and coached the sales manager on how to handle him.  Unfortunately, the salesperson never recovered and they eventually fired him.  I suspect that may have been what he was hoping for – a new start somewhere else.

Well, that was a dramatic example of a distraction.  The daily, insignificant distractions are the ones for which to zero in as a sales manager.  A small improvement here can have a compound return later.

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This article from abcnews.com starts off with a terrific interview anecdote (emphasis mine):

John-Paul Lee, CEO of Tavalon Tea, a premium tea company based in New York, recently interviewed a job candidate he’s not likely to forget.

“The first two minutes were great,” Lee says of the recent MBA grad. Then Lee asked the candidate who he believed Tavalon’s biggest competitors were. To which the candidate replied, “I think Tavalon Tea is a formidable one.”

“I assumed he was nervous and had blurted out the wrong company,” Lee says, “so I played along and asked him, ‘Why?'”

The candidate’s answer? “I don’t think they have the right management in place. I know the CEO of the company and he is a real jerk.”

Rather than let on right away, Lee asked the interviewee if the two had met before, and if the grad knew where, exactly, he was interviewing.

The candidate, who finally noticed the Tavalon Tea logo on the wall, realized he was in hot water: “Oh my god, I’m sorry,” he fumbled. “I know this is no excuse, but I partied a bit too hard last night.”

I’m still laughing at that last line.  The article continues with many more laughable stories that will start your Friday off right.

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SalesHQ.com offers up an article that discusses the “secrets” of top sales achievers.  A couple of the secrets:

• Position themselves with the real decision-makers and avoid those without ‘approval power’. They are able to first identify and then access the formal decision making unit.

• Recognize when to treat an old account as a new prospect and keep the relationship fresh, alive and maintain profitability

And then there is the most important one:

• Never entertain business they do not want because they recognize that it takes just as long to work an unprofitable opportunity through the sales funnel, only to lose it at the death, as it does a profitable one. They trust their own judgement but also rely heavily on objective assessment.

That last secret cannot be stressed enough.  This point is a fine one, but the strongest salespeople recognize a dog when they see one and move on.  If the prospective deal is a loser for them, they go find a new prospect.  This ability is difficult to train but crucial to success.

As a sales manager, it is imperative that you question your salespeople on what information they have qualified for any prospective deal on their forecast.  If you don’t, some of the salespeople will waste time chasing low probability deals to appear busy.  The end result will be surprise that they didn’t get the deal closed at the end.

I know this because I have done it as a sales rep.

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Interesting article here from RecruitingTrends.com that highlights a speech given recently by Dan Hanyzewski, staffing director from Nike.  There is one piece of data that caught my attention immediately:

“This is the first time in American history that we’ve had four generations at work at the same time,” Hanyzewski says. How do you communicate an employer brand that will attract such a broad audience?

Quite a dilemma, isn’t it?  The task of branding your company effectively for 4 different generations is a tremendous undertaking.  But the discussion then turns to a critical point (my editing):

“One of the most powerful metrics is time,” Hanyzewski says. But, what’s does it mean? What’s the expectation? It’s not time to fill. “If you had an understanding of what that role being empty represents on a daily basis, then you will know what it means to the bottom line.” Whether a position is open 75 days or 125 days, unless you know what the vacancy cost is, it won’t help you know the impact, Hanyzewski adds.

Seventy days or 125 days, unless you know what that vacancy cost is, it won’t help you know the impact, Hanyzewski says. Hanyzewski explains that if you can calculate your vacancy cost due to lost revenue, and maybe you deduct 10% due to the declining economic climate, and you know the vacancy has existed for 6 months, and you multiply it by the number of territories, then you now know the reality of time to fill because it’s real money. “Now you can come to the table with a real business concern.”

Exactly.  The costs in sales is even more dramatic.  An open territory is lost revenue to your company and added revenue to your competition.

I think the counter-argument we see is managers discussing the cost of a bad hire.  Their view is that it is cheaper to wait to get the perfect hire than to accelerate their process to make a strong hire.  You can effectively argue both sides of that equation until you get to one pertinent point – what if you don’t find the perfect hire?

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These lists seem to come out on a regular basis with different results.  Yet, I’m a sucker for a list so I read them.  The one consistent piece of information I read is that compensation is often overrated.  People may say they changed jobs for a better compensation package, but usually it is some other factor driving them out of their current job.  I’m not sure that holds up well in sales.

The top reasons people have changed jobs:

Downsizing or restructuring (54 percent);

Sought new challenges or opportunities (30 percent);

Ineffective leadership (25 percent);

Poor relationship with manager (22 percent);

To improve work/life balance (21 percent);

Contributions to the company were not valued (21 percent);

Better compensation and benefits (18 percent).

In the online survey, respondents checked all circumstances that were among the reasons they left previous jobs. The percentages add up to more than 100 because people have been in more than one of these circumstances during their careers.

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From CollegeRecruiter.com:

Generation Y a/k/a Millennials promise to:

1. Hold only productive meetings. Hallelujah!
2. Shorten the workday by focusing on productivity.
3. Bring back administrative assistants — even if Gen Y pays for them out-of-pocket and even if they’re virtual.
4. Redefine retirement by taking multiple mini-retirements.
5. They’ll find real mentors by teaching older workers about technology and in return be guided through office politics.
6. Put human back into human resources.
7. Promote people to management based on their managerial skills, not their seniority.
8. Continue to value what their parents have to offer because Gen Y respects their parents and their parents respect their Gen Y children.
9. Trade off potential raises and promotions for higher starting salaries.
10. Re-invent the performance reviews by increasing their frequency from semi-annual or even annual to on-the-spot.

I’m with them on number 1 and 2.

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BusinessWeek.com has an intriguing article titled Why Failures Can Be Such Success Stories.  I have an appreciation for these discussions because I can relate to many of these topics.  My career has had many ups and downs and certainly does not look like a textbook example of how to build a career.

In business—as in sports, politics, and the arts—many of the greatest and most influential leaders share a history of failure. Automaker Henry Ford and animator Walt Disney both stumbled badly with early business ventures. Early in his career with General Electric (GE), Jack Welch caused an explosion that blew the roof off a building. Not long after taking Apple Computer (AAPL) public, founder Steve Jobs was ousted by the very man he recruited to lead the company.

Psychologists say it’s not simply the fact that these people learned from mistakes that led to eventual success. It’s also the resilience they displayed in getting past those potholes.

Blowing the roof off of a building definitely qualifies as a “pothole.”  Resiliency is a key trait among successful leaders.  Many companies realize this fact, but they do not have a method for assessing it.  We do.

This definition was particularly apt:

While self-efficacy is akin to other aspects of positive thinking such as self-confidence and self-esteem, it relates in particular to self-assurance about being able to excel at a particular task rather than to a person’s overall self-image. When failure strikes, people with high self-efficacy learn from their errors and strengthen their resolve to succeed.

Leadership roles at any level require this ability.  If you are not assessing for it today, perhaps it is time to start?

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I read this line in a sales employment ad this past weekend:

Actual Year 1 average earnings  – $100,000  – $200,000 ++ REALISTIC

A $100K spread?  You know, this type of line is an immediate red flag for a jobseeker.  It may be true, but most salespeople will be skeptical.  They will put a multiplier of <1.0 on the number.

The sad part of this ad is that it was posted by a sales recruiting company.  The best bet in these ads is to be somewhat conservative on the compensation and keep a tight range on the potential.

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