Peak Sales Recruiting

In many companies, it is commonplace to promote successful reps into sales management roles. To be fair it is instinctive to reward your most successful and reliable people reps with a promotion and who better to take on more responsibility in the sales organization than someone who understands how to sell a lot? But our [...]

Miller Heiman recently released its annual best practices study and tech sector sub report (Opportunities to Achieve Revenue Growth in the Technology Industry – see below) – the 2008 report involved 17,000 participants and covers how leading sales organizations are winning, perceptions and trends. There are several good findings in here for enterprise sales forces [...]

A colleague pointed me to Jack Welch’s blog post on the best way to approach to structure company hiring programs. Here is the summary of his advice: Discipline – “…get religious about all the usual hiring best-practices. Test all candidates against your core values, conduct multiple interviews, and when checking references, be sure your people [...]

Great short post about how many recruiters fear sales assessments –> (Many Recruiters Fear Sales Assessments, by the Objective Management Group, a sales assessment company so it’s a bit of an advertorial). He is right that most recruiters, are not inclined to use assessments – and it should be no surprise, whether they are internal [...]

A colleague pointed me to a research paper written by David Godes, a graduate professor at Harvard. The paper, In the Eye of the Beholder: An Analysis of the Relative Value of a Top Sales Rep Across Firms and Products, addresses the question: How much is selling ability worth? (very heady stuff, I will warn [...]

Sorry for the hiatus. August has been a busy month with vacations and workload, but now we are back at it and with companies in full building mode as they staff up for a strong Q4, I thought it made senses to re-open with a post on building teams. I came across this article on [...]

Talk to any sales manager and they will tell you that hiring reliable performers is one of the most difficult things to do. Even the ones who say they have a pretty good hiring track record will typically admit that too few of their reps are at target. Why is that? What makes hiring good [...]

I came across this article on the different styles of tech sales people (the tech sales styles, written by Lisa DiCarlo for ComputerWorld) and was reminded what a lot of buyers see when they are engaged by a sales person. Unfortunately it is not flattering. A sales person has to be extremely enthusiastic about what [...]

Last week I got called for a reference check for someone that used to report to me (more than a decade ago).  I was happy to respond, and I wish this former employee well, but I was a bit taken aback by the approach. You see, it was more like a form-email, than a reference check. [...]

In recruiting, people (business leaders, prospects, even some of the professional recruiters we know) say they “rely on their gut” when making a hire. Isn’t that like saying that you rely on your ears to tell you it’s safe to cross the street? Don’t get me wrong: what you hear at an intersection is important [...]