Selling Power has a fantastic article about hiring salespeople – Avoid Hiring Mistakes. There are many truths in the article so I recommend you read the entire article. First, some compelling stats: A recent survey shows that 53 percent of all sales recruiting efforts lead to miss-hires. And according to a Miller Heiman white paper, The Three Top Challenges Facing Sales Leaders Today, only 28 percent of sales leaders believe they have an effective process for recruiting and hiring qualified salespeople. More than half of all sales recruiting efforts end up in mishires (my preferred spelling). Now try to tabulate the lost revenue in this futile approach and you realize… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Spiderman Interview
Ragan Jones writing about bizarre candidate interviews. Trust me, a great read to end the work week.
Continue ReadingHow To Retain Employees
Earlier this week we posted on employee turnover via a survey that found 75% of jobseekers believe they will find greater career success elsewhere. As jobs become more plentiful and workers more scarce, employee retention is going to be a top 3 topic for most companies. Steve Rothberg posts on the CollegeRecruiter.com blog a handful of tips to increase your company’s employee retention rate. Please read them – he is spot on. The suggestion that stood out to me in terms of the younger generations: Keep it fresh. Create new ways to ensure your employees continue to learn and grow within their related field and your company.
Continue ReadingThe Cover Letter King
If you’ve read The Hire Sense for any length of time, you know one of my favorite pastimes is reading cover letters/emails. There really are some bemusing, befuddling and bewildering approaches. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this abcnews.com article – ‘Cover Letters from Hell’ Expose Poor Quality of College Grads. Ok, I’m all over that article and I have found my new hero – Bob Killian. And I thought I had some good examples but this guy is the king. This link takes you directly to the cover letter section of his website. It is excellent and amusing – I even had to subscribe to his… Read More
Continue ReadingSales Traits Series – Personal Drive
Last week we covered Self-Starting Ability. This week we look at a complementary aptitude – Personal Drive. Most salespeople work within the framework of a company but their actual performance takes place on a one-to-one level…salesperson to prospect. To be successful, salespeople have to have the internal drive to succeed without excessive, external, surrogate motivation from their manager. Personal Drive A gauge of personal motivation to achieve, accomplish or complete tasks, goals or missions. This drive can take many forms (e.g., tasks, knowledge, career, physical, etc.), but it involves the level of personal motivation a person is capable of bringing to bear on any given task which they feel is… Read More
Continue ReadingWhat’s My Password?
I found this story amusing – One in Three Workers Writes Down Computer Passwords, Study Says. For all the security measures taken by companies, a third of the works still undermine it. Staff still had a tendency to jot down passwords either on a piece of paper or in a text file on a PC or mobile device. Great analogy here: “This is really a lot like mom and dad buying a great new system for the house and junior leaving the combination under the door mat,” David O’Connell, senior analyst at Nucleus Research, told Reuters.
Continue ReadingA Good Time To Be In Sales
This article – The Hottest Industries For Sales Jobs – comes from the daily SM&M Magazine enewsletter. The market demand for salespeople is strong right now (we can attest to that fact) and is going to remain high: The trend for hiring shows no signs of stopping, according to Cindy Hazen, the founder of Sales Executives, a recruiting firm based in Nashville, Tenn. “We have been booming for the last two years in sales and project to be booming for the next five,” she says. And now for the hottest topic in hiring: The aging U.S. workforce is also changing the sales profession. Companies soon will need to replace a… Read More
Continue ReadingWall Street Pay
Wall Street Pay Averages $300,000 Per Year. “Averages” is the word that hooked me into the article. The straight-forward article simply relays the stats and how an improved Wall Street helps NYC. Today’s news that the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 12,000 line for the first time ever bodes well for that average pay moving up. I enjoyed this rather dry statement from the short article: “Wall Street is recovering,” Hevesi said in a statement. I guess so.
Continue ReadingSales Managers – Manage and Lead
Selling Power has a short, but valuable article titled The Two Things You Must Do Well to Succeed as a Sales Manager. I’ll cut right to the chase: 1. Manage the Sales Process 2. Leading the Salespeople That is it. Sounds simple but rarely do we see it in action. Instead, we normally see some variation of this: …managers are compensated primarily on their salespeople’s sales revenue, which leads many managers to jump in and act as “super closers,” taking over the relationships in the most critical accounts – and in the process, often undermining the motivation of their sales reps. Super closers – I like that. Most sales managers… Read More
Continue ReadingSales Comp Potpourri
We are working through some offers for sales candidates with multiple clients this week and thought it would be helpful to discuss some general points. Salary – we’re big believers in a modest/decent salary. The best plans we see provide a salary to cover the basic needs of the salesperson. If they are worrying about basic bills, they are not as effective. I know there is an old school belief that commission-only plans are the best – purest form of selling, you eat what you kill. The largest drawback to this approach is that sales managers often leave the salesperson to their own devices. Their rationale – the salesperson will… Read More
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