Experience is a tricky component to successful sales hiring in that it is often overvalued. Don’t get me wrong, it is important, but you never want to overvalue it. The reason is that you can teach new salespeople about your product or service a lot easier than you can teach them how to sell. A sports analogy (I know, often overused) – it is far easier to teach a football wide receiver what routes to run in your offense than it is to teach them how to run a 4.3 40 yard dash. Some will simply never run a 4.3. This is why talent is far more valuable to successful… Read More
Continue ReadingRevealing Resumes
We run a systematic hiring process for sales positions. We have refined the process over the past 14 years and have it optimized (even though when we started we were writing newspaper employment ads!). As part of any hiring process, you have to receive resumes of respondents to the ad. This is where things are changing. A new trend I am seeing is resumes with copy and paste information from job descriptions, websites, etc. What I mean is candidates do not take the time to write about their skills and experience in their current or previous roles. They simply use web/marketing copy that they paste into their resume. I have… Read More
Continue ReadingApproaching Via The Ad
I recently read this line in an approach email/ad for a sales position: Do you have open availability that includes holidays, days, nights and weekends? To be honest, it appears to be a retail position, but my word, I would not lead with that fact in an ad. Think of that sentence…what times are not covered by that statement? I would not recommend ever making a job appear to be a 24/7 proposition.
Continue ReadingHow GPA’s Matter In Hiring
They don’t. That is the conclusion from Google based on their own internal research. Some info from the New York Times article: “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” Bock said. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. Mind you, this is research from inside Google – they know… Read More
Continue ReadingTattoos Hurt You
I’ve written about this before, but it keeps coming around – tattoos hurt your chances of landing a job according to this salary.com article. I am a bit old to participate in the tattoo craze so I probably come across as a stodgy old man on this topic. However, the millennials seem to be enthralled with tattoos even in open sight. To give you proof: A recent study from the Pew Research Center found nearly 40% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 have at least one tattoo… Think about that stat – 40%! That is more than a fad. But here is where the problem develops: The… Read More
Continue ReadingManaging Paradoxes
From the Herman Trend Alert email newsletter (sorry, no link): Agile Thinking Skills. In this period of sustained economic and political uncertainty, and, agile thinking and the ability to prepare for multiple scenarios is vital. In industries that face significant regulatory and environmental challenges, including life sciences, and energy and mining, the ability to prepare for multiple scenarios is especially important—72 percent and 71 percent respectively, compared with 55 percent for the overall population of respondents. To succeed in the changing marketplace of the future, HR executives also placed a high premium on innovative thinking (46.0 percent), dealing with complexity and managing paradoxes (42.9 percent). I couldn’t agree more with… Read More
Continue Reading5 Tips For Hiring A Sales Manager
This Selling Power article is a quick, solid read. The 5 tips are all on point with this one being my favorite: 2) Metrics without context. Your candidate noted that his or her team closed $2 million in sales last year. That’s great. But what was the quota? What were the expectations? Was this half of what your potential new hire and the team were expected to do? Or did they not only exceed quota, but also outperform every other sales team at the company? Don’t rely on metrics alone; your candidate should provide context that tells the whole story. So much of resume information is devoid of context yet… Read More
Continue ReadingSpinning The Bad Economy
The economy is in rough shape as most people know. However, I give credit to the Business Journal for attempting to spin a good story out of this hot mess. Here is the headline: Challenger report: June job cuts hit 13-month low Sounds positive and they lead off with this info: Nationally, the country’s employers announced plans to slash 37,551 jobs in June, down 39 percent from May, which marks a 13-month low for planned cuts, according to a new report from human resources consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Ah, but the truth often lies in the later paragraphs: Still, halfway through 2012, there have been a total of… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Money Trap
-Discounting is a hot topic in sales especially in this prolonged, down economy. However, discounting is never the best choice regardless of the situation. Here is a good Eye on Sales article speaking to that point. Here is a good suggestion: The first question I ask anyone who thinks they need to lower their price to close a sale is if they know at least 3 needs the customer has and if they have been able to measure the real value of those needs with the customer. Exactly. The author is speaking to qualifying which is the core of all successful selling. This is why it is of the utmost… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Lamest Of Excuses
CareerBuilder.com comes out with an annual list of Most Unusual Excuses and this year’s list does not disappoint. Here it is from a press release (my personal favorites in bold): 1) Employee’s 12-year-old daughter stole his car and he had no other way to work. Employee didn’t want to report it to the police. 2) Employee said bats got in her hair. 3) Employee said a refrigerator fell on him. 4) Employee was in line at a coffee shop when a truck carrying flour backed up and dumped the flour into her convertible. 5) Employee said a deer bit him during hunting season. 6) Employee ate too much at a… Read More
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