Who’s in charge of your sales recruitment?

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Who’s in charge of your sales recruitment?

March 19, 2009 in Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Management, Sales Talent

1. How much is a good sales person worth to you?
2. How much is a good hiring manager worth to you?

Speaking about recruitment in these current economic times may seem foolish, however in the area of selling, this is where you could make great strides by picking up highly effective sales people who have found themselves on the job market or are looking for a better business to work in. I know of a few highly competent sales people and sales managers who have been let go along with other staff as part of large staff reduction strategies.

In my opinion, the last people I would let go in this market would be highly competent and high producing sales people.

Which leads me to the contentious issue about who makes the decisions to hire and fire sales people. In particular, who hires sales people.

The financial and personal impact of the Hiring Manager in any organisation is enormous. They decide who can and cannot be hired. We know that the attitudes, preferences and prejudices, of the person responsible for recruitment will affect the quality of the people hired, even if that person is not the direct line manager of the new recruit. If we reflect we can see how our own emotions, behavioural preferences, prejudices and ideals impacting on who joins our company.

There is a direct financial impact on any business when it comes to hiring new sales staff.

Sales Managers are directly accountable for the success or otherwise of the salespeople they manage – their own performance is critically judged by the performance their team and sales managers live or die, career wise, by how well their sales people perform.

So who is in charge of the selection criteria and recruitment decisions of your sales people?

Realistically it should be the people how are actually leading the sales team, i.e. the Sales Managers. Many sales managers intuitively know what they want and need however, I often see two issues arise which can dramatically affect the quality of the sales recruitment decisions made by sales managers:

Many sales managers do not know how to clearly articulate and define the qualities they need in terms that can be assessed and measured objectively
Many sales managers are not well trained in effective, structured recruitment practices and often rely on gut feel, resumes, unstructured references and the ‘personality’ of the candidate which are the least predictive of sales performance.

This leaves them vulnerable to poor hiring decisions and means then that recruitment processes and decisions are often left to those people who are not directly responsible for managing the sales team.

When another person is in charge of recruiting sales people and is not the line manager responsible for the new sales person, it is often very hard to appreciate the qualities, knowledge and skills that are required to perform successfully in a sales role, especially if they have never been in a sales role themselves.

This can lead to other major issues, for instance I was told this story recently by a frustrated sales manager:

HR Manager (who owns the hiring decision) tells Sales Manager after a sales candidate interview, “You can’t hire this sales person because they are too sales focused”.

The sales manager asked what the HR manager meant and they replied that “I think this person is too pushy and we want ‘nice’ people who are friendly and helpful’. The sales manager was so annoyed because what he saw in the candidate was the assertive, proactive, professional behaviours and skills necessary for a B2B sales person and now he was going to have to deal with the consequences of this hiring decision, i.e. another ‘nice’ person who won’t get out and sell. He confessed he already had too many of these people.

If sales managers cannot be well equipped and in charge of the hiring decision or cannot clearly express what they need to another, then those people who are in charge of recruitment, in my opinion, need to be held directly accountable for the performance of the sales people they select because:

Cost without Accountability leads to

Hiring people who do not produce or stay
Failing to hire people who would have produced and stayed

To impact positively on the successful recruitment of sales people I recommend that non line management recruiters do one or more of the following:

Relinquish control of sales assessment, selection and staffing if they do not wish to be accountable and allow their sales managers to be trained in effective recruitment practices so they can best manage the process
Be required to accompany salespeople on prospecting activities and sales calls for at least 14 days per year to better appreciate what happens in the role
Share results accountability for sales revenue by participating in a base salary plus commission incentive measured on the performance of the sales force they have recommended.

Simply put, the right thing to do is to train up our sales managers in how to properly define, assess and select the right sales people for their teams and business and give them control over the sales recruitment process. Then they can be held truly accountable for their team and their results.

In sales you hire results not potential.

Your advocate for selling the right way.

FYI Structured Sales Recruitment Kits available at www.barrett.com.au or call (+61) 03 9532 7677.

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Daring to be Different (part 2)

August 6, 2008 in Assessments, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

Here is the second of two articles about recruiting top performing sales people and daring to do so from outside of your industry.

Even though I have not worked as a traditional recruitment consultant for more than 14 years many of my long standing clients still talk about those ‘out of the box’ placements we made. Was it just the recruitment approach that made the difference. Well NO. What these savvy mangers is did was make sure the culture and the business could accommodate these ‘new’ types of people.

They took their current team along on the journey to the new as well. Sure it wasn’t all smooth sailing but they knew what they needed to do. As we know when we bring in difference we can often cause the current people to feel uncomfortable and if not addressed they can kill off the ‘new’ way.

So be aware.
If the overall culture of your business is not set up for excellent sales performance, all your efforts could implode. Here is an example of what I mean. A key client came to us saying they didn’t want to hire people from their industry because they just weren’t competitive in the current market. They wanted to refresh the gene pool and bring in fit sales people who were not tarnished by the industry and its way of doing things. They knew that in this over commoditised marketplace that their sales people where their competitive edge. They were on the right track but didn’t know where and how to start. So here is what we did to help them find elite sales performers:

Reviewed sales strategy and path to market
Defined Sales DNA & ‘ideal’ role/person specification
Built a structured sales recruitment process and kit
Targeted the industries the new breed of sales people could come from
Built and implemented the induction company sales training process
Implemented a sales management support system
Mapped & measured sales metrics

The results were fabulous from a sales initiative perspective:

The new breed of elites sales performers achieved a sales closing ratio of 4:3 within 2 months and sold annual sales budget within 5 months.

Now wouldn’t you think everyone would have been jumping for joy? You’d like to think so but sadly the new team was a small part of a very large business that had been operating in an entirely different manner (i.e. slow, internally focused, transaction product selling). Rather than embrace the new ‘fitter’ sales way of life and find more success across the board, the broader business killed off the team because it was too successful just so they didn’t have to change.

Sadly this is not an isolated incident, many a successful competent sales person or sales manager with new ideas, a healthy can-do attitude have been passed over for promotion or eliminated from the team because they were too different and too good. They did not fit the often buttoned down, compliant thinking, follow-the-rules-or-else culture that many larger business can have.

And what I still see, all too often, are senior managers and sales mangers recruiting from within their own industry sector recycling the same old people getting the same old ideas and the same old results. Relying on ‘industry experience’ as a major determining factor in your sales selection process can severely limit your potential to develop a competitive edge in your industry and find elite sales performers. This strategy has left many businesses vulnerable today as they now struggle to transform existing transactional product focused sales teams to savvy business people how can sell.
Which raises key questions:

How we can we find top sales performers to refresh our gene pool and revitalise our culture, our bench strength, our results, etc.?
How does an organisation create and the promote transparent sales performance in the field and at leadership level?
How do we encourage diversity, innovative thinking and outsiders into our thinking, our team and our business?

I encourage you to challenge the prevailing views and attitudes of your business and industry and really examine what your sales strategy needs by way of talent now and into the future and select and develop those people how meet your business needs accordingly.

If you do it can really pay big dividends.

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Daring to be Different (part 1)

July 31, 2008 in Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Management

Here is the first of two articles about recruiting top performing sales people and daring to do so from outside of your industry.

When it comes to assessing sales and sales leadership capabilities in your business do the lines blur between the cultural morays, views and perceptions, gossip and politics and the real capabilities needed to be assessed against your actual sales strategy?

In my line of work I am often requested to sit on senior management interview panels for clients because of my background and expertise in assessing sales leadership and sales performance and the issues around of internal and external assessment of sales people and leaders. They request my presence based on the following criteria:

My 15 years working in the sales competency, assessment and development space
My eight years as a recruitment consultant interviewing approximately 8,000 sales people and managers face-to-face.
My independence as a 3rd party
My willingness to speak up and challenge prevailing views and attitudes as I am not likely to carry the internal company prejudices and paradigms that influence current thinking and culture into the interviews.

Sales recruitment and assessment is not for the faint hearted and is one of the hardest areas to get right in any business, and it doesn’t help if politics, nepotism and inaccurate perceptions of what constitute effective sales and sales leadership performance prevail. I get to see this, especially when we are looking at internal candidates.

Just recently I was in shock at the extreme contrast between two internal candidates who were two of several internal candidates vying for sales leadership roles on a newly formed senior management team:

One sales leader was rated highly be their manager and endorsed by certain peers in high places but in interview it was clear they had no idea about sales leadership, strategy or process and no substance what so ever. They were a ‘fraud’ as far as the role was concerned. Yet their manager and other allies were clearly trying to position this person as a top performer which they clearly were not.
Next rolls up the complete opposite. Clearly a highly competent candidate. They had the complete package, it was obvious from our investigations and we were impressed yet they had been previously rated poorly on key criteria and the lobbying by certain internal stakeholders to deposition them was astounding. His comment, when asked how he felt about being invited to participate in the interview process, was very telling. He said ‘Relief. Relief at being actually able to present his capabilities honestly, clearly and fairly without bias or prejudice.”

My client, relatively new to this division and whom I shared the interview panel with, had very little direct dealings with any of the candidates which was good on one hand, however, most of his information about the candidates was coming second hand via comments and lobbying from peers and managers and performance data ratings which may or may not have been accurate depending on who had assessed the individuals. He wanted a transparent, evidenced based approach used which is why he called me in. And our approach unearthed a whole lot of issues and raised questions around:

The formal performance assessment criteria and process of sales individuals (not just $ sales results)
Those who were doing the assessment ratings on staff and what perceptual filters they are using in addition to the standards provided i.e. biases, prejudices, etc.
The political lobbying in place to keep top performers from making it to influential positions
The actual criteria used to assess effective sales performance and leadership. Is it up-to-date and able to deliver our sale strategy?
The consequences of political, inwardly focused, biased culture and its effect on the organisation’s success in sales, staff performance and retention.

If the sales capabilities and performance requirements needed are properly assessed against sales strategy then what we can go looking outside of our comfort zone for top performers who can thrive and deliver I our culture. What is good for one industry may also be good for another.

I can honestly say for a fact that my best placements were people outside of the industries I recruited for. The clever sales managers recognised this and took a risk. So dare to be different.

Part 2 next week.

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Don’t confuse quantity for quality, or biggest for best

May 22, 2008 in Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Talent

Attracting and Searching for Candidates
Just like sales, in today’s market you need a combination of ‘Push & Pull ‘ contact strategies for finding the right candidates for your business. Advertising alone is not likely to yield the candidates you seek. When you decide to recruit externally, the following methods are available to select from:

Advertising (On-line job boards (MyCareer, SEEK, CareerOne, etc.); Newspapers;Magazines;Radio and television)
Recruitment Agencies
Executive search firms
Viral Marketing email campaigns
University Job Boards
In-store Advertising (shop window)
Family & Friends
Your own website
Information Seminars
Search (direct contact)
Networks
On-line network groups (My space;Link Me;Linked in)

With the advent of online job boards, many people can DIY their own recruitment more easily and at much cheaper rates than ever before. Pretty much everyone realises nowadays that online job boards are part of our front line recruitment strategy and not just a nice-to-have. In fact they are very rapidly replacing the traditional newspaper advertising medium, if not already. But you have to know how to use them wisely and well. Putting up recruitment ads willy nilly isn’t going to work. You really need to think about who you are writing the ad for and where they are likely to look. Content, placement and maintaining visibility are some of the key things to consider when using online job boards.

Yet many people assess the credibility, usability and value of online job boards by the volume of candidates they receive without really assessing what those numbers mean. Getting a whole lot of international applicants who are not qualified to work here and no local candidates is tough. As an ex recruiter (pre the online job board days) it was quality that counted not volume. My clients wanted the right sales person for the job not a whole lot of bums on seats. I don’t know about you but I don’t have the time to wade through email after email of irrelevant resumes. If I am advertising I want to attract good quality people that can do the job even if it means I only get two or three to choose from. If I cannot find the right person I need to have other strategies in place.

My advice is don’t get caught up the hype in the about volume / traffic metrics or the brand of the job board alone without investigating the quality of candidates you get from it. Because quantity doesn’t always equal quality and the biggest doesn’t always mean the best.

I am speaking from experience, not just as an ex recruiter, but through my current experiences and observations of the recruitment market and, in particular, online jobs boards and their effectiveness.

Over the last year, as part of our work, we have been assisting a number of our clients with the recruitment of sales and service people and managers. Now we are not working as a traditional recruiter, more like a quasi HR team working along side advising our clients on what to do in this space. We have helped a number of clients in various ways from building and/or supplying them with end-to-end structured competency based recruitment kits, to assisting with candidate screening and interview support.

As part of our support we also advise them on how to write a candidate attractive ad and where to advertise on the main online job boards, which categories to place the ads under, etc. Some of our clients have placed their own ads on the big online job boards in the past and achieved very poor results. This was mainly due in part to the type of ad they wrote. Once ad quality was rectified we helped them place the new ads on the two main online job boards (you know which ones I mean). Here is what we have found so far:

1. With one large online job board we can only get one selection area to place our ads in and within a few minutes of getting posted each job ad was not on the front page any more. The ads had slipped down due to the huge volume of ads they competed with for space and visibility. Within a day each ad was so far down the list that most people couldn’t be bothered looking past the first few pages. (Just think Google searches and you know what I mean). Its almost as if we need SEO for job ads here. Then there are the responses; sadly the quality of applicants from this online job board has slipped markedly over the last year – too many people just sending out applications and not even bothering to read the ad. Don’t get me wrong there are occasionally a few good ones but only a few.

2. Now the other online job board is producing quite a different result. Admittedly we are paying a slightly higher fee per ad but only slightly and what we are getting is the following:

3 job listing locations for the ad

the ad is refreshed every week over 4 weeks; which means that the ad goes back up to the top of the page and appears as a new ad again every week for the life of the ad

And the overall quality of the candidates has been vastly superior, resulting in hires coming from this job board 90% of the time to date

I know the candidates are local and/or qualified to work here.

In short, the second online job board out performed the first in every way with the exception of traffic volume. Now I know you can pay top dollar for big online display ads and get prime position but most SME’s do not have the volume of advertising to get the better ad rates that you get if you are a recruitment agency or big corporate. So as SME’s we have to use a range of tactics and that means using online job boards smarter too.

My advice, if you are speaking with the sales people from any online job board company ask them about how their job board really performs. Ask them about:

their demographics;- are their % of unique browers international or local traffic hits? (you can easily inflate the ‘value’ of an online job board site by including international hits)
how do they attract local candidates to their site?
what % of unique browsers are from your own country?
what do their real numbers mean?

If all you get is ‘volume traffic talk’ with no real substance then make sure you have other options available to you. See above

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Getting Sales Recruitment Right

July 30, 2007 in Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Role Clarity, Sales Assessments, Sales Talent

Your small business is growing and diversifying. You’ve experimented with bringing in an inexperienced sales person (who did not work out). You realise you need a more experienced direct sales person, but you don’t know where to go or what to look for.

All you know is you need a sales person who is able to prospect for, and win, new business opportunities on a consistent daily basis, however you are not really able to detail anything else. You know your recruitment approach is haphazard at best. And what’s worse, it’s costing you big time.

You are not alone. Many SMEs still find it very difficult to recruit effective sales people. And it’s not all due to the tight candidate market.

Many people who know me know that I’ve been going on about having a more disciplined structured sales recruitment process and strategy for years. Many people are cynical about sales recruitment. You can hear the sighing or see the eyes rolling, can‘t you?

The problem is most people are not trained in effective recruitment practices and yet it is one of the most critical jobs in your business, especially for sales. They often give it to someone else and then blame them when it doesn’t work.

So who is in charge of your sales recruitment process? You are! Whether you go direct to market or use a recruiter, you hold the key. If you do not own the sales recruitment process you and your business are in big trouble.

I went out on a limb a few years ago and set about building effective and user-friendly sales recruitment processes for my clients, because they weren’t satisfied with what options they were using. I wanted to give them control so they were in the driver’s seat.

Many of my clients felt at the mercy of the market when it came to sales recruitment. Especially when using recruitment companies. It was all a bit “black box”.

Now you might think I have an issue with recruitment firms (I am an ex-recruiter myself). In principle I do not, but my advice is “recruit your recruiter”.

Make sure they really do know how to recruit what you need. I am not entirely blaming recruitment firms (sure there are a few shonky ones out there, just as in any industry) but I do believe there is work to be done on both sides.

Here are some of the issues I see plaguing businesses when it comes to having poor sales recruitment outcomes:

Issue 1: You do not know what type of sales approach or sales person you need to deliver your sales strategy. Ask: Has your strategy and/or marketplace changed recently? If so, how do you need to sell now? Not all sales roles are the same. Be clear about what type of sales approach you need to make your business successful: For instance do you need:

An ‘expert’ who is bringing new products, ideas or concepts to the market versus an ‘organiser’ working in an established ‘educated’ (about what you do) market place?
A sales person who can develop long-term viable business relationships with clients or a person who can get around to many people in your customer market and make quick one-off sales?
An account manager who maintains accounts or someone who can develop new business with new or existing accounts.
A sales person who can sell expensive quality value products/service or a person who can sell commodities or cheaper price sensitive items?

Issue 2: You do not really know how to clearly define, articulate and compare what qualities you want in a good sales person. What skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours do your sales people need to demonstrate to be competitive and successful in your marketplace?

For instance, latest research now reveals that high performing sales people also display high levels of emotional intelligence (EI). Know what sales competencies you need.

Issue 3: You do not use or have a logical structured recruitment process to objectively assess, compare and select candidates. Providing structure is probably the single technique most likely to help in improving the reliability of a selection method or process. Use a structured recruitment process to follow that allows for you to compare and contrast applicants in a more disciplined and consistent manner.

Use the Key Selection Criteria (competencies mentioned above) as the framework.
Standardise all selection activities.
Rank the criteria: Are they essential, desirable or nice to have? And select in that order.

Research shows that the average percent increase in output from using a structured multi-assessment selection approach (structured behavioural competency interviews, relevant psychometric assessments, simulation exercises, structure reference, etc.) is approximately 2.5 times greater in sales jobs than in low-complexity non-sales jobs

Issue 4: You do not have or use an integrated recruitment strategy to find good sales people. How do you find the “right” sales people for your business and how do prospective sales candidates find out about your business?

Just like sales, in today’s market you need a combination of “push and pull” contact strategies for finding the right candidates for your business. Advertising alone is not likely to yield the candidates you seek. You are always recruiting sales people even if you do not have a vacancy.

Issue 5: You continue to recruit from your own industry, recycling the same people and do not look outside your industry to refresh the gene pool with new talent. Same old people, same old ideas, same old results. Need I say more?

Issue 6: You do not screen your recruiters for “best practice” nor do you brief them properly. It is a very costly exercise to get recruitment wrong and many people so not have the time to do it themselves.

However many are equally sceptical about the real value of using recruitment consultants. It is as difficult to find a good recruiter, as it is to find a good sales person. If you are going to use a recruiter, ask them what processes they use to source and select candidates.

Check them against the processes recommended above to see if they use “best practice” methods or just “wing it”.

By giving the recruitment consultant a clear job and person specification and competency profile you are able to clearly articulate and request what you need and what they need to deliver.

No more “bums on seats”, thank you very much. The good ones will tell you who is available in the market place, what each type of person is attracting salary wise, and most importantly help you find the right sales person for your business.

Being in control of your recruitment process is very important. Not being able to articulate what and who you need to perform the job well is very risky. As you can see it’s all in the preparation. Putting in the work on getting it right up front and then sticking to a plan really pays off.

The positive feedback I am getting from sales managers and senior managers when they do follow the process is so rewarding. For instance:

“It really works! I was able to make a selection decision based much more on the evidence not my emotions or prejudices.”
“I’m not getting caught up in my own dialogue and can really concentrate on them.”
“I didn’t think it would, but it saves me so much time and money.”
“I don’t take any one out of desperation and more.”
“When we follow the process, my co-interviewer and I come to the same conclusion time and time again and we have the evidence to prove it.”
“I feel in control and are able to make more informed decisions.”
“I know how to work with my recruiter to my best advantage.”

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need more information.

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