I just reviewed a sales management resume I received from a gentleman. The resume contains a handful of spelling and grammatical errors which is a concern. But this is what caught my eye, for the past 10 years, he has changed companies every 2 years.<\/p>\n
This employment pattern is always a red flag for us. Sales is a difficult position to successfully hire as most people know. A main problem is that bad salespeople often use their good rapport-building skills to subtlely, but emotionally, persuade a hiring manager to hire them. We refer to these types as schmoozers. They look like John Wayne in the interview and perform like Elmer Fudd on the job.<\/p>\n
2 years is just about the right amount of time to flush out a schmoozer. They use their tools to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Their preferred tactic is an inflated pipeline of prospects that somehow always seem to be just on the verge of closing, but never quite do. Managers become reluctant to fire the schmoozer immediately. Instead, they prefer to hang on to the false hope that the schmoozer may just close one or two deals. That would be one or two deals they probably wouldn’t land if the position was not filled.<\/p>\n
Rarely do those deals appear. In fact, the better question is what was the opportunity cost in terms of prospects that went to the competition? What did the schmoozer cost in terms of deals in their territory that they never discovered?<\/p>\n
I don’t know if this gentleman is a schmoozer or not. He may have legitimate explanations for 5 different employers in the past 10 years (soon to be 6 if he lands a new job). I’ll let him share those explanations with someone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"