Here is an excellent reminder from the JustSell.com newsletter: How long was your last presentation? What could be trimmed? Over the next couple weeks (outside the money hours, of course), invest some time examining the brevity of your sales presentations (both your formal and informal versions). For every point ask, €œWhy is this needed for my presentation?€ If you’re unsure of the reason, cut it — lean and effective is your goal (review the presentation checklist here). If you don’t have it written, planned, and practiced, commit to doing it within the month. The chances of rambling skyrocket without a formally developed presentation. Time is money and decision makers who… Read More
Continue ReadingCultural Fit Questions
We write often about the interview stage of a sales hiring process and how to use it effectively. One of the best uses of the interview is to determine the sales candidate’s fit to your company culture. In that light, Selling Power offers an article with some good questions to ask during the interview. These questions start the culture discussion and will be helpful in your hiring determination: €¢ What is your understanding of sales culture? €¢ How would you describe the sales culture of your present employer? €¢ Specifically, what do you like best about that sales culture? What do you like the least? €¢ If it were up… Read More
Continue ReadingSome States Cost More
A press release from the Milken Institute’s annual Cost-of-Doing-Business Index lists the most expensive states for doing business and the least expensive. First, the top of the list: Ten Most Expensive 1 Hawaii 2 New York 3 Alaska 4 Massachusetts 5 Connecticut 6 California 7 New Jersey 8 Vermont 9 Delaware 10 Rhode Island And then the inexpensive list: Ten Least Expensive Rank 50 South Dakota 49 Iowa 48 North Dakota 47 Nebraska 46 Idaho 45 South Carolina 44 Montana 43 Missouri 42 Tennessee 41 Arkansas I see lists like this and think one thing – taxes.
Continue ReadingSell Me This Pen
Here is a good post from Ed McLean on his Sales Itch blog – Sales Dilemma No.1: There€™s a story in sales job hunting folklore where the smugly smiling interviewer plucks out a pen from his jacket pocket and say, €œSell me this pen€. What would you say? Here are the options I came up with: You will have to read the post to view Ed’s excellent options. Believe it or not, I actually encountered this interview approach when I was a young sales rep. I sat in the office of a salty old sales manager who told me to look under the chair I was sitting in. There was… Read More
Continue ReadingSmall Business Is Where The Jobs Are
Interesting story here from Inc.com – Small Businesses Responsible for Nearly All New Jobs – that has a surprising statistic: Businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90 percent of all U.S. firms and are responsible for more than 97 percent of all new jobs, according to a new report by the Small Business Administration. This is just one statistic from a recently published annual report by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy based on Census data from 1988 to 2004, the most recent year available. The detailed figures quantify various indicators among small businesses, including job creation, business births and deaths, industry growth, and regional differences. 97%… Read More
Continue ReadingCompensation In The Sales Ad
I just came across an ad this morning for a sales director that started this way: As a Business Development Director with Idea Information Security, you will enjoy a healthy base salary… The ad is quite long and covers more topics than needed, but the opening line is a bit of a concern. Hiring salespeople who are money-driven is a wise approach (though there are mitigating factors in that approach). The issue with the opening line is that it sounds like a reward for winning the interview process. This point is subtle, but we have run into it in the past. We prefer to list base salary amounts in the… Read More
Continue ReadingSelling With Style
We’ll close the week with an article from ManageSmarter.com titled Building Client Relationships: Use Sales Psychology to Create More Lifetime Clients. The thrust of the article is how to use DISC styles when selling. This tool is one of four assessments we incorporate into our hiring process. The author is correct – knowing your prospect or customer’s style should be part of any saalesperson’s repetoire. This isn’t the Jedi mind trick but rather a focus on clear communication. If a sales rep doesn’t know how to sell, understanding a prospect’s preferred style will only make the salesperson clearer in their failure. However, an effective salesperson who learns and uses the… Read More
Continue ReadingHow Responsive Is Your Company?
Here is a fascinating survey regarding customer service from large companies. The article is from ManageSmarter.com – Return to Sender: Responding to Customers. I think you will find the format quite clever: Every year, our organization conducts a customer service survey by sending the following one-sentence e-mail to our list of respected and admired companies: What is your corporate policy regarding the turnaround time for e-mails addressed to customer service? The subject of the e-mail is “Customer Service.” The goal of the research is to see who actually answers the question, which is different that simply responding and how long it takes them. The results: Here are highlights from this… Read More
Continue ReadingTips To Retain Employees
Retention is on everyone’s mind with the job-hopping world we now live in. I have to admit, if we see a candidate who has been locked in with a company for 10+ years, we start to wonder about their overall development. Today Kevin Wheeler offers an excellent article on the ERE website that deals with strategies to implement to improve employee retention. Money Won’t Hold Them starts with a quick history lesson on how we got here: But somewhere in the early 1980s, things began to change. The first crack came with the advent of the 401(k) and (b) plans that freed employees from the corporate retirement programs. The 401… Read More
Continue ReadingRaises For Results
This CareerJournal.com article can only be categorized as good news – More Employers Are Basing Raises, Bonuses on Results. Of course, none of this is surprising for salespeople since the vast majority are compensated based on their successful selling. For other positions, this may be a bit of a surprise: Employers have turned to tying pay to performance to shore up costs and to try to retain their best workers. “There is a limited amount of money that people have, and they are trying to get a better return on those compensation dollars,” says Steve Gross, Mercer’s global-reward practice leader. I am a passionate proponent of merit-based pay structures and… Read More
Continue Reading