In one of my previous sales lives, I worked for 2 different companies in a highly specialized, technical field. The companies were competitors – I worked for the larger company first that had a highly recognized name in the market. The company was approximately 200 employees strong with worldwide sales.<\/p>\n
I worked for the smaller company about 2 years after resigning from the first company. The smaller company was family owned and had . . . how do I say it? . . . no name recognition. The company had 7 employees and 3 of them were related.<\/p>\n
I describe these 2 settings for you to make a point about hiring based on experience. When I was with the larger company, we had a fully staffed marketing department that effectively leveraged our market-leading position. We also had an established distributor network that covered the choicest territories for our product line. My main responsibility, as a Regional Sales Manager, was to qualify leads effectively. The position was a tremendous learning experience and I was handsomely rewarded through the commission plan.<\/p>\n
The smaller company was a completely different story and a real learning experience for me. I sauntered into the position expecting my qualifying skills to put me on the fast track to revenue. What I learned was that I needed to go find my own prospects with a limited (to say the least) set of resources. What an eye opener! My prospecting skills were laughable and I ended up wasting much time trying to put my gameplan together. I eventually was laid off as the company began to contract down to blood relatives due to many internal problems.<\/p>\n
The point here is simple – hiring a salesperson based on their experience is a high-risk strategy. The lesson here is that I was skilled at selling for a company with a strong market capitalization and I was successful in that role. However, those skills did not directly translate to success at the smaller, unknown company.<\/p>\n
To top it all off, the smaller company had a better product based on superior technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In one of my previous sales lives, I worked for 2 different companies in a highly specialized, technical field. The companies were competitors – I worked for the larger company first that had a highly recognized name in the market. The company was approximately 200 employees strong with worldwide sales. I worked for the smaller company about 2 years after resigning from the first company. The smaller company was family owned and had . . . how do I say it? . . . no name recognition. The company had 7 employees and 3 of them were related. I describe these 2 settings for you to make a point about… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-1y","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}