Cube Management: Recruiting Bytes

Patience + Perserverance = New Hire Sucess!

2007-04-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

One of our clients right now has a new sales rep who is about 60 days into her job, has a proven track record, and will most certainly get up to speed in this new position. However, this is an industry change for her and her domain knowledge is lacking with respect to this particular product that the company is offering. This requires a little bit of extra patience from the client to allow for this person to come up to speed on the learning curve.

It's important for us to remember that just because a person has great skills doesn't mean that they're going to immediately going to be able to apply them to a new circumstance, new product, or a new market/industry. Sometimes, we tend to get anxious about how fast we can get through the learning curve and up that learning curve to results with new hires. We need to apply some level of patience and persistence when working with the new hire to make sure that we're bringing him or her up to speed in an orderly fashion and allowing for that person to assimilate the information that they need in order to be successful at their job. It’s very easy to be sixty or ninety days into a new hire and feel like you're not getting to the results that you're looking for. Allowing that anxiety to creep into your thoughts, actions, and discussions with that individual.

Yet, new sales hires want to be supported in their job and want to know that they have management's confidence so it's very important as a sales manager to maintain an even keeled approach to scrutinizing and verifying their activities and their progress while at the same time being supportive and instilling confidence in the new sales hire as they work towards getting ramped up. There is a lot of finesse involved in managing the relationship with a new sales hire. It's not easy work but when done right, you'll have the shortest possible cycle to get the person ramped up and you'll get the best possible results.

Online Tool For Recruiting Sales People

2007-03-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

I understand that a lot of companies out there don't feel that they need to use outside recruiters, even if they specialize in sales and marketing or other types of outside support resources. If your company is planning on going it alone with the regard to hiring new sales people, consider using an outside sales profiling tool such as the one that we use at Objective Management. The express screen tool is a very helpful tool that will help you to determine whether or not a particular candidate can and will sell for your company and whether or not their selling style and experience is aligned with the profile of what it is that you are looking for in a top sales person. This tool, while not providing the only information that you need for the hiring process, will give you yet another set of inputs and data which will make it extremely helpful for you as you make your hiring decision.

All of us have blind spots when it comes to hiring sales people. Often times, we bond with the candidates and we tend to hire people that we like or have the same style as we do, yet a lot of miss-hires come from this exact flaw. This is why it is so important to get an objective, outside read as to whether or not a candidate is really suitable for your company's need before you make an offer.

An online sales profiling tool should be used as a compliment as opposed to a substitute for other parts of your interviewing process. Those interviewing processes should include behavioral interviewing, team interviewing, and sales achievement tracking to name a few, but by using this outside tool, it will greatly reduce your risk of a miss-hire when it comes to hiring sales people. I suggest that if you're not using an outside tool such as this as a part and partial of your sales hiring process, you're missing an opportunity to adopt a widely recognized best practice when it comes to hiring sales people. So, even when you don't want to use a recruiter, consider getting outside support and looking at the tools that are available on the internet today.

recruiting

A Good Sales Recruiter is Worth Its Weight In Gold.

2007-03-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Often times we come across companies that are looking to hire sales people but don't recognize the value of an outside sales recruiting service. The reason is because they are experienced hiring managers. Certainly most sales managers, one of their key capabilities is to hire good people, but getting to those people is half the battle. This is where a good recruiting company can help. A good head hunter knows how to go in and access the best talent, where ever it may be, including companies which you could not approach directly and can make the difference between hiring B and C players for your company, those who are out looking for a job, and hiring A players, those who typically aren't out looking for a job.

The results between hiring a B or C player and hiring an A player can be truly astounding. Particularly in the sales arena, a top produce is one who can produce several times the amount of sales as a B or C player. Getting to those people is no easy task and that's where seeking outside assistance can make a real difference. What's the bottom line impact? Sometimes it can be worth several million dollars of incremental sales for your company per year. Can you afford not to hire the best in your business? If you really are trying to grow and take your company to the next level, it's important that you don’t settle for less than the best. This is why a head hunter is so critical to bringing you the talent that you need in order to grow your company.

recruiting
career search

Candidates: Focus Your Message

2007-03-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

If you're a sales and marketing executive, you've probably spent a good portion of your career developing and refining specific positioning and messaging that you've used for the companies that you've worked with with your customers, right? Well, all I'm saying here is, before you go out to market yourself, make sure that you're properly packaged, just like any company would be properly packaged in its marketplace. What that means is that you've got to make sure that your marketing message is clear, concise, and lines up perfectly with what you want to be doing.
This is where a lot of executives fall down. They say, "Well, I'll be happy to take anything in sales and marketing, I'll do just about anything." Again, that's not good enough.

If you're passion is working in manufacturing automation software, focus on that. If you are looking for a VP of business development position, make sure that's part of your message. If you're looking for that kind of an opportunity in a start-up or emerging growth company, make sure that's part of your career objective as well. Instead of saying I'd take anything, approach you’re networking with, "I'm looking for a VP of business development position with a start up or emerging growth Software Company in the manufacturing automation sector." That kind of career objective is something I can get my arms around and start helping somebody along the way to find the opportunity they're looking for. So, make sure if you’re a sales or marketing executive to eat your own dog food when it comes to honing your own message before you get out on the search beat.

recruiting
career search

Focus Your Career Search

2007-03-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

If you are a top sales and marketing producer at the executive, mid-level, or frontline, and looking for a new job, make sure that you have a laser focus in your resume on what your career objective is. Spell out exactly the ideal job you are looking for at the front of your resume in succinct terms so that anybody who sees your resume understands exactly what you're looking for, why you would fit the opportunity that they are screening for, and how they can help you find what you want.

A good career objective includes the following elements: position, title, size of company, industry focus, duties and responsibilities, and overall cultural fit. By spelling out these elements, in clear, succinct, short sentences, you'll be doing yourself a great favor. Most recruiters and people who are looking for talent are really trying to figure out who lines up exactly with their requirements. They are trying to do a quick screen and a job match. By giving people a precise idea of what your career objective is and how it lines up with your experience; you will be setting yourself apart from most resumes which define their skills in very broad terms. Likewise, by doing this you'll also be able to get much better help from your colleagues and associates when you are out networking, looking for that next job and looking for referrals to that next job.

Why? Because people who you meet with to network are usually happy to help, but they need to know exactly what you are looking for, and you need to paint a picture for them in their mind that gives them a precise idea of the ideal situation that you'd be looking for in a new company. If you do that, and when you do that right, well connected people who are trying to help you will immediately know who to send you on to who might be able to help you land the job of your dream. Make sure your career objective is very well focused on your resume and that it covers the essential elements of your ideal job scenario. If you do this well, what are the chances that you'll get that ideal job? Well, a lot better than if you don't do this right.

recruiting
career search

Tips for Candidates Working With Recruiters

2007-02-08T15:33:00.000-08:00

We gets lots of sales and marketing executives, mid level and front line job seekers who come to our office and we're happy to spend time with them to get to know them and to understand their skill sets, what they're looking for, and to put their resume into our search database. We make sure to follow up with every candidate because we feel it's important that we get to know them so that when we do have a search that's relevant to their skill set, we can immediately consider them for those opportunities.

Many candidates come to us not actually understanding exactly how a search firm works. As a result of that, they continue to pound us for opportunities, even when we've already told them that we aren't working with anything that is relevant to their skill set at a given time. Candidates need to remember that executive recruiting and sales and marketing search firms like ours are client retained. Our clients are the ones who pay our bills and therefore we focus a very large part of our effort on sourcing, screening, interviewing and presenting candidates that line up with exactly what our clients are looking for at any given time. This does not mean that we're not interested in meeting candidates. As I've said before, we are happy to network with them and get acquainted, but it's important for a candidate to remember that if you approach a search firm, if they are willing to give you time, don't keep following up too often with the search firm if they don't have something that fits your skill set right now.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, the reason why we spend time to meet candidates is so that we can develop a very good profile of their skill set, exactly what they're good at and what they want to be doing, so that when a search does come up, we're actually capable of presenting them with those opportunities. We make it our business to know candidates specifically so that when the right opportunity comes along, we can jump on that with good talent.

Does this mean that if you're a candidate, I'm saying, "Don't call us, we'll call you?" Well, partly. The best candidates that we see understand that once they're in our system, what's required is just from time to time, an email or some sort of touch base communication telling us what they're up to, how their job search is going, whether or not they're still available. What this does is it serves to keep them in our minds which is important so that we can make sure that we do give them a shot at any opportunities that are relevant. The worst candidates are constantly harping on us, trying to get us to give them a job, and it just doesn't work that way.
If you are a candidate and you're approaching recruiting firms looking for a new position, practice the following rules:

1. Get the appointment and make sure that you've brought an up to date resume with a very clear depiction of the kind of position you're looking for.

2. After the appointment, make sure to follow up with the recruiter, and thank them to remind them what it is that you're looking for.

3. Then, periodically, once every four to six weeks I'd say, ping them via email or call them and leave them a voicemail and just let them know what you're up to and how your search is progressing, and remind them in a nice way that you're still looking and that you appreciate any consideration of opportunities that are relevant.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Behavioral and Performance Interviewing for Sales Achievers

2007-01-30T16:56:00.000-08:00

If you are a CEO or a sales manager and you're in the process of interviewing top sales talent, you probably have been trained on standard behavioral interviewing techniques which are used to make sure that you are getting to the heart of a candidates past behaviors as to predicting future performance. The other critical component that's probably even more important is to make sure that in your behavioral interviewing process, you're integrating performance based interviewing questions that really get to the heart of whether or not a candidate has the track record of consistent achievement that is an accurate predictor of their ability to achieve their sales goals once they come to work for you.

Performance based interviewing means that you need to integrate a number of specific measurements of metrics into the actual questions that you ask to a sales interviewee. Those include providing a summary of sales achievements by year against their actual quota, and then moving upstream from there to look at their activities in terms of daily and weekly customer visits, call counts proposals delivers, face to face customer visits, percentage time spent at the sea level versus at the front line decision maker level, etc. A good sales candidate should be able to rattle off these types of measures from previous positions.

Performance based interviewing also means that you're going beyond just asking a person how they faced and won in a difficult sales challenge. What it translates to is asking the candidate how they've consistently beat their sales goals. Those are the kind of people that you're looking to hire anyway, and by asking performance based questions, you'll have a much better chance of weeding through a pile of resumes and a pile of potential candidates to get to those true top performers. After all, the true top sales producers, those who are in the top five percent of their class, can outsell the next ten to twenty percent of sales people by a factor of two fold. So why wouldn't you invest in hiring only the best?

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

There is Still a Role for Farmers in Your Sales Organization

2007-01-22T14:48:00.000-08:00

I have a sales person who I've been working very hard on coaching to improve her ability to get new business for our company. After investing lots of time and energy, what I've really come to as a final decision is that this individual is not going to make it as a hunter. Now the question is, what do I do about it? Well, one of the things I believe in is always looking for the best in people and looking to play to their strengths. This particular sales person is an outstanding troubleshooter, problem solver, and a champion to the customer. She is also a very good relationship builder and has an uncanny ability to help our organization to mobilize itself in order to solve customer problems when they do arise. What better role for this person than a job as an account manager, straddling the fence of sales and customer service? I'm redeploying this person into this position, knowing full well that she's not going to do a great job of finding new business, but will accomplish a very important task for us, which is to manage our current accounts and to maximize our customer retention.

If your organization isn't expending some of its resources on customer retention, there's a good chance that you're digging new pits to fill old ones. What do I mean by this? Well, your organization could be spending time acquiring new customers to replace the ones that you're losing. For this reason, an account management or customer service function is extremely important to the overall mix of your sales organization and to your customer facing operations in general.

Some people would choose to terminate this type of non-performer, but I believe that everybody has their utility and in our particular organization, we have lots of need to make sure that we are working to retain our current customers, so it's very easy for me to move this person into an account management role and thereby improve our overall ability to satisfy our existing business as a foundation for more growth.

If you have a sales rep who is not making it in his/her job, sure that you don't decide to terminate without at least figuring out if there's another role for that kind of person in your company. What you'll find is that the DNA of a relationship builder or account manager can be very useful to your overall organizational success.
sales
marketing
executive search

Hiring Marketing Executives With Substance

2006-11-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

If you're a senior executive looking to add a key member to your marketing staff, but you've never hired marketing people before: buyer beware! Why do I say this? While there are a lot of talented marketing executives out there with an excellent repertoire of skills and experience, there also are marketing people who lack the substance, the training, the skill sets, and the understanding of marketing dynamics in order to really have a positive impact on your business.

What is the profile of an empty marketing suit? Well, typically it's somebody who dresses well, is very polished, speaks nicely, and uses all the latest fancy buzzwords, but who has little/no track record of actual execution or success. This person is great at "wowing" a CEO through the interviewing process, but that's about all they're good at.

What you should be looking for is a marketing executive who's got true substance and capabilities.

What I want to outline here are some of the key hiring criteria when you're looking for a good marketing executive:

• They should have outstanding quantitative training with a strong background in mathematics, which translates into being able to do budgeting, forecasting and tracking.

• They should have proven analytical skills that are used to survey and analyze complex sets of data, do market segmentations, sizing, competitive analysis, etc.

• They should have strong strategic thinking skills and a strong grasp of marketing strategy, as evidenced by previous challenges they have faced and dealt with in their career.

• They should have formal training in strategic marketing planning, product planning, new product development, etc.

• They should understand the modern methods for marketing communications for both awareness building as well as lead generation. In particular, a marketing executive of today needs to have a very strong grasp of Internet marketing since that’s how so much of today’s successful marketing gets done.

• A marketing executive needs to be able to lead. That means they have to have very strong collaborative and influencing skills, that can be brought to bear on setting a direction for an executive team. They also need to know how to instill good marketing discipline.

Today's "best in class" companies are both market and customer driven. The marketing leader needs to be the voice of the customer and the marketplace as it relates to setting strategy on target markets, new product development, gross margins, sales channels, messaging, etc. – the list goes on. Given this level of complexity in skills and experience, making a good hire can be a real challenge for the untrained eye. This is why bringing in a recruiter or executive search firm which specializes in marketing is so important for many firms who lack this expertise in-house.

If you are in the process of looking for a member of your marketing team, make sure that you follow a rigorous process to clearly understand what's under the hood with the people who you are interviewing. If you don't, and you end up with an empty marketing suit, it'll cost you tremendous amounts of money, lost market share, and lost opportunity.

Can you afford that?

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Recruiting Marketing Talent: Hire the Artist or the Scientist?

2006-11-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

Following my last blogs, let's talk a little bit more about the difference between the artistic and creative side of marketing communications and the science of marketing and what's more important to a successful company.

When you are recruiting a marketing executive, you should be looking for somebody who much more resembles a scientist than an artist. Why? The scientist is the one who's going to bring you the analytical, quantitative, and strategic thinking skills that are necessary to properly target the right markets and reach the right customers with the right products. This requires more technical and scientific skills than it does artistic/creative skills, such as what you'd find in a marketing communications person.

Many of the top marketing people we meet and who we place, have deep quantitative analysis skills and often times come from technical backgrounds. In the technology sector, many of the marketing executives we place actually come from an engineering background and have moved up through product management or product development into a marketing executive role. These are the kinds of "scientists" who have the quantitative and analytic skills that are so important to modern marketing effectiveness.

The "empty marketing suits" we meet may have the ability to develop flashy ad campaigns and be very polished communicators, but often lack the substance to analyze, create or manage a company's core strategy. For this reason, if a company has to pick between marketing disciplines (the strategic and quantitative side vs. the creative side), it should focus on the former and outsource the latter.

Why is this? Well, there are thousands of creative agencies out there that are capable of taking your company's messaging and positioning and translating it into effective sales tools, advertising copy, brochures, collateral, etc. But there aren't lots of people that can actually lead a company's strategic marketing effort internally.

If you are up against a decision on what kind of person you hire to lead your marketing efforts, I would opt for the quantitative, analytical, scientific marketing type and I would outsource the creative, qualitative, marketing communications types of activities.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

How to Decide When a Sales and Marketing Job is for You

2006-11-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

Today I had a 45 minute conversation with a very senior sales and marketing leader who wanted my advice regarding her decision on whether or not to take a VP of Sales and Marketing job at a leading company in the technology space. I spent time walking through her decision criteria and helping her to work to a conclusion on this subject. One of the key things that came out of our discussion was she was having serious trepidation about whether or not this particular job was a good fit with her career goals. While she liked many attributes of the job, she wasn't really excited about it, and so we talked a lot about why this particular position was not something that sparked her passion. At the end of our discussion, I said, "I'm going to let you make this decision on your own, but my advice to you is that if you are right up against the edge on whether or not to take a job opportunity, even if it's highly compensated like this one is, if the answer is "maybe," then it should be "no."

The reason why, is if you're not completely passionate about an opportunity, you're not really excited about the prospects of joining the company, and if you're not visualizing exactly how you can make a difference to help the company grow it's top-line revenues and transform itself, why would you settle for just another “job?”

The most precious thing you have as a career-minded professional is your time, and how you decide to devote it. We spend most of our waking hours working, and if we aren't excited about the work that we're doing, if we aren't passionate, if we don't feel the drive ignited within us when we go to work every day, the only question I have is, "Why are we doing it?"

So if you are faced with the hard decision about whether or not to accept a job offer, whether or not it's the only job offer you have, my advice to you is, if the answer is "maybe," and if you're not totally excited about the opportunity, then pass. Pass and keep looking for that special career move that's going to get your juices flowing, ignite your passion and get you totally committed and totally jazzed about how you're spending your day. That's something worth working for, and that's a hell of a lot more than just a job.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Good Recruiters Do The Right Thing

2006-11-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

I have a situation developing today whereby a client of mine is avoiding engaging us in a recruiting project, while at the same time going through the final interview process to hire somebody who got introduced to him from me through my network. Both the candidate and the client are uncomfortable with this situation. In particular, because they're worried they're going to ruffle my feathers and I’m going to lose my recruiting fees from this project.

Well the fact is that we are going to lose our recruiting fees, but there is nothing I can do about it except take the high road and accept that when I do the right thing and help people, they will ultimately reward me by maintaining our relationship. I expect that over time those relationships will be far more important than the transaction fee or the recruiting fee that I just gave up in this particular instance.

Some recruiting companies are so focused on working for their fees that they forget who they're really working for. Some recruiting companies are so focused on closing deals that they forget what the primary purpose of their job is. It's really easy for recruiting firms to become very transactional and money driven. In fact, right now is a perfect time for people to be that way because the market is booming and there's so much opportunity, but the fact is that the best search firms are the ones that treat both their candidates and clients with the utmost dignity and respect, and look beyond the value of their monetary goals towards the value of their relationships, and how those relationships over time will reward them.

I believe a good recruiter, particularly in sales and marketing, has a long-term perspective. In our niche of this business, what we find is that good candidates end up becoming good clients. When I introduce a VP of sales candidate to a particular client and that candidate ends up being placed in a position, often times he/she will become my client. As a result of that, anything that I've done to maintain the integrity and value of my relationship with that person through the process will pay me back in spades.

If you are in the process of looking for a good recruiting firm to outsource your hiring process in sales and marketing to, make sure that you go beyond the surface and explore the values and ethics the firm has, before you decide to retain them. I believe that if the values and ethics of the firm are aligned with your own, you'll have the best success in getting the kind of results that you're looking for.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Remember The "Give/Get" When Networking For A New Job

2006-11-03T16:06:00.000-08:00

This morning I had a top VP of sales candidate in my office. This person came to us because he's looking for a new career position. He asked us to spend some time with him to help him talk through his career search as well as do some networking and also give consideration to him for specific positions that we're searching for right now. We spent about 45 minutes together and through the conversation after hearing about his search and the direction that he was going I gave him several specific contacts, phone numbers and referrals that I felt would be useful. I also assured him that we would continue to keep him in consideration for positions which were appropriate as they became available.

At the end of our conversation this individual said, "Now I'd like to ask you: what can I do for you? You folks have been very gracious with your time and giving me ideas and some great referrals. What can I do to help you in return for your time and all of the good will that you've established here?"

This was an excellent example of how professional sales people understand that in any relationship there needs to be a positive "give/get" for both parties. This individual obviously understood this, because he took the time to ask us what it was that he could do to help us. I, of course, gratefully responded that we would be very anxious to get any referrals that he has to top sales and marketing candidates for the positions that we're filling right now. I also told him that we would love to get referrals for any companies which need to retain the services of a firm like ours in order to hire sales and marketing talent.

If you're out there looking for your next great job, make sure that you're a giver and not just a taker. If you simply ask how can you help in return at the end of every networking interview, you'll go a long way toward establishing good will. You'll also build relationships that last beyond your job search.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Integrating Your Passion With Your Career

2006-11-03T16:11:00.000-08:00

Do you wake up every morning excited about the prospects of going to work? Are you generally smiling during the day as you go about your activities? Do you love what you do? Do you love the people you do it with? These are all questions that I ask of people or try to uncover as I interview them for sales and marketing leadership roles. The fact is, there is a very high percentage of the population in today's workforce who views their work as "just another job." In fact, the level of discontentment amongst most people with respect to their daily work is really quite astounding; particularly given the fact that people spend more time at their work than any other activity.

When we interview people who are looking for sales and marketing positions, we always start by trying to understand what gets them excited. What do they love to do? What are they really good at? How do they plan to carry that passion and positive energy forward in their career? Unfortunately a lot of job seekers fail to make the connection between what they really love, what they're good at, and what they want to be doing in their job. A lot of times they follow a career path that someone else tells them to pursue, like their parents. You'd be surprised at how many people pursue a particular career in order to subconsciously please mom or dad.

The fact is, that people do best in their jobs when they really love what they do. When they get excited about the work they do every day. When it connects to their inner core and their own sense of purpose. That's when people perform best at work. That's when the days go by quickest and that's when people have a smile on their faces all day long.

If you work in sales because your dad did, or because you thought it might be a good career or because you couldn't figure out what else it was that you wanted to do, and you really view it more as a job than as a career, you might want to think about this. We see sales people come through our offices that view their job as just that - nothing more than a job. You can tell that's how their attitudes have shaped their career. As a result, they move from job to job. They jump from company to company and from industry to industry, searching for something they can't quite find. Their sales achievements are typically poor to average and they're not capable of really sticking with a company. We see sales people that come through like that and my best advice to them is, "Don't be a sales person because you've been told to, or because somebody thought it might be a good idea for you. Be a sales person because you love it."

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Recruiting Top Sales & Marketing Talent: It's All About Momentum

2006-11-03T16:08:00.000-08:00

We're working with a client right now on a sales search, and unfortunately she has dragged out the recruiting process to the point where we are considering whether or not we can complete this assignment. In particular, I'm concerned that this client is about to lose a candidate that we've worked very hard to put in front of them, who is ideally suited, and who is very interested in taking the job.

Every once in a while we run into clients that lack a sense of urgency when it comes to completing a recruiting project.

This troubles me because when we work with these kinds of clients, we can see that they become their own worst enemy. Sometimes, clients go very slowly and methodically because they've been burned in the past and they want to avoid a miss-hire. Other times, the person who's responsible for making the decision has too many things on his/her plate, and is not able to continue forward at an acceptable pace.

Whatever the case may be, top sales and marketing candidates have a short "shelf life" for a specific position, and that shelf life can expire if the recruiting process is not proceeded through with haste. (When I talk about the word haste, I don't advocate making a hasty decision. A good recruiting process, particularly in sales and marketing, always requires a very deep level of diligence and a very rigorous process as I've advocated throughout this blog and in other materials in our website). Having said that, proceeding with a lack of purpose and a lack of momentum tends to send a message to top candidates that you're really not that interested in bringing them aboard.

The best sales and marketing candidates enter and exit the job market quickly, so you need to be willing to move quickly to recruit them onto your team.

The recruiting process needs to be looked at as something that has a start and an end. The end is either a yes/no decision and an offer letter, and in the middle, there's a series of steps that you pass through or phases of the process that you have to go through in order to get to that conclusion. My advice to companies that are trying to hire the best, is to make sure that you proceed purposefully and swiftly through each phase without skipping any steps and always move towards finalizing the process as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If you do this you'll have the best chance of capturing the kind of talent that you are looking for to drive the growth of your business. If you don't you'll end up losing the best candidates and have to settle for B or C players in order to staff your sales team.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople (Part 2)

2006-08-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

A third idea is when you are speaking with references, ask if you can have an offline discussion with them, during the non-working hours when they’re not in the office. The reason for this is to try to get candid information from the references about the individual, as opposed to the company’s official stance on the types of information they will or will not give out during a reference check discussion.

One of the most important things you need to do when you’re checking references on sales people, is to actually tell the reference the specific sales achievement history that you were given from the candidate. in order to verify that those facts are correct. Make sure that you take sales achievement history and quota data that you got from the candidate, and verify these figures with their ex-supervisor. A lot of times, if we don’t check references and specifically verify that the candidate achieved a certain level of sales, we're really missing the opportunity to verify the objectiveness of the data we've been provided through the interviewing process.

Another very important tip when you are talking to a sales candidate's references, is ask them about key accounts that the candidate actually brought to the company. If you’re looking for a hunter, you’ll want to make sure the supervisor can remember big wins that the candidate had when they worked for them.

Another tip is to ask the references whether or not they would hire the candidate back into their previous position if they had the opportunity. A good candidate would always be welcome back to the company, and a poor sales producer wouldn’t be. So these are some of the things that I suggest that you talk about when you are checking references on sales candidates.

recruiting
employment
executive search
staffing

Career Search Considerations for Top Sales People

2006-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

If you are in the midst of a transition and thinking about making a career change and you’re a top sales producer for your company, it can feel very risky to make a move; particularly if you’ve established a real strong track record in your job. Yet all of us reach a point when we know its time to move from a very good situation into the next phase of our career. I personally have experienced this on several occasions over the span of my professional life and I’m sure you have as well.

So what is it that you’re looking for as you search for that next great sales position? Well, a number of things. First of all, think about the following factors:

• How stable is the company?
• What are its growth opportunities?
• What is managements vision for building a successful business?
• What is the company’s unique selling proposition?
• How much intellectual property does it have to back its ability to compete effectively in its marketplace?
• Is the company well funded and capitalized and can it take advantage of the opportunities that it has?
• Is the leadership principled and do they have the kinds of values that you can get excited about being a part of?
• What's the quality of the team member that you would be working with?
• How’s the compensation plan?
• Is an opportunity for upside if you can exceed your annual revenue goals?
• What sort of distribution channel partnerships are there that will help you to facilitate the growth in your territory?
• What sort of career growth opportunities does the company offer?
• Is the company willing to hire and promote from within, or do they go outside to recruit their top talent?

These are some of the considerations I would be looking for if I were thinking about a career change in sales. The key is balancing what you see intellectually as you examine an opportunity, with how you feel emotionally about it. Ultimately a gut check is a very important part in making a career change decision.

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Dealing With Truth In The Interviewing Process

2006-08-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

If you’re a sales professional and have had at least on career misstep, how do you deal with that when you’re interviewing for your next great job? This is an important question because we interview top sales candidates all the time and while there are many people who have had a smooth career without any bad decisions or failed startups, inevitably, most people have probably encountered some difficulty in their career along the way, particularly if they’re risk takers. Those of you who have worked in startups for most of your life in particular can appreciate this. As we know, 8 out of 10 start-ups fail, so the probability that you’ve been involved along the way with a business that has not gotten off the ground is pretty high if you’ve had the kind of risk profile.

How you deal with this on your résumé and through the interviewing process is very important. First of all, its important that even if you had a mishap with a particular company that you still listed on your résumé, there are ways to de-emphasize your participation in a startup, particularly if it was shorter than one year, by listing all your sales accomplishment at the top of your résumé and only having a brief chronological history of your actual employment relationships.

Probably more important, when people ask you about a particular job where you can't point to any particular successes, its very important through the interviewing process that you be up-front with the interviewer. Don't provide too much information at the outset, but if you are asked to provide the details of what happened in a particular situation, how it happened, why it happened, and what you learned, then you should focus on making sure you give clear, explicit answers.

Interviewers want honesty above all. They want to see evidence that a person is willing to take ownership and responsibility for any mishaps that they’ve had in their career, particularly as it relates to startups.

One thing that you’ll want to avoid is blaming only the external factors related to a job situation that was negative. Employers want to know that a candidate has actually learned from a particular situation and takes some level of ownership for what did or did not happen in a business failure. So if you are about to go out on a great interview and you've got a few chinks in your career armor, make sure to not hide from or avoid the truth, as you go into the interview process. You’ll find that you’ll commend a lot more respect and receive more opportunities if you deal with those kinds of situations in an honest and up-front way.

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employment
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Social Networking for Your Job Search

2006-08-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

The internet has brought some wonderful new tools over the last few years, that can help you to rapidly accelerate your job search through the use of social networking programs such as Spoke, LinkedIn, and others. These programs allow you to establish linkages between yourself and different people who you are associated with in business and in personal pursuits, and to also build your network forward and backward from a particular point in time, in terms of relationships that you’ve had over the span of your career history. When properly used, programs like LinkedIn can have a powerful network effect and allow you to rapidly harness the power of your network connections to enhance your career search. If you’re a sales and marketing professional at the executive or the mid-level and have lots of contacts, consider using one of these programs as one of the foundation strategies for your job search. It’s very easy to sign up for them and you’ll be amazed by the number of people in your network who already subscribe. We like LinkedIn in particular.

By using these programs build a web of connections, you can gain introductions to many people who you would not otherwise be able to gain access to. This is a very powerful tool when it comes to targeting companies and individuals that you’ll want to be approaching as a part of your overall job search.

If you are an employer and in the process of recruiting sales and marketing talent, using these programs to advertise your job postings is a wonderful way to attract top talent. We've successfully posted several jobs on LinkedIn and had great results, in terms of responses from people in our networks who are interested in the jobs we’re advertising for.

Other Programs such as Jigsaw also provide an outstanding platform for social networking and for developing contacts that can help you in your job search. We are a regular participant in Jigsaw and have found that a multiplier effect on our marketing efforts has been created as a result of having used this program.

So if you’re considering looking for a new career position or making a career move, make sure that you’re signing up for a social networking program. Talk to your friends to find out which ones they’re using. It will help you to greatly leverage your contacts for an enhanced career search.

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Job Seekers: Make Sure That You Do A Good Job Of Contacting Recruiting Firms

2006-08-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

Often times we get jobseekers in the local market who submit their résumés to our firm for specific positions, but they’ve never taken the time previous to the job listing to actually post their résumé with us. This causes us to ask ourselves why job seekers are not doing a better job of contacting companies like ours that specialize in sales and marketing recruiting.

If you are looking for a new job or starting a new career search, make sure that you take the time to research all of the local recruiting firms that specialize in sales and marketing positions in your local market, and that you systematically contact each one of them in order to get your résumé into their database.

Also make sure that you’ve had a personal discussion with whoever it is who's responsible for talking to candidates. Why is this? Well the fact is, that recruiting firms tend to review candidates that are in their database first, relative to positions they have open and only start sourcing candidates outside of their database after they’ve already looked at those internal candidates. Also, they tend to give preference to people who they’ve met face-to-face and are impressed with. So you want to make sure that as a job-seeker, your résumé is on file and that you’re personally known to each sales and marketing recruiter in your local market. This will give you a much better chance of being considered for the opportunities that recruiters are working on at any given time, and it’ll multiply your chances of short-term success in finding the job that you’re looking for.

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Map Your Reference Checking Process To The Job You’re Recruiting For

2006-08-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

A lot of times when people do reference checks on candidates, they fail to adapt the reference checking process to the type of position that they’re looking to fill and therefore ask very generic questions. This fails to uncover the kind of information that you really need to have in order to understand whether or not a specific candidate is a good match with the specific job you're trying to fill.

Prior to performing reference checks on sales and marketing candidates, make sure that you come up with a specific list of questions that you're going to ask each reference that are aligned to the exact hiring criteria that you've set for the position that you're trying to fill. If you're looking for a market research person, and you’re trying to check references on a candidate, make sure that you go into depth regarding their market research capabilities, their analytical skills, and other aspects of the candidate’s qualities that would indicate whether or not they have the right DNA for a market research position. If you’re hiring an internet marketing person, make sure that you ask questions relative to their knowledge of search engine marketing, their understanding of email platforms, their ability to manage pay-per-click campaigns and other job-specific hiring criteria.

So, as you check references on sales and marketing candidates, make sure that you adapt the questions that you ask each reference to the job you are trying to fill. What you’ll find is that you’ll uncover much more relevant information than whether or not the person is just a good person or whether or not they’ve just worked at the company. What you really want to get to is the heart of their achievement, there aptitude and their match with your specific position.

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Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople (Part 1)

2006-08-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

We see lots of companies that skip reference checking at the last stage of their recruiting process, before they hire sales candidates. As a result, they make mis-hires. We also have witnessed companies that realize their reference checking is inadequate, because they didn’t get to the right types of references as they made their final hiring decision.

Here’s a couple of suggestions to follow when it comes to checking references on sales candidates, before you actually make a job offer:

First, make sure that the candidate’s references are all direct supervisors whom he/she worked for in previous sales positions. Why is this important? Well, a lot of sales people, particularly those who haven't produced very well, give you references from colleagues and other friends of theirs without giving you the people they actually worked for. If a person can't produce references from their previous sales manager or supervisor, it’s probably a good indicator they’re not hirable. Those kinds of candidates usually should be rejected outright.

Second, make sure that you dig deeply to get the references that are missing from a candidate’s list. If you have a sales candidate that gave you one supervisor from three jobs ago, but not the supervisors from their past two jobs, ask for those references as well, and if they say that they can't find them, ask why and tell them you’re going to need to have them track them down. You need to talk to a number of direct supervisors in order to really get a rounded perspective of the candidate.

When sales people are hesitant to give you references from any/all of previous sales supervisors, that should set off an alarm in your mind and you should make sure that you try to get those references, even if they haven’t been listed.

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Retained Verses Contingent Search For Sales And Marketing Talent

2006-08-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

If you’re in the process considering using a recruiting firm in order to find sales and marketing talent for your company, you may know that there are at least a couple of options out there for you to consider when it comes to the type of arrangement between yourself and an executive search firm. One is retained and the other is contingent. By retained we mean you are working exclusively with the search firm and you’re paying their fees as you go for performing those services. Contingent means that you only pay the fees at the time they successfully place a candidate in the position that you’re looking to fill. The notion of exclusive verses non-exclusive is a different one though in contingent search. Many companies do contingent search, but they want to know that they are building an exclusive partnership with their client for the assignments that they’re taking on. If you are thinking about outsourcing your recruiting to a search firm, you should consider doing it on an exclusive basis as opposed to hiring several recruiting firms to do it simultaneously. Why? Because you’ll get the best results.

Many companies make the mistake of outsourcing their searches to a group of firms, thinking that they’ll get better coverage of potential candidates, but in fact, the results is a number of search firms are really giving them no quality attention on their job orders.

If you want a recruiting firm to do a great job for you in finding the best talent for your company, then you should consider giving the assignment to a firm which you believe has the best overall candidate pool and skills in the functional area that you’re looking for. In particular, you should retain the services of the company that focuses on sales and marketing if that’s what you’re looking for, in finance or IT or whatever the specialty is according to your search. But as you retain the services of the search firm, make sure that you’re willing to invest yourself in the process and in the relationship that you’re creating with its people. That will give you the best potential to find top candidates.

Why is this? It’s simple. Recruiting firms that don’t work exclusively on their assignments tend to take on a lot of searches simultaneously, and their efforts get diluted to the point where they are doing a little bit of a lot for everybody, but nothing really well in particular. This is the risk that you run when you pull in multiple recruiting companies to do a single search for you, particularly for higher-level positions in sales and marketing. Now it might be fine if you do this for staffing administrative positions, but when it comes to finding that A-level candidate for a very specialized sales or marketing position, you really want to make sure that your search firm is a partner of yours, that they understand your needs deeply and are willing to take a very focused approach to finding and vetting candidates according to your detailed search criteria. That’s why it makes a lot of sense, whether you go contingent or retained, that you pursue an exclusive partnering approach with the recruiting company that you decide to work with.

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Pursue A Career In International Sales

2006-08-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

If you are thinking about or are interested in pursuing a career in international sales, it's a wonderful opportunity. In fact, with globalization, there's an increasing demand for people who have international skills to fill these kinds of positions. Unfortunately, most Americans of traditional descent are not aptly prepared for such a profession. So a lot of international sales positions go to foreign nationals who already speak different languages and come from different regions of the world. If you want to prepare for an international sales career, my advice to you is this: first of all, learn a foreign language – or several! Don’t just take a year or two of language in college -- actually become fluent, or bilingual. Immerse yourself in the language. In order to do that, you’ll need to follow my second piece of advice. Go live in the area of the world that you are most interested in and become completely immersed in that culture. Become a local in that area. If you do that, when you come back to the United States, being fluent or bilingual and having a deep appreciation of the area which you are interested in, you will be very attractive to potential employers which are targeting that area or already have operations. Third, if you want to pursue an international sales career, make sure that you gain overseas work experience.

Traveling abroad, moving around with a back pack while in youth hostels doesn’t count for practical international work experience when it comes to pursuing this kind of career. My own background: I spent 4 years traveling and working in international sales in Latin America, Europe and Asia before I came back to the United states for my first US-based international sales job. As a result of having that experience working in sales abroad, I was very easily employable and got snapped up by a great company. It was my language skills and foreign work experience that made this possible.

So, if you are thinking about pursuing a career in international sales or marketing, make sure that you move overseas, get practical work experience, and learn at least one foreign language related to the region that you are interested in. Those are the key attributes to pursuing this career. Wondering how you can get an international sales job or get international work experience? There are management internship exchange programs that allow for recent college graduates to get overseas work experience in their field of study. One of those is AIESEC, which offers an internship exchange program worldwide.

Look into study abroad programs as well, if you can’t find an internship or work experience. While it’s not as powerful as working overseas, it’s another path for gaining an international background that is attractive to global employers.

An international sales career is a very interesting and rewarding job and one that I would recommend highly. You get to travel the globe; you get to experience the wonder of diverse languages and cultures; you get to grow a lot faster than most people would who are pursuing a domestic job, because of the diversity and skills you acquire.

An international sales position is a great fast track into general management. Why? Because people who work in international typically have a much broader set of responsibilities than people in domestic positions.

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employment
executive search
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Exploring A Sales Career (Part 2)

2006-08-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

One of the most important things that you can do for yourself to determine whether or not sales is an appropriate career move is to talk to different sales people -- people who are already in the profession. Find out what their daily routine looks like. Understand more clearly the kinds of challenges, problems and issues that they face in their work. Spend a day job shadowing with them to understand their daily routine.

So, if you're thinking about exploring a career in sales, make sure to do a lot of information interviewing with different types of sales people to get their feedback and to understand really what their jobs all about.

Another thing that you can do is get yourself prepared by taking a course in sales or a sales training course or consider getting yourself into a routine of reading some books on sales. There are many great books out there that cover the topic and will easily give you an idea and an appreciation of what sales is all about.

If you are thinking about moving into sales directly out of college, one of the most important things to do is to find a good sales team to work with and a particularly good sales manager who you can learn from. If you can’t find a good sales manager, make sure that you pair yourself up with somebody who has a lot of sales experience and is a true professional so they can mentor you. Why is this important? Well, just like any other career pursuit, becoming successful in sales is all about learning from the best and developing positive work habits and behaviors. Sales is not something that you can do just any old way. Its requires a certain methodology and system. A successful sales person and management knows that building and executing that system day in and day out is what produces consistent repeatable results.

So, if you want to get into sales, make sure that you find a place where you can learn from the best. It’ll make all the difference in terms of your achievement, you earning power, and your ability to advance in your sales career with some of the best companies out there.

Also, if you are thinking about a sales job, make sure that your first one is in a place where you can get lots of training. Why is this important? Because most employers actually don’t offer good sales training programs, but the good ones do. What are some of these companies? Well, IBM is legendary for its training, so is Xerox, just to name a few. The point is that you want to be looking for a company that has strong entry level sales training programs, and where you can get the education you need in order to learn the right skills to become successful in a sales career.

recruiting
employment
executive search
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