Seriously. From abcnews.com’s Basic Training For Business Types:

The most domineering boss has a way of melting in the presence of the drill instructor’s flush cheeks. And the royal waistline loses some of its cache when draped in mesh gym shorts

“Yeah, we break down their egos real quick,” said Senior Drill Instructor Matt Terlop.

Terlop is a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, and the lead drill instructor at CEO Boot Camp.

This is almost surreal. I enjoy the concept and was hooked into reading the entire article when I read this line:

“We want this to be an excuse-free environment,” Terlop warns.

Amen to that. All sales departments should have a big sign that reads This Is An Excuse-Free Environment.

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We are coffee house aficionados as I have mentioned in previous posts. One of my goals is to be a barista some day. Now a Pioneer Press article describes a coffee university – Enrollment grows at Espresso U. I now have a new motivator! In case you doubted the appeal of coffee:

Nationally, the number of coffee houses has nearly doubled in the past six years. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, there are almost 24,000 coffee houses in the U.S., up from 13,800 in 2001.

The addition of wireless internet has made them a business hot spot. Yesterday the Rock Star and myself were working at Panera in the early morning before meeting with a client and we observed at least 10 business people working on laptops, 3 different business/sales meetings and 1 company (?) meeting of 8 people at one table. None of this is news, just an observation.

But be careful – this is pure coffee heresy:

To fuel its expansion, Starbucks in recent years has dropped manual espresso machines from many stores, replacing them with automated models that are faster and more efficient.

That is just plain wrong.

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Seems like I am encountering many articles and posts regarding under-performing salespeople. Now SalesforceXP.com offers Move Bad Salespeople Up Or Out. The author offers 5 strong steps to get the mediocre salesperson performing. His first step is one we fully endorse:

Never lose sight of the ABR principle: Always Be Recruiting.
If you have five strong candidates in the pipeline, you don’t have to endure a low performer. But if you have no bench, you may opt to keep a warm body around €“ even if that body hasn’t sold anything in weeks.

That is an area in which we can be of assistance. There is much truth in this approach. If you know you have a strong bench, you tend to be more direct in your assessment of your low performers.

And the article closes with the crux of the issue for sales managers:

Realize that you need to get comfortable with confronting people on poor performance. You can’t be a sales coach and a conflict avoider. When someone is failing at selling, you’re not doing him a favor by letting him coast along.

Low performers eat away at your coaching time and can infect everyone else’s attitude and mental capacity. They pollute the sales culture and can actually bring down overall performance.

One of the tasks many sales managers avoid is holding their salespeople accountable. But sales managers avoid this activity at their own peril. Salespeople need to have direction while also having clearly defined parameters and expectations. Sales manager who abdicate their authority in this area weaken their leadership…drastically.

We will address this topic with a new addition to our hiring process next week so please look for the announcement.

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This week we look at a trait that is beneficial to both salespeople and sales managers. The ability to stay balanced in forming decisions is integral to sales success. Salespeople who can look at the entire opportunity and properly weight the pieces before pursuing it are the most successful. Salespeople who can’t often chase the proverbial rabbit down the hole.

Balanced Decision Making
This trait involves the ability to be objective and fairly evaluate the different aspects (people and other) of a situation. This ability includes making an ethical decision that takes into account all aspects and components. It is the ability to maintain a balance between the needs of oneself, others and the company at the same time while providing equal importance to all three when making decisions.

A salesperson with strength in this trait does not suffer from an imbalance in the amount of focus they place on any one factor (internal or external). They will most likely make decisions which place equal emphasis on all involved parties or concerns – therefore making decisions which are more likely to satisfy all needs.

A weakness in this area indicates a salesperson who does not place equal importance on all aspects of a given situation. They may make decisions which satisfy some but not all of the factors or people involved.

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From Foxnews.com’s How to Deal With the Salary-Expectations Question:

Don Sutaria, president and founder of CareerQuest, a staffing and training firm, advises job seekers to avoid offering a solid figure. “Don’t answer the question. Say, ‘I’ll expect the fair market value. Make me an offer and we can discuss it.’ Or, ‘Maybe you can tell me what your range is?’”

Sutaria adds that the best approach is to arm yourself with information. “It’s very easy to find now, based on the job title and industry, what your range is.”

This is a pet peeve of mine. I don’t think candidates get anywhere by being coy about their salary expectations. Candidates should know what the going range is for the position and it is wise for the hiring company to include compensation range in their ad.

We deal with salespeople so we have a bit of a myopic view, but the salary question is really a qualifying question. We look for salespeople who can qualify money, i.e. compensation, effectively. I would expect a strong salesperson to have qualified the compensation before going this far into the hiring process.

As a hiring company, it is wise to put the information out there. Watch how the salesperson handles it. See if they attempt to secure more compensation (nothing wrong with that approach). You should not bring in candidates without having a basic outline of their compensation expectations.

Basically, don’t let the money topic turn into a cat-and-mouse game between the candidate and the hiring manager.

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CNNMoney.com offers a fairly innocuous story: Survey: CEOs bullish on better economy. That is always good news and I am bullish along with them.

Small and mid-sized companies are optimistic about the U.S. economy’s prospects in 2007 on the back of brisk first-quarter sales and increased revenue, according to a survey released Tuesday.

But catch this little throw-away line from later in the article:

Twenty-one percent of all executives surveyed report having conducted Internet searches via News Corporation-owned MySpace, Facebook or Google when researching job candidates, the survey showed.

I found that number staggering – almost 1 in 4 executives are using social networking sites or search engines to research candidates. It is the right approach. Unfortunately, I would prefer to know how many executives used Google vs. the other sites. My hunch – of those 21%, the vast majority only used Google to research the candidate.

We’ve posted on this topic before- every candidate should complete their own online research regarding themselves. You never know what digital dirt is floating around in cyberspace.

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Monster Pairs With Tech Company to Increase Newspaper Ties:

Under the deal, newspapers using Adicio’s service will have several options to increase their ties with Monster, including having their own employment ads co-listed in Monster’s database and giving online advertisers an easy way to buy print ads in the paper.

A good move by the fading newspapers for sure. The traditional newspaper help-wanted ad is just about toast, as it should be. Surprisingly, we still encounter companies that only advertise in the local newspaper (at confiscatory rates). The trend is clearly towards a handful of major online job boards and a myriad of niche online job boards serving specific industries or positions.

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From Dick Costolo’s Ask the Wizard blog:

Briefly, the “No False Positives” school of hiring says that bad hires are worse than no hire because bad employees infect the company with all sorts of issues. Better to march on with nobody filling an important slot than to bring in a sub-par performer.

The hire fast, fire fast approach basically can be boiled down to “it’s really almost impossible to understand whether a person is going to be a killer A+ match before they start working with you day to day, so best to find somebody that seems close enough, and then remove them quickly if they don’t work out.”

This topic resonates with us and becomes amplified when you read further into the post:

You can hire fast, fire fast with sales people. It’s very very hard to comprehend a priori who will be able to best sell your service/product in a particular region to a particular customer base. Since this is an area of the company where people generally are responsible for very straightforward, measurable and explicit individual goals (ie, sales targets), it’s much easier to communicate and implement a hire fast, fire fast kind of policy with this group. You have to ensure you really stick to it however, and understand when company processes and products are causing the sales ramp challenge(s).

That’s my emphasis above and I have to disagree, in part, with his conclusion. First off, yes, you can have a priori knowledge of a salesperson’s ability to sell your service/product – that is what we do for a living. We work with a wide range of companies in a wide range of markets, but we see distinct patterns in hiring salespeople.

Here are 3 of the most common pitfalls we encounter:

Entrepreneurs
The sales manager would prefer to have a team of entrepreneurs. Successful sales does require some independence, but often sales managers abdicate their responsibility to coach, train, debrief, motivate and hold their salespeople accountable. In effect, they hire a strong salesperson, provide minimal training and then expect them to perform with no management. This is the most significant pitfall we see in sales departments and one that is exasperated by a hire fast, fire fast mentality.

Savior
The sales manager knows the revenue stream is drying up fast so the solution is to hire a savior to double revenue in half the time. In this instance, every facet of a new hire is turbo-charged. The revenue quota, if attained, should lead to the salesperson owning the company since it hasn’t been attained in years (if ever). A typical approach here is to attempt to hire a salesperson from a competitor who will bring their own book of business. This approach rarely works and is the forerunner to a churn-and-burn sales department.

Clones
The sales manager would prefer to have a salesforce comprised of clones. Typically, they would like to clone themselves. Any salesperson who varies in style, motivations or rewards is viewed marginal. The subtle truth here is that a sales department comprised of clones contains salespeople with the same strengths and the same weaknesses. One market change can render this team impotent.

The Wizard makes an important point at the end of his post – you have to understand what obstacles are affecting the sales ramp process. The first place I would look – the sales manager. Is he or she falling into any of the pitfalls above? What went wrong in the hiring process? What led he or she to believe this salesperson was the best candidate at the time and what changed (or was discovered after hiring)?

We do see companies hanging on to mediocre or worse salespeople when they should be upgrading the team. The belief that a warm body is better than no body rules the day in these organizations. But there has to be a happy medium – somewhere in between hire fast, fire fast and no false positive approach.

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Managesmarter.com offers a short article regarding Best Sales Practices of 2007 that contains a stellar piece of sales advice:

“The dictum of ‘No RFP shall go unanswered’ is not a good idea,” says Sam Reese, CEO of sales training firm Miller Heiman. Because of the time, energy and money involved in responding to an RFP, “If you didn’t spec it,” says Reese, “don’t bid it.”

Salespeople have a hard time walking away from any deal whether it be a good deal or not. RFP’s tend to be bad deals unless you helped author it. Main point – people can be qualified, RFP’s generally cannot.

We’ve seen many sales managers struggle with the concept of walking away from a bad opportunity. But it is the right thing to do. You can’t make a good deal with a bad prospect.

Go find a better prospect.

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Selling Power published How to Manage Customer Meetings Effectively which offers some sound advice for running an effective sales meeting. There are many salespeople who believe they can wing it through a sales call by simply talking loquaciously. Mistake. Here is some advice found within the article:

Hoffman suggests that you begin by clearly defining a personal goal for the outcome of the meeting. Don’t define a weak goal such as, “I want to establish next steps or action items.” Instead he suggests identifying a specific goal €“ is it an order? A trial for your software? Expansion into new markets? Referrals? And yes, says Hoffman, you can have more than one goal. Just don’t overcomplicate it. You will more likely achieve simple goals.

Next, says Hoffman, work backwards. What do you need to do in order to achieve that goal or goals? Are the people you’re meeting with the right people? Do you have the influencer and the decision maker attending? What’s the timeline?

Sounds like qualifying, doesn’t it? The kicker – if you cannot answer these questions, don’t schedule the meeting until you can answer them. There is an approach in selling where the salesperson believes being active is synonymous with success. Salespeople who employ this approach are the sames ones who create a furious cloud of dust, but at the end of the day, the wagon has barely moved an inch.

Finally:

“Some people are visual and will respond well to Power Point presentations. Some are auditory and respond well to literature and conversation. And others are kinesthetic or hands-on learners.” How do you tell what learning types you have before a meeting? Well, aside from giving them all a test, you can’t, so Hoffman suggests mixing up the presentation to include all types of learners.

People do have a preferred learning type – this is an area we have been exploring in more detail. It can be difficult to determine their preference, but you can get clues by paying attention to their word selection. I am auditory and tend to use pet sayings like “sounds good” or “talk to you later” or “that doesn’t sound good.” You get the idea. People broadcast their style frequently, you just have to be attentive to it. And if you don’t know, start with visual (65% of the population) just to play the odds.

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