Telecommuting is the Norm is a quick article from Sales & Marketing Management’s website. I don’t think this trend is surprising to most people. We have seen a tremendous shift towards this approach in outside sales positions over the past 2 years especially. Most candidates now expect some form of telecommuting capability including wireless-connected laptops, VPN connections and PDA cell phones. If your company does not offer these telecommuting basics, consider this excerpt from the article: “The war for talent, combined with commuting times and costs, and an increasing need for work-life balance are all factors that promote telecommuting,” says Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing for Yoh.… Read More
Continue ReadingDisqualifying Prospects
Selling entails many skills and aptitudes, but one thing that is often overlooked is the ability to disqualify prospects. Selling Power offers up this article – How to Disqualify Leads – which provides a thorough explanation of techniques. First, a great image that I have not heard used in this context: Brooks says top performers are so guarded about who goes into their pipeline that their pipelines look more like cylinders: fewer opportunities going in one end and a higher percentage of them closing on the other. Contrast that with the other 80 percent of your reps. Typically this group aims to prop up every lead that comes their way,… Read More
Continue ReadingWho is the Toughest? – Part 2
Back in early November I posted on a newsletter article from Workforce Management that middle managers are the most resilient group in the workforce. In one of their late November newsletters they previewed a new study due out in January from Monica Wofford International, a corporate training firm. They found that middle managers are lacking the emotional intelligence to advance into top leadership positions. They also found that middle managers tend to resist coaching as a toll for improving performance. They have piqued my interest and I will be sure to share with you more of what they learned in this study when it is released.
Continue ReadingSales Time-Wasters
Sales & Marketing Management has a short article about what holds back sales reps – Companies Hamper Their Sales Reps. Some of the findings from the study: * Salespeople spend just 8 percent of their time prospecting and qualifying new customers. Yet they spend 23 percent of their time dealing with problems and mistakes, searching for information and expediting orders. * Salespeople spend 62 percent of their time on non-revenue-generating activities and 38 percent of their time selling. I don’t doubt these numbers. In fact, we have seen entire salesforces that subscribe to these percentages (and sales managers who allow it). But my initial thought was this – how much… Read More
Continue ReadingFrom Windbags to Bullies
It sure feels like a holiday already, but we at The Hire Sense march on today. We’ll keep things light before the long holiday weekend. Google kicked up this fun article from a CareerBuilder.com editor titled The 10 worst things to do in a meeting. Here’s a good tease: Who among us hasn’t cringed as the office windbag launched into a self-aggrandizing discourse that was completely off-point? Pitied a meek co-worker who got trounced by the office bully? Or marveled at a colleagues’ ability to string together an array of buzzwords that mean absolutely nothing? Oh, I have been in many of those meetings. A couple of my favorite items… Read More
Continue ReadingEmployee Retention Wake-Up Call
Speaking Up Helps Keep Star Workers appears in one of our local papers – the Pioneer Press. The article discusses a topic we have addressed before that many employers assume is not active in their company – job hunting. In case you were in doubt, some stats from the article: A recent workplace survey of 16,237 workers by Leadership IQ, a leadership training and research firm in Washington, D.C., found that nearly half the people regarded as stellar performers were actively trying to leave their current employers. That should grab every managers’ attention. 16,237 is a large sample size and 47% are actively looking to leave. Forty-seven percent of your… Read More
Continue ReadingGo For No
We are fans of Jeff Thull’s approach to selling as we commented in a post from this past summer. Now Thull has a new article in the latest SMT enewsletter – The Science and Art of Go For The No Selling. I recommend you read the entire article, but here are some excerpts: Probably the most debilitating myth ever perpetuated on the world of selling is: A good salesperson can sell anything to anybody. But those of us pursuing a complex sale should be taking the opposite approach. Provocative you say? The reasoning: Selling has become such a complex process that if you don’t consider “no sale” as a valid… Read More
Continue ReadingSimply The Best
I had a good conversation today about a business owner whom we assessed as a salesperson and found some varied results. The owner was strong in some areas but weak in some important aptitudes. This led to the discussion that the owner was one of the best people at actually selling this service so how could they have lower scores in these areas. Some important points about this scenario: Hiring is a complex process with an almost limitless amount of variables. A successful process needs to incorporate objective data and then use it interactively with the candidate. Our approach is to pursue specific topics, in an indirect manner, once we… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Sales Manager Factor
It seems we come across this issue frequently so it merits some attention. The scenario is this – a company hires a strong salesperson and they fail within a short amount of time. The first question that is usually raised is why did we hire this person? Obviously, they were not the right fit, they weren’t talented, they were disingenuous in the interview, etc. But is this really the case? It could be, but there is one crucial piece of the equation that goes unexamined . . . management. This is a touchy subject with a company because you have to confront their perception. Most managers believe they are doing… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Importance of Your Boss
Sales & Marketing Management has a quick hitter of a story regarding an Adecco survey about the worker-boss relationship. I think most people are aware of this: “The relationship between a worker and his/her manager has very real implications for both employee satisfaction and performance,” says Ray Roe, president of Adecco North America. But here is a survey result that I found somewhat surprising: The younger the worker, the less impact the boss has on overall happiness. Among Generation Y workers, 53 percent said their relationship with their boss had no impact on their work-life happiness. However, 62 percent of baby boomers report their bosses have influence over their day-to-day… Read More
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