Selling Power Blog

Three Surprises to Watch for When Hiring New Sales Reps

Today's post is by Max Cates, author of Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers.

 

There’s often a huge difference between the person you interview and the person you hire as your new sales rep. Following are three candidates who may surprise you once they’re on the payroll.

Natural-born Salespeople  

You know them – the ones exuding charm, poise, and grace. The ones you instantly like. They may describe themselves as “born to sell.” They will be your best performers or they will be your worst. The ones with drive and discipline – those who work hard, prepare, and learn new skills – can be your top sellers. The others, who slide by on social graces, are likely to walk into appointments with little preparation, and just improvise a way to get the signature. They’re also slow to learn new skills.

In a word, they are lazy. They will do just enough to get by but not enough to excel. Many times, you can identify them by asking for their sales reports, which will show average numbers. Another way is to probe for their enthusiasm for learning and their ability to prepare for sales calls.

Perfectionists

Self-described perfectionists look good on paper, and can be quality reps – considering their attention to detail and uncompromising standards. However, perfectionists can overcomplicate customer transactions to the point of losing the sale. The perfectionist may try to add just one more detail – a cross-sale, for example – and see the whole transaction fall apart. Perfectionists, having an eye for detail, sometimes are overwhelmed by minutia, and have difficulty meeting deadlines and completing tasks.

Functional perfectionists, the ones who make good candidates, are able to get 90 percent of the job done – then move on rather than spending excessive time fussing over the remaining 10 percent of details. To identify those with over-the-top perfectionism: probe for their ability to meet deadlines; inquire about uncompleted projects (hobbies, home, and job-related tasks); and watch for “over-explaining” (providing  more detail than needed).  

Sales Narcissists

These self-absorbed sellers will manipulate people, break rules to meet their personal goals, and alienate coworkers and customers. Most sales narcissists shine in interviews – looking you in the eye and telling you what you want to hear with a contrived sense of sincerity, even humility.

One way to identify a narcissist is to make a statement critical of the candidate’s credentials. For example, “I’m not sure you have the kind of quality experience we need to handle our customers.” Most true narcissists hate to be maligned, and may show defensiveness or irritation.

Also, ask the candidate what his or her weaknesses are. The answer may be a strength that’s masqueraded as a weakness. For example, they might answer, “I sometimes over-prepare for my sales calls.” Also, look for a lot of “I” instead of “we” statements, and a tendency to blame the economy and others for failure to achieve objectives.

For more on hiring, see my new book, Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers.

Three Tips to Turn New Sales Hires into Top Performers

Today's blog post is by Diane Polnow, owner and founder of Elite Sales Leaders.

 

In my 20+ years as a sales manager and sales director working for some of the most recognized Fortune 100 companies – such as American Express and Sprint – I’ve coached my fair share of new hires who have become some of the highest producing reps in nationwide rankings.

There is a long list of things to do – but here are three tips to help you get started.

Starting new hires properly from the beginning is vital if you want them to be superstars.

Tip #1: Onboard new reps as fast as possible. 

First, get them get onboarded as fast as possible. It’s vital to give them all the necessary tools you can to help set them up to succeed in the beginning! Get them things like territory and account lists, technology, access to company systems, and training schedules. I’ve heard horror stories of new hires not getting these until long after they start.

Tip #2: Assign a team to help train, mentor, and coach reps.

Next, it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to coach someone new, so the next tip is to assign a team of people – as many as you can – to help train, mentor, and coach in addition to you. These would be top performing peers with the same job title as your new hires – either in or out of territory. Helping your new hires build a network of superstar peers will allow them to learn from the best. Plus, you’re their boss – they’re always hearing from you, so they’ll like hearing from peers and they should be striving to hit their quota from day one. Having multiple coaches can accelerate learning and top performance. Too often, new hires are left to fend for themselves. Providing proper training in the beginning is everything!

Tip #3: Provide opportunities to learn in the field quickly (and often).

The next tip is to get them in the field quickly and as often as possible – either with you or with other top performing peers. If you want new hires to be the best, let them learn from the best – and there’s nothing like learning quickly through on-the-job training. Quick success is motivating and exciting, so work with your new hires to develop a list of potential deals to close.

After you’ve done these things, it’s now all about activity, activity, activity. Activity leads to sales. Continue coaching new hires to refine and improve their pitch. Keep them focused and be cautious to not overwhelm them with too much information – give them just enough to be powerful and effective. I did these with my new hires and they quickly rose to the top.

For more details and information about our programs and services and how you and your teams can rise to the top and be part of the Elite, go to www.EliteSalesLeaders.com and watch our video – “Coach New Hires To Become Top Sales Performers” – at https://youtu.be/TRiaeUTUYKg. I look forward to hearing how you rise to the top and join the elite!

How to Avoid Rookie Mistakes that Could Cost You a Great Sales Job

Today’s post is by KiteDesk CEO Sean Burke.

 

 

The level to which you choose to be public, private, and everything in between on your social networks has a substantial impact on employability. For those seeking their next lucrative career opportunity, it’s challenging to decide what to reveal in your public social spaces.

In no space is that more relevant than in sales, where talent acquisition is more competitive and fluid than ever before. Hiring managers now use candidates’ social footprints as one of the first steps in the hiring process – and they may be using it as much to weed out potential employees as they are to include them.

So how exactly are hiring managers considering social profiles and participation as they hire? Internet citizens looking to score a dream gig want to be sensitive to what recruiters are thinking as they consider a new hire.

What Managers Look At

A whopping 93 percent of hiring managers look at a candidate’s social presence before making a hiring decision! CareerBuilder reports that one-half of employers said they’ve found content that caused them to not hire the candidate – up from 34 percent in 2012. Managers are studying your suitability for a sales role from a culture fit standpoint.They’re interested in your personality because they want to know if you will be a good fit with the rest of the team.

Here’s what hiring managers are likely to view favorably:

• High number of overall contacts and connections
• Active and current posts across various networks
• Recommendations from colleagues and supervisors
• Synergy – similar connections to the company and the industry
• Obvious willingness to engage, and ability to get others to engage
• Well-rounded, wide range of interests
• Volunteering or charitable connections are a plus

Here’s what won’t work in your favor:

• Illegal activity references (and/or sexual escapades and obvious drug use)
• Inappropriate photographs
• Negative comments about a company or team member
• Poor spelling and grammar
• Political or religious rants/diatribes or proselytism
• Oversharing

Be Yourself

By all means, don’t forget to be interesting! Express in detail what you want in a career; wishy-washy candidates are rarely appealing. If you don’t dare to reveal what you’re looking for, you’ll be passed up completely.

Experience and knowledge of the position are obviously also key, but so is a clear representation of balanced interests. In other words, one-dimensional profiles are far less appealing than those that show a “real” person.

Keep It Current

Stay current with social data. Don’t include your high school experience on your profiles if you are a mid-level job seeker. Still touting older accomplishments? Managers may assume you haven’t achieved much in recent years and that you lack ambition and drive.

Be Humble

Nobody achieves success as a lone wolf – we all have help along the way. Be mindful of the number of instances of I vs. We as you list your accomplishments. In other words, resist narcissism – give credit to those who deserve it. Managers weary of hiring a very me-focused social profiler.

Be Active

Follow and engage with the social presence of all companies you are considering for employment. It’s this kind of initiative that separates less-appealing recruits from the full-on must-haves.

Rookie Mistakes on Social

Here are the most common gaps you should definitely avoid:

• No professional, polished photos as your avatars
• Profiles that are self centered and self serving
• Flat, generic profiles that don’t tell a story or build a portrait
• No recommendations from coworkers, supervisors, or customers
• Interests that don’t match the position or industry you’re considering
• Profiles that are either too aggressive about employment or too passive

Stay vigilant. Pay attention to privacy updates on all of your social networking accounts. Know that managers will use public information to spot both stars and loose cannons.

Sales is a highly competitive landscape, and learning to present oneself skillfully on social platforms is paramount for career success.

Six Reasons You Should Include Simulations in Your Sales Hiring and Training Processes

Today’s post is by John C. Kolencik, who has been conducting business simulations for client companies for more than 20 years. His company, Matrix Impact (http://www.matriximpact.com), focuses on increasing clients’ sales revenue an average of 42 percent by finding the best people, training them, and providing high-producing lead generation.

Organizations are only as strong as the people who work for it. That makes people your most precious resource. It also makes the hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players critical best practices in any company. Nobody wants to make a mistake in hiring or promoting. So why is it one of the most under-taught, under-improved processes in all of business?   

One of the best ways to improve your hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players is the use of simulations, but fewer than 2 percent of all businesses use them – and it is a mystery to me. What this stat screams is that, when simulations are utilized correctly, you can differentiate your business from at least 98 percent of your competition.  

I mean, nobody would buy a car without taking it for a test drive, nor would an airline hire pilots unless they could prove – in a flight simulator – that they were competent. So why choose to hire or promote someone without seeing their true ability to perform required business tasks with your own eyes?

Here are the six reasons simulations should be an integral part of any hiring, promotion, and training processes.   

#1: The 5:1 Ratio

A mis-hire/promote costs the company 5 times the candidate’s annual compensation (e.g., a $50,000 salary costs the company $250,000).

With training, it’s just as easy to see the ROI. A business parable for you:

CEO said to the CFO: “We have to train our people to get better.”

CFO says: “But what if we invest time and money to train them and they leave us to go to our competitor?”

CEO shoots back: “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

Whether it is a mis-hire or a less-than-adequately-trained employee, the impact on client relations, revenue, productivity, supervision time, and morale is negative – and it is huge.

#2: The Power of Proof

Have you ever had an interview where the person told you they couldn’t do the job? Or have you ever had a person who “stretched” their abilities in the interview and, as a result, you were cleaning their messes for days, weeks, or months after?

A best practice simulation provides you “point-to-point correspondence” with the job. When the activities found in the simulation are a replica of activities required on the job, you get an accurate portrayal of skill level.

This is also why simulations are critical to training. Do you really want salespeople “practicing” on customers? Of course you don’t! General George Patton once said, “The more my troops sweat in peacetime, the less they bleed during combat.” Simulations are a must in all continual development.

Reason #3: How They Handle the Debrief

Once they perform in the simulation, how do they respond to constructive criticism? Are they thin-skinned? Do they gloat? Is their self-confidence warranted? Many times, you find out the best and the worst of people by observing how they handle coaching.

It also opens a window to know how they learn best. Through the debrief, you will discover what they will and won’t respond to. This can be invaluable as you continue to train and develop your team.

Reason #4: Go to the Video

When recorded, simulations help reduce – if not remove – bias and subjectivity in the hiring process in one big  way: “The eye in the sky does not lie.” You don’t want a he-said/she-said situation in any business scenario, but especially in simulations.

Here’s a great example of the benefit of recording simulations: A hiring manager who got a “good hit” off a candidate in an interview might get a completely different feeling after watching a recorded simulation. The candidate might be the most charming person in the world, but, when the time came, he didn’t have the skills he had trumpeted. In any business, that is a disaster averted.

Recorded simulations are irreplaceable in training as well. There is nothing better than being able to go back and review specific areas for either praise or correction. Plus, reviewing with individuals their recorded progress or regression is a very powerful training tool.

Reason #5: Onboarding

Even if somebody is an A-Player, it does not mean he or she is perfect. Too many onboarding programs fail to adapt to the candidate, thus slowing the speed to effectiveness of the new hire.

Simulations don’t just weed out bad candidates. They also help assess a good candidate’s specific strengths and weaknesses in a hyper-accurate way. This allows you to design/implement an onboarding process to speed them to productivity. Not to mention, it helps in offer decisions such as salary negotiations.    

Reason #6: Positioning Your Company as the Best

The War for Talent is upon us and there are only so many A-Players out there. The mistake most organizations make is purposefully making the hiring process easier out of fear of losing the candidate.

Thomas Payne said, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Being with the best requires paying the price. Candidates learn respect for the position and respect for the company by seeing how seriously the company takes the hiring process. The best candidates don’t want to be with some company that just rolls over. Remember: Everybody wants to belong to The Club that is impossible to get in.

87 percent of people who voluntarily (i.e., quit) leave a company do so because of a lack of growth and development opportunity. It’s human nature to want to improve, develop new skills, succeed, and advance. If you have good people, make them better. Use simulations to continually train and develop your team. And you know what they call the company with the top employees…they call that company the best!

Andy Grove, the Intel visionary, said, “The most important charge a good manager owns is the responsibility to continuously train his/her employees.” When you add in the training component, you have three areas where you can either irreparably damage or exponentially advance your most precious resource.  

To ensure you are hiring A-Players – and for training to be both impactful and “sticky” – you have to closely tie how things are actually done in your organization to any evaluation and development of personnel. This is why simulations are such a critical management tool.

Four Steps for Hiring the Right Sales Reps

Today’s post is by Brandon Redlinger, who runs growth at PersistIQ. PersistIQ helps sales reps become more effective – with smarter outbound campaigns, better lead management, and more personalized communication. You can read more of his work on the PersistIQ blog or follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09.

Hiring the right people can be the difference between building a good company and building a great company. Mark Roberge, CRO of HubSpot – who was the first sales hire and responsible for building the entire sales team to what it is today – says, “I felt that, if I could get the right people into the system – even if I did a mediocre job at training and management – they would find a way to win. But, if I got mediocre people in – even if I did a world-class job at training and leading – it wouldn’t matter.” Hiring must be one of your top priorities.

The demand for high performing sales reps is plenty, but the available talent is few and far between. If you don’t make it a priority, you can quickly find yourself behind the 8 ball with a lackluster sales team and significantly limited revenue coming in.

We’ve talked to multiple recruiters, interviewed countless candidates, and built a stellar team, so we’ve built a proven process to help you find the next superstars for your sales teams.

1) Clearly Identify Your Needs for the Role

Assess your team’s abilities and identify what’s missing. What role, if filled, will have the largest impact on your team’s overall performance? If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, how will you know when you’ve found it?

You’re hiring for an immediate need, so screen for and hire the skills that are going to be the most useful over the next 3-6 months. Don’t get hung up on whether a candidate has what it takes to transition into a hypothetical role that might materialize in another year or two. Face those decisions if and when they come. For now, optimize for the KPIs this hire will be responsible for delivering on day one. The market changes incredibly quickly – what you think you’ll need two years from now could be extremely different from what you actually end up needing. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself.

After you identify missing links in your team, examine what characteristics and personal attributes are important for your team. In our experience, the best sales reps exhibit:

• Drive and ambition: They’re internally driven to success, are usually competitive in nature, and do whatever it takes to get the job done (within moral and ethical guidelines, of course).
• Coachability: They’re willing to (and can) listen, learn, and quickly adapt.
• Positivity and optimism: They are resilient and persevere when faced with fear, challenges, and/or rejection.
• Empathy: They understand others’ thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, then act accordingly.
• Curiosity: They’re lifelong learners who constantly need to try new things. They’re always asking questions; after all, that’s largely what they’ll be doing for you as a sales rep.

2) Create a Compelling Job Description

Sell candidates on the position. How can you make your job listing stand out from all the other listings for sales roles? How can you attract the best talent to come work for you? Most job postings are simply a laundry list of duties. What matters most is why they should work for you. Inspire people! If you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s TED talk titled, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” or read his book Start with Why, invest the time to understand this concept, then apply it to your job posting.

Another mistake is making the job about how much money you can offer. That should be an afterthought. If you’ve determined this candidate is a good fit for you and you’re truly a good fit for this candidate, than compensation shouldn’t be the thing getting in the way of a signed contract. You’ll be able to work it out.

In your job listing, paint a picture of your company culture. Make it about being part of something bigger. Tell them the impact they’ll have on the company and, more importantly, the society. Sell them on working for your company.

3) Act Quickly and Decisively

The first step in the interview process is the phone screening. Limit these to 15 minutes. Make your decision to cut them or move to an in-person interview quickly. Sales professionals need to be able to present themselves extremely well over the phone, so, if they’re not able to sell themselves in this short amount of time, don’t expect them to be able to sell your product or service. On the other hand, if you’ve identified someone who can help your company, move quickly toward an in-person interview, a culture interview, then an offer, or you risk losing that person to a competitor.

Candidates should be doing research on your company, your market position, and any shared connections. After all, you’ll be expecting them to do exactly the same thing – many times over every day on the job. Don’t hire candidates who ask basic questions that could be easily answered by Siri or a two-minute Google search. On the other hand, some salespeople can convince you (and themselves) that they’re the right fit for a role when, in fact, they’re not. Look out for feigned enthusiasm.

4) Keep the Top of the Funnel Full

Just like in prospecting, it’s vital to keep job candidates flowing through your pipeline. Don’t wait to start the hiring process until you need someone – or it will be too late. It always takes more time than you anticipate to find, hire, and ramp employees. And, just because you have a handful of candidates going through your funnel doesn’t mean you should stop putting more in the top, either. Traditionally, sales has had a high turnover rate compared to other professions. Just because a rep was a top performer at another company doesn’t mean he or she will be at yours. There are too many factors that come into play. Secondly, many students fresh out of college will take sales roles but quickly discover it’s not for them.

Always be looking out for top talent. There are many ways to keep candidates in the pipeline, so don’t limit it to any single channel. Manually prospect on LinkedIn for top talent. Utilize a staffing firm like Hired or CloserIQ. Ask your network to make introductions to candidates. Motivate your current employees to refer their friends and colleagues.

Conclusion

Treat hiring like a sales process. To source job candidates, you can even use a lot of the same advanced tools and technologies that reps use for prospecting and selling. We built PersistIQ to help sales reps become more effective at outbound sales, but it’s become own secret weapon for hiring too.

As Jim Collins says, “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” There’s only so much you can do on your own, but, with the right people around you, you can do anything.

An Unexpected Way to Make Contact with Influencers and Decision Makers

Today’s post is by Stu Heinecke, president of Contact, a first-of-its-kind contact marketing agency located on Whidbey Island, Washington. He is also a DMA Hall of Fame-nominated marketer, a cartoonist for The Wall Street Journal, and author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone.

Cartoon by Stu Heinecke, excerpted from How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. All Rights Reserved.

The ability to make initial contact with influencers and decision makers is a crucial part of success in business and in sales.

I discovered early in my career that my cartoons were quite effective at helping me make the critical connections I needed to launch my marketing business. When I wanted to make contact, I used the cartoons as contact devices and soon found myself breaking through to presidents, a prime minister, various celebrities, and lots of CEOs, C-level executives, and top decision makers.

The more successful I became with my “contact campaigns,” the more curious I got about what other people were doing to break through to their most important contacts. Along the way, I discovered a hidden form of marketing that has been producing results long considered impossible by most marketers. So I decided to write a book about it, called How to Get a Meeting with Anyone.

To write the book, I interviewed nearly all of the top 100 sales thought leaders in the world, along with veteran executive assistants, CEOs, and top sales executives. What I got was a stunning collection of audacious and brilliantly successful contact campaign techniques, which I organized into 20 categories of contact campaign types. Consider the following examples.

• Marketer Rick Bennett once connected with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison by producing a contact letter as a full-page ad and placing it in The Wall Street Journal on behalf of a client. The ad cost $10,000, but it resulted in the sale of Bennett’s company to Oracle, a deal worth millions of dollars.

• Top sales blogger, author, and turnaround specialist Dan Waldschmidt uses beautifully crafted swords to connect with CEOs of distressed companies. The sword campaigns cost $1,000 apiece and produce a near 100 percent contact rate – with some of those contacts leading to multimillion-dollar deals.

• To launch the NoWait app, the developers used a series of personalized videos to talk directly to C-level executives of the top 20 restaurant chains in North America. The videos were delivered on iPads in custom packaging; each was the start of a direct conversation between the NoWait CEO and a targeted executive, resulting in an immediate penetration of the market and several national roll-outs of the app.

• Sales trainer and author Paul McCord set the record for reported ROI thus far with a campaign he launched to cultivate a referral base among 70 local builders for a mortgage product. His tube mailing cost less than $200 and produced more than a million dollars in fees and commissions, and an ROI of more than 620,000 percent.

Have I discovered a new form of marketing? Several of the people interviewed for the book reported generating response rates as high as 100 percent, while others reported  revenue-versus-expense figures topping more than 600,000 percent. They produced spectacular results with their campaigns, but no one had a name for what they were doing. It didn’t fit any conventionally defined form of marketing. Therefore, I believe “contact marketing,” as named and defined in my book, is a legitimately new form of marketing.

When I use cartoons to break through to VIP connections, I am constantly amazed by the reactions they produce. Until recently, I was reluctant to voice those results, because it just isn’t credible to say you’ve generated a 100 percent response rate – ever. Now that I’ve found a community of fellow contact marketers, I’ve discovered it’s not so rare after all.

What about you? Do you have any stories of your own contact marketing successes? Please share below.

A Bold Way to Hire and Retain the Right Salespeople

Today’s post is by Chad Bronstein, founder and CEO of Time to Hire.

 

 

 

 

 

As the leader of a sales organization, you’ve seen it a million times before. You recruit, hire, and train a candidate that fit the ideal model you had for the perfect salesperson – only to find they can’t meet minimum expectations or aren’t a cultural fit, forcing you to part ways.

It’s an easy loop to fall into once the first few candidates don’t work out and you become increasingly desperate to fill open sales positions. Not only can this take a toll on you as the sales leader, but can also negatively affect client relationships and company performance.

Common Hiring Pitfalls

Salespeople tend to be bright, outgoing, and best at selling themselves. As such, many sales leaders and business owners tend to pick the one who seems “shiniest,” even though it may turn out that person is a terrible fit for their organization. Moreover, most businesses hire only when the need arises, resulting in a hiring process that is not designed to hire the best, only the best available.

For companies that utilize commission-based or salary-plus-commission pay structures, there is a solution – hire multiple salespeople for the same position and have them “compete” for the job. With no long-term or high-dollar payroll commitment – other than earned commissions or small base salaries – hire as many as you can handle. Train them all at once, see how their different attributes and experience work in your organization, and keep only those who make the cut.

This may seem overly Darwinian and unfair, but that’s the paradigm in the sales arena: kill or be killed, sell or be fired. The key is to set expectations up front and provide clear metrics and goals in order to keep the position:

• How long will the trial/competition period last?
• How many new clients need to be signed or how much business needs be closed?
• How many calls need to be made or how many appointments need to be set?
• Who will manage and train the employees? Can you provide mentors and will you incent them to help?
• What happens if everyone hits their goals?

This fosters an environment with no surprises and a culture where the most competitive and motivated salespeople will “win.” It should also provide a steady stream of high-performing salespeople and help establish a culture of competitiveness within the organization from the ground up. Indeed, a recent study by TechnologyAdvice found that 55 percent of salespeople prefer to work in a competitive environment – with 30.5 percent hoping for a very competitive workplace.

The Link between Competition and Quota Attainment

Moreover, a report from Aberdeen Group found that companies do better on their quotas when there is competition: 85 percent of reps attain their quota and 51 percent of new hires achieve their numbers in their first year. On the other hand, in the absence of competition, only 78 percent of reps make quota and only 42 percent of new hires meet their numbers.

To further entrench a competitive culture within the organization, you should also provide ongoing incentives and recognition programs. This can be anything – weekly competitions on who brings in the most new customers, annual competitions on who sells the biggest deal, special competitions for a coveted territory that is finally opening up, and more.  

Companies we know who’ve taken a position competition approach are better at finding and retaining salespeople who perform better. Employees who’ve competed and earned their positions take extra ownership in the business, stay with the company longer, and are more interested in moving into management positions – helping grow and shape future employees into additional high-performing salespeople.

Five Questions Salespeople Should Ask in a Job Interview

Today's post is by Brandon Redlinger, who runs growth at PersistIQ. PersistIQ helps sales reps become more effective – with smarter outbound campaigns, better lead management, and more personalized communication. You can read more of his work on the PersistIQ blog or follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09.

Looking for a new sales job? Landing in the right organization at the right time can propel your career to impressive heights. Joining the wrong shop can do just the opposite. Whether you’ve pounded the phones for a company or two or are just out of school and looking for your first sales development job, there are a few things you need to know about any new opportunity before signing on.

Before you interview, you should conduct your own research to find out the basics. How long has the company been around? How do customers/users currently perceive the brand? Beyond that, use the questions below to guide your research. If you can’t find the answers, plan to ask these questions during your job interview. Even if you don’t get the chance to ask all of them, they should help you learn whether you’re making the right move. 

1. “What’s the current size of the sales team?”

The size of the sales team will help you learn what kind of resources they have. A quickly growing organization should have ample opportunity for you to grow in your own career. Even a product that’s seen a lot of success with only a couple of salespeople could really explode as the sales team gets more resources.

2. “Why are you hiring for this role right now?”

This will give you important context into what’s happening internally at the company. Did someone just leave? Get promoted? Is business growing so fast they’re hiring to keep up with demand? Is business slowing down and they’re throwing every resource they can at the problem?

Try to understand what prompted the need for the specific role you’re considering. 

3. “What’s a common deficiency you’ve seen in a salesperson and how did you coach him or her through it?”

This might be the most important question a salesperson can ask in a job interview – assuming you’re talking to a sales manager. Here, you want to hear an anecdote about how the manager successfully coached a struggling sales rep through a tough patch. Many sales managers fall back on their own sales skills and just do the sales rep’s job in a pinch. After all, the manager often has his or her own targets to hit. So, when a rep falls behind their goals, the manager will come in and close deals. 

I spoke about this recently with Mark Roberge, chief revenue officer at Hubspot Sales Products. That management style can shake a rep’s confidence and create an environment where laziness thrives, he said. After all, why do the work when you can just “delegate” it to your boss?

On the other hand, Mark explained, “If you find a manager who’s an amazing sales coach, you’re going to have an amazing couple of years and really excel and grow in your career.”

4. “What percentage of your salespeople are hitting quota?”

This question is critical because it’ll give you an idea if their quota is accurate. If they tell you on-target earnings (OTE) are $80,000, but only half of their reps are hitting quota, the organization is setting unrealistic expectations. Practical on-target earnings could be closer to $65,000 or $70,000. Don’t be afraid of asking to see their leaderboard for the previous month. Baiting and switching is, unfortunately, common in sales jobs. Remember, your ability to hit OTE will affect your personal income

5. “What’s your sales workflow and what sales tools or platforms are you using?”

The purpose of asking about their workflow is to uncover their approach to outbound sales. Do they focus only on cold email? Do they focus only on cold calling? Do they have a mixture of emailing and calling? Make sure their workflow fits your skills and comfort level.

You also want to find out what their sales stack is. If a company invests in the best platforms out there, it shows that they’re serious about outbound sales and supporting the sales team. Not only that, but you’re also set up for success.

Remember, the interview goes both ways. You’re vetting good companies to work for just as much as they’re vetting good candidates. Good luck!

How to Capitalize on the Resignation of Your Top Sales Performer

Today’s guest post is by Marcia Needels and Cassie Rosengren, co-founders of Digital Knack.

 

Imagine it’s Q3 and you’re the vice president of sales at a tech startup. The lean sales team you have built is finally gelling. The top performers are driving revenue and junior sellers are learning the ropes. Pricing, pitch, and product are aligning. That is when your top sales pro walks into your office and resigns.

Perhaps this person quit due to leadership, change in commission structure, or culture. Maybe it’s a reason out of your immediate control – an offer with higher base pay, relocation, career change, a new or better emerging solution, larger territory, or a less commoditized product.

As the recruiters and co-founders of Digital Knack, we help companies stay on track when facing inevitable departures. Companies who can adapt with talent loss have much to gain. Here are some tips on how to gain from your seller’s departure.

1. Before departure, learn what needs weren’t being met. Evaluate those unmet needs for your existing team and meet them when plausible.

2. Resist the desire to provide a counter offer. The moment your top sales pro resigns, you usually start thinking about winning him or her back. You think: I want this person to stay – what does he or she need, and how much will it cost me? Keep in mind that money is usually a factor, but not the primary one (especially for Millennials who expect passion, culture, change, evolution, and agility from their employers). Furthermore, 90 percent of employees who take counter offers end up leaving within six months. You may lengthen the shelf life of your top seller a bit, but you just showed your entire sales team that a counter offer could be a good way to get a raise.

3. Be proactive and shape the internal communications around the departure. Use it as a chance to check in one on one with your team members.

4. If you decide to address the unmet needs of your team, ensure you set realistic timelines for rolling out those changes, and don’t under-deliver. Otherwise, you’ll invite a domino effect. You want to isolate the departure, not spread it.

5. Don’t go looking for a clone of the talent you lost. Take a fresh look at the role and make it fit with your existing team, business objectives, and needs. Assess your talent requirements by asking yourself and hiring stakeholders these questions:

• What do we need to accomplish in the next 90 days, six months, and year? How can we reach these goals and what type of talent will help us get there?
• What type of employees make up my organization? What skills are missing from our current bench?
• Who are the decision makers for this hire and do we agree on the type of talent we need?

6. Remember to perpetually recruit. Efficiency and accuracy during talent loss are key. Engaging with top talent year-round will alleviate the pains of searching for your new team member.

7. Outline the initiatives that will need to be handed over from the departing team member. Create new accountability with your existing members to deliver on the pending initiatives. Give your team a chance to step up and advance as a result of your loss.

8. Plan for ramp-up. The average seller needs six months to ramp up. Even if you’re recruiting perpetually and have talent to pull from, ramp-up time needs to be accounted for when assessing your business objectives for the next 90 days, six months, and year.

Most people looking to make a move check out mentally before they actually walk out the door. Unhappy employees are unhappy for a reason. If the reasons are in your control and reasonable, fix them. If they’re not fixable, acknowledge them. Unhappy employees risk damaging culture, team dynamics, and your brand. It’s why employee satisfaction rates and business vitality are directly correlated. Companies such as Zappos, Amazon, and Riot Games go as far as paying unhappy employees to leave. They don’t want to employ people who need a paycheck while they interview elsewhere. They don’t want to employ anyone who’s not a good fit with the company culture.

The best companies in the world lose great employees all the time. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than two million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs every day. But you can make the most of these inevitable departures. When your top seller makes a move, remember that a new top seller will emerge. Employment is an ever-changing landscape, so use these shifts as a chance to re-assess your team, your company, and your needs. You may find that what you need is not what you had.

Turnover: The Silent Sales Killer

Today’s post is by speaker, consultant, and sales navigator Troy Harrison, author of Sell Like You Mean It! Email him at Troy@TroyHarrison.com, or visit www.TroyHarrison.com.

 

 

I answered the phone this afternoon, and an earnest voice said, “Hello, Mr. Harrison? This is Chris, and I’m your new representative with Company X.  I’m calling to introduce myself and see if we could set up a time to chat so I could learn about your business, and we could see if Company X could do more for you.” 

Company X is a vendor with whom I have done business for six years. I’m loyal to this company because it provides a service that helps me. I spend quite a bit of money with this company, and I’m sure that when Chris looked at my account, he figured he had a pretty solid customer and a good sales call. That’s why I’m sure that my response was a huge surprise to him (and it might be to you, as well).

“I’m sorry, Chris, but that wouldn’t be a good use of my time or yours,” I told him. Chris seemed shocked, so I decided to explain fully. 

“You see, I get a call just like this every six months from your company. About every six months, more or less, I have a new rep who wants to spend time being a resource to me. I’ve had several of these conversations, and I just don’t have the time for another. I’m already buying what I need from your company, so there’s no up-sell potential for you. I wish you the best. I have your contact information, and if I need you, I’ll call.”

He said, “Well, I do appreciate your candor.”  

I told him, “I’m not trying to be rude. I’ll tell you what, call me on your one-year anniversary, and I’ll give you all the time you want.” 

Chris was disappointed, but I meant what I said. I doubt, based on past experience, that I’ll get that call on his one-year anniversary.

Turnover in sales is a sales and relationship killer. Sooner or later, customers get tired of hearing, “I’m your new salesperson.”  For those salespeople who jump jobs and are saying, “I’m now with a new company,” your customers get tired of that, as well. In both cases, credibility and relationships are the victims.

The reason I wouldn’t speak with Chris was exactly as I told him: it wouldn’t be a good use of my time. By the time he’s getting it figured out, he’ll probably be gone, and I’ll be getting a call from yet another new salesperson. I like to train salespeople – but only when I’m paid to do so.

Here are the raw facts: there is a learning curve for salespeople in any job. Stats show that salespeople reach basic competence in six months, become profitable for the hiring company between month 12 and month 18, and don’t reach full productivity until year three or year four.  When salespeople change jobs within that three-year window (or worse, the one-year window), that tells me that they don’t know what it’s like to reach full productivity.

Ultimately, excess turnover is a problem for our profession, but there are a few things that salespeople, sales managers, and company owners can do to curb it.

For Salespeople

Stand and fight. There are many stated reasons that salespeople short-time a job; however, the main reason is that things get a bit tough, and the salesperson bails. Sales isn’t always an easy career, but the best, most successful salespeople fight through the problems and emerge victorious. 

Stop chasing shiny objects. One of the biggest reasons for turnover is that salespeople chase.  What do they chase? Shiny objects. To put it another way, they chase the new opportunity that seems so much better than the current job – more money, better technology, different territory, etc. I recently interviewed a guy who said that he was a “chaser of the best technology in [his] space at any given time.” This was to explain six job changes in the last 10 years, none of which produced significantly better results or income. Don’t get me wrong: I know that there are times when the only way to advance your career is to make a change, but those changes should be infrequent and well thought out.

For Sales Managers

Hire smart. Too many hires are simply future turnover in the making. Sales managers, lacking a good basis or tools for hiring, simply make “gut hires” that don’t produce results. Lower turnover is the result of good hiring practices.

Coach before firing. Once you have hired someone, you owe it to yourself, as well as to your hire, to give him or her every reasonable opportunity to succeed. That means termination should be a last resort, not a first. The first resort is to troubleshoot and coach your salesperson. You should terminate only when you can look at yourself in the mirror and honestly say that you gave your salesperson a shot. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that both hiring and coaching are well covered in my Unconventional Guide to Sales Management audio course.

For Company Owners

Take a long-term approach. Building a quality sales force isn’t something that happens week by week or necessarily quarter by quarter. It happens over the long haul. In the case of the sales rep who contacted me, I’m sure that ownership or upper management has established a set of standards that basically wash out new sales reps after about six months, hence my frequent calls from new reps. 

Hire a quality sales manager. Quality sales managers coach and improve sales performance; they are drivers of the sales effort, not the passengers. If that’s not your sales manager, it’s time to invest in coaching or training for that person – or rethink who you’ve put in that managerial position.

Turnover has many costs, but it doesn’t have to be a sales killer. The right approach to building a sales force can greatly reduce turnover – which puts profit on your bottom line.