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":"