We write often about the interview stage of a sales hiring process and how to use it effectively. One of the best uses of the interview is to determine the sales candidate’s fit to your company culture. In that light, Selling Power offers an article with some good questions to ask during the interview. These questions start the culture discussion and will be helpful in your hiring determination: €¢ What is your understanding of sales culture? €¢ How would you describe the sales culture of your present employer? €¢ Specifically, what do you like best about that sales culture? What do you like the least? €¢ If it were up… Read More
Continue ReadingSell Me This Pen
Here is a good post from Ed McLean on his Sales Itch blog – Sales Dilemma No.1: There€™s a story in sales job hunting folklore where the smugly smiling interviewer plucks out a pen from his jacket pocket and say, €œSell me this pen€. What would you say? Here are the options I came up with: You will have to read the post to view Ed’s excellent options. Believe it or not, I actually encountered this interview approach when I was a young sales rep. I sat in the office of a salty old sales manager who told me to look under the chair I was sitting in. There was… Read More
Continue ReadingSmall Business Is Where The Jobs Are
Interesting story here from Inc.com – Small Businesses Responsible for Nearly All New Jobs – that has a surprising statistic: Businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90 percent of all U.S. firms and are responsible for more than 97 percent of all new jobs, according to a new report by the Small Business Administration. This is just one statistic from a recently published annual report by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy based on Census data from 1988 to 2004, the most recent year available. The detailed figures quantify various indicators among small businesses, including job creation, business births and deaths, industry growth, and regional differences. 97%… Read More
Continue ReadingSelling With Style
We’ll close the week with an article from ManageSmarter.com titled Building Client Relationships: Use Sales Psychology to Create More Lifetime Clients. The thrust of the article is how to use DISC styles when selling. This tool is one of four assessments we incorporate into our hiring process. The author is correct – knowing your prospect or customer’s style should be part of any saalesperson’s repetoire. This isn’t the Jedi mind trick but rather a focus on clear communication. If a sales rep doesn’t know how to sell, understanding a prospect’s preferred style will only make the salesperson clearer in their failure. However, an effective salesperson who learns and uses the… Read More
Continue ReadingRaises For Results
This CareerJournal.com article can only be categorized as good news – More Employers Are Basing Raises, Bonuses on Results. Of course, none of this is surprising for salespeople since the vast majority are compensated based on their successful selling. For other positions, this may be a bit of a surprise: Employers have turned to tying pay to performance to shore up costs and to try to retain their best workers. “There is a limited amount of money that people have, and they are trying to get a better return on those compensation dollars,” says Steve Gross, Mercer’s global-reward practice leader. I am a passionate proponent of merit-based pay structures and… Read More
Continue ReadingSales Traits Series – Accountability For Others
We continue this week with another mission-critical sales manager trait. This measurement reveals a manager’s ability to take responsibility without using excuses for a lack of team peformance. Accountability For OthersThe capacity of a sales manager to take responsibility for the consequences of the actions of those under their management. This trait encompasses taking responsibility for the decisions and actions of subordinates and not shifting focus on blame or poor performance back onto them, or somewhere else. This trait derived from an internal responsibility and accountability to one€™s self as a manager. This internal willingness is to accept responsibility associated with being in a position of management. It involves understanding that it… Read More
Continue ReadingWhen To Trust Your Intuition
Yesterday I posted on a quick story regarding owners who make hiring decisions based on their gut feeling. I want to follow it up today by clarifying this approach. The article simply states that the owners made a yes or no hiring decision based on a gut feeling. It does not state what they did up until their decision and this is the point I want to make. Unfortunately, many hiring managers run down the same tired path – post an ad (the job description), sort the resume responses, interview the “yes-pile” people, follow their gut on the decision. Then the bad hire gets through and they attempt to revisit… Read More
Continue ReadingWarm Chair Attrition
The above term is from The Herman Group’s weekly newsletter (no link but their website is www.herman.net). I love that phrase – it is quite descriptive. Here is the excerpt that caught my attention: Fueled by the publicity frenzy the press is enjoying, the current volatility in world financial markets is affecting many people at all levels of our societies. From the employees’ point of view, this uncertainty engenders insecurity. What will happen to my company? Will it be in business? Will I have a job? The reaction is that they continue “corporate cocooning”, staying in the safety and sanctuary of their corporate jobs, despite their deep dissatisfaction. A number… Read More
Continue ReadingHiring Via "Gut Feeling"
If ever you wondered why hiring is such a gamble, feast your eyes on these 4 paragraphs from Inc.com’s Survey: Hiring Often Based on “Gut Feeling”: Most small-business owners hire employees based on likeability, rather than qualifications, according to a recent survey. In a survey of 500 small businesses nationwide conducted by The Price Group, a Texas-based marketing firm, 90 percent of owners said they decide whether or not to hire job applicants based on a gut feeling. Many reported having no formal hiring assessment process. The reason is that most small employers find hiring assessments too costly, according to Bette Price, president of The Price Group. “Unfortunately, they fail… Read More
Continue ReadingInc. 500 Companies Monitor Social Media
It’s true. Do you? Reading this blog would apparently qualify based on Inc.com’s article To Gain Competitive Edge, Companies Turn to Blogs, Video, and Social Networks. A study by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research found that 51 percent of Inc. 500 companies are monitoring social media, and they are doing so by various methods, including reading RSS feeds, looking at Web statistics, tracking video downloads, and watching online competitive activity. Interesting. The article isn’t overly descriptive of the methods, but the blog piece is certainly worth noting. “Inc. 500 companies are saying that not only is it important for us to communicate in an outbound… Read More
Continue Reading