LinkedIn recently surveyed over 10,000 people who changed jobs in 2015 to find out why they made a change.  Some interesting findings:

#1 reason they left – Lack of advancement opportunities (45%)

#1 reason they choose their new employer – Career path & opportunity (59%)

I’m convinced that there are always a myriad of reasons behind a job change, but the primary reason is simply the most interesting.  I’ve been beating this drum for some time, but it warrants repeating – you must provide a general career path to all new hires today.  Many times in sales the thought process is to simply hire a strong salesperson and let them develop their own success.  Their monetary success will be enough to keep them satisfied for years to come.

For some, yes.  For many more, no.

The younger generation is looking for growth in their own skills and their career development.  This desire for growth is present in most people, the difference with the Millennials is that they will simply leave a job after a short tenure to find a new opportunity.  They are not “constrained” by the…traditional mindset of staying at a company for 5 years even if it gets to be repetitive.  I think this is one of the most fundamental changes I have seen in the marketplace over the past 15 years.

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If you have done some level of interviewing, you have certainly come across some interesting characters.  Monster.com highlights a few:

Wearing a tuxedo to an interview. I told him to dress nice and professional for his interview, but he definitely went overboard and crossed the line of dressing business professional. Needless to say, the hiring manager also thought it was a crazy move and the candidate did not get the job.

I caught a candidate lying in his resume. He had made up so much of his previous experience that he then forgot a company name where he said he had worked. The candidate actually asked me to look at the resume I had so he could see what he wrote.

This is one I have encountered a few times in sales interviews:

I had a candidate incessantly tell me they were “the best in the market” over and over again. This phrase was added to every sentence as a punctuation mark. It made for a very awkward interview. Confidence is good; arrogance is not.

Then there is this old favorite from CareerBuilder:

Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a “private” conversation.

Amazing how unaware some people are in today’s world.

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I haven’t heard of this one but it is intriguing:

To boost the chances of preventing that hiring misstep, there’s one easy tactic everyone should take in an interview: Stop asking candidates to evaluate their own abilities.

Here’s why. Underskilled candidates consistently overrate their abilities, and more skilled candidates consistently underrate their abilities. There’s even a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological research finding that the poorest performers are the least aware of their own incompetence.

So I’m immediately left questioning why?  Are highly-skilled salespeople awash in humility?  I don’t think so and neither does the author.

Top performers set higher standards for their own performance, so they judge themselves more harshly than low performers.

Bullseye.  I couldn’t agree more with that statement.  We see this effect in our objective assessments often with top performers.  An interesting aspect is that they often have lower self-esteem.  It isn’t that they are shrinking violets…to the contrary, they set high standards and always strive to reach higher.  They have a drive that says I could have done better or I can do more.  It is counter-intuitive to me and took quite some time to understand this effect.

Don’t be put-off by a sales candidate who doesn’t project a booming confidence.  Trust the assessment and dig down to find out what motivates them to succeed.

Contact us if you want to learn more about how our assessments can drastically improve your sales hiring.

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Trustworthiness.  It is true.  I have sat through many interviews where I simply did not trust, or believe, what the candidate was telling me.  The Harvard Business Review tip of the day quickly dissects this point.

The most important thing to get across in an interview is not that you are smart and motivated – it’s that you are trustworthy. Trustworthiness is the fundamental trait that people automatically look for in others. To be seen as trustworthy, you need to demonstrate warmth and competence. Warmth signals that you have good intentions, and competence signals that you can act on those good intentions. If you follow the usual interview advice and only focus on highlighting your competence, the interviewer may end up a bit wary of you. One way to project warmth and competence is by asking your interviewer questions. For example, you might show interest by asking, “So how did you come to be [current role] at [company]?” or “What are you currently working on?” The answers might reveal similarities in your background, experience, or goals, and help you connect.

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Just saw this title to a sales position ad (emphasis mine):

Regional Sales Manager Job

“Job”…seriously?  Don’t do this in your ads.  Salespeople, especially young salespeople, are looking for opportunities, careers, even a path.  If you promote the position as a job, you will instantly limit the perspective, or upside, of the position.

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That is an age-old question, isn’t it?  You can insert your favorite sports example here which typically involves a superstar/Hall of Fame-caliber athlete who fails as a coach because the game came too easy to him.  But does this analogy work in the sales arena also?

This Sales & Marketing Management article approaches the topic with aplomb. The pull quote (emphasis mine):

Sometimes great salespeople aren’t as good at coaching and managing other people – they’re excellent at being individual contributors, they’re great at building relationships with customers and working deals from start to finish, but they lack the patience or coaching ability or intangible interpersonal savvy to be responsible for other people’s performance.

Intangible interpersonal savvy is a long way to say empathy.  In assessing sales candidates for over a decade, some patterns become evident.  Top salespeople are typically “hunters.”  These hunters hopefully have some empathetic skills, but they are often used solely as tools to get to a close.  And in so doing, the hunters will usually dial down their empathy to achieve their goal of winning the deal.  This ability is what makes them so effective as a salesperson.  They drive themselves to succeed and use their empathy, when needed, to simply get a read on the prospect before closing.

Now place that profile into a sales leadership role.  This hunter may have some empathy, but they use it within a limited scope.  When it comes to coaching their team, they drive on them – pushing the salespeople based on the inner drive they possess as hunters.  Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t.  I’ve even seen other hunters push back against this leadership.

The author of the article offers 3 strong ideas to assist in finding the right sales leader.  I like his summary from the first point:

Many of the best salespeople love to work alone – they pride themselves on being great individual performers and goal setters who hold themselves accountable for excellent results. However, sales management is not an individual job – it’s all about coaching and communicating and helping other people reach their goals as part of a larger team.

Sales leaders have to work through their team.  What often happens is that the hunter turned sales leader will accompany his or her team on sales calls and actually end up doing the close for them.  They insert their drive into the deal since that skill is more familiar to them than the coaching skill.  I evaluated an entire sales team once that had a hunter sales leader who behaved this way.  The sales team learned to simply get appointments, softly qualify them, then bring in the hunter sales leader to close the deal for them.  This is an unsustainable model as was eventually born out at this company.

One closing thought – you do not have to guess at this behavior – it can be assessed with our tools.  If you are interested, please contact us today to learn more.

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I’m browsing through job postings in a specific sales category and I read this sentence in a fairly high-level position:

The tols are here for you to make a diference in our busines and your carer.

The modern day tools available to writers for proofing your text are abundant.  The entire ad has a similar “minimalist” use of double letters.  It is rather odd, isn’t it?

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Supposition – something that is supposed; assumption; hypothesis

Think of supposition, in sales parlance, as being synonymous with stereotyping.  This is a dangerous approach to sale in that once you start making assumptions, you start derailing your qualifying skills.  In most prospect situations, once you stop truly qualifying you are headed towards prospects that are welded on your forecast 90 days out.  Eternally.

Proposition – the act of offering or suggesting something to be considered, accepted, adopted, or done

I suspect you are thinking of value proposition which makes sense.  I read an interesting post that turned that term upside down.  The author suggested selling to the customer’s value expectations rather than your value proposition.  I agree.  They went on to postulate that this approach leads to listening rather than proposing.

Supposition, in partner with proposition, leads to sloppy qualifying.  Salespeople with these two habits tend to assume what is needed by the prospect without asking the right questions.  This mental supposition then leads to them proposing what they feel is the best solution for the supposed problem.  Circular and twisted logic all in one fell swoop!

The two better habits for salespeople in any sale is investigation and observation.  Investigation – ask the right questions to get to the truth.  Observation – simply put, listen…and watch body language, tonality, eye movement, etc.  Salespeople with these habits are far more efficient qualifiers and typically are far more productive.

If you need help finding these types of salespeople, we can help.

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Stereotypes abound around introverts and extroverts-most of them are simply untrue.  The stereotypes go too far in categorizing behaviors.  Part of the issue flows from the Myers-Briggs and its binary assignment of introversion/extroversion.  You are simply one or the other…completely, according to that tool (of which I am not a big fan).

This article provides a succinct, accurate definition based on Jung’s work:

Shyness and being outgoing don’t have anything to do with it; it’s more about where we get our energy from. In fact, the differences are pretty simple:

• Introverts get exhausted by social interaction and need solitude to recharge.
• Extroverts get anxious when left alone and get energy from social interaction.

That’s it. There’s nothing about shyness, being a homebody, or how adventurous you are. Both types can be social, both can creative, both can be leaders, and so on.

Remarkably simple, is it not?  The binary issue still exists as there truly is a spectrum to introversion/extroversion.  People tend to vary, or move, between them.  Jung called these people “ambiverts.” This is key in leadership.  People definitely have a preference and lean towards one side or the other.  But rarely do you find someone who is categorically wired one way, though there are some.

I often tell leaders to focus on the energy of the salesperson.  Some gain energy in the group while others lose it.  Neither one is better, just be cognizant of the difference and you will be a more effective leader.

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I ran into an old coworker, whom I consider a good friend, at a coffee shop this Friday morning.  He is the VP of Sales with 75 or so direct reports.  His company is international with a majority of their revenue occurring in Asia.

He was telling me about sales training he held for the entire sales team.  The focus was on negotiating and, more specifically, how to ask the right questions to qualify the opportunity.  The Asian sales reps balked at some of the questions based solely on their approach to qualifying.  Let’s just say they prefer to take a more passive, unquestioning approach which leads to prayer rug forecasts and lower revenue.

Obviously there are some cultural issues when it comes to qualifying.  Anyone who has been to Japan knows that there are certain formalities you have to follow to honor your counterparts.  However, I would argue that the qualifying issue is an individual issue.  At the risk of sounding overly simple, sales is a difficult profession that requires a skill set that is uncommon to the majority of the population.

The training that my friend provided was not provocative, excessive nor “risky.”  It was simply communication made clear by a sound questioning strategy.  This approach is the essence of qualifying.  It spans cultures.  It leads to the important point that if you are attempting to hire stronger salespeople, you must incorporate an assessment to get an x-ray of the salesperson’s abilities.  Do they have the right mix of talent and motivation to ask the difficult questions required for successful selling?

If you are looking for a solution, we can help.

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