We have said it many times. The world’s second oldest profession has changed more in the last fifteen years than it has through all of time. Dan Pink’s latest book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, covers this evolution and if you love selling as much as we do, you will love this book.
First of all Pink is not a salesperson, so you don’t get the typical rah-rah, salesmanship that you would naturally expect to find in a sales book written by a sales person. Pink is a business and management author that has extensively studied motivation and psychology so he has some degree of objectivity.
Some key points in the book:
We Are All in Sales – this has never been more true that it is now. while 1 in 9 people in the workforce are involved in traditional sales, the other 8 in 9 are engaged in non-sales selling and influencing others which consumes a significant percentage of work time.
Caveat Venditor – buyers have access to so much information and choice that honesty, fairness and transparency now rules sales over old school sales tricks and manipulations.
New Science of Selling – Pink proposes a new model for success in sales which involves creating meaningful connections and providing service.
The Value of Purpose – Pink shows how people don’t have to sell out to out sell.
If you sell or manage sales, or want to know more about the most important profession in the world, get this book.
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Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
One of the biggest challenges faced by hiring managers and sales leaders looking to hire is how to get exposure to top sales talent. Creating more sales candidate flow won’t necessary get the right person to show up at your door, but the more people you are exposed to certainly increases the chances that you will find someone that can help your sales team be more successful.
Post Ads – there are many job boards that can raise the awareness about your open position and don’t forget Craigslist as a source of talent for certain types of positions.
Linked-in – probably the largest resume database in the world, if you look for people here, you will have to be an expert at searching or you will be overwhelmed with the number of people with whom you are interested in speaking.
Facebook – the largest social network in the world, so the chances are the people that you want are here.
Competitors – If your competitors have a good track record and a similar culture then it is likely they have sales people that can help you.
Outside your Industry – Look at the career history of your top performers – are some sectors a better source of new talent than others?
Referrals – ask your network or even your customers who you could approach about your open positions.
Networking – industry and social events are a great place to find sales people.
Candidate Database – search through your database of people that have submitted resumes to your company for people that you have spoken to in the past that you may want to go back to
Internal Referral Programs – existing employees can be a great source of new sales talent, especially when combined with some kind of incentive like recognition or a gift.
Hire a Sales Recruiter – of course we are biased, but if you have tried some or all of the items on this list and still need to get to the right candidate, call us to leverage our large team of people that do this on a daily basis.
In many cases, the biggest challenge is that the great sales people that you want to speak with are unaware that your open role exists. The purpose of generating candidate flow is to get enough candidates in front of you so that you are picking from the best that exist rather than the best that apply. To make the best decision, you need choice. Lots of choice.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
In the weeks to come we are going to address the various questions that a VP of Sales or CEO are faced with as they are looking at developing a kick-a$$, bullet-proof sales recruiting strategy and process. These strategies will apply whether you are a VP Sales/CEO of a enterprise or a small company.
The topics we will ask and address are as follows:
Creating a large candidate pool
Developing pre-defined success criteria
Defining an effective interview process (who does what & when)
Conduct effective sales interviews
Using tools and exercises to help you assess the suitability of candidates
Pre-negotiating compensation before the offer
Ensuring candidates are not counter-offered.
Checking references and how do to a sales specific reference
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Never underestimate what you can learn from checking the references of someone you are thinking about hiring and never get so enamoured by a prospective hire that you don’t bother to make reference checks part of your hiring process.
Here are some of the most insightful things we have learned from years of checking sales candidate references.
Great person, but not for sales – One time I received a call about a sales rep who had worked for me, which surprised me since I had terminated this particular rep several years earlier due to poor performance. Not wanting to mislead the caller, I disclosed that the rep was a great person, but not meant for sales based on what I had seen.
No managerial references – often we will get a list of references that include peers, customers and senior executives in companies that the candidate worked, but no former managers which is a huge red flag. Great sales people have a long list of former bosses with heaps of praise for the candidate.
Wait a second, they said what? – Sometimes during the interview process, a sales person will get a little over confident about their accomplishments and when you check references, you find a different version of what actually happened. Perhaps the deals were slightly smaller, or were closed by someone else altogether.
This is how I got the most from them – A best case scenario on a reference check is finding out that the potential hire is in fact solid and worth hiring, and in addition, you find out how previous managers were able to coach the best results from that particular sales person.
References are always worth pursuing when hiring sales. Make sure they are part of your hiring process.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Removed from the sales effort in the trenches, the CFO is not always in a great
position to understand the impact of the sales compensation plan on the behavior of the sales force. Since it is the
CFO’s role to help the company to be successful from a business and financial perspective, it follows that it is
critical to work with the sales and human resources leadership to create compensation plans that result in the right
sales results.
Here are five things the CFO needs to understand about sales commission and incentive plans that work:
Tie rewards to the right outcomes – while this may sound obvious, we often see this rule
broken. If a company’s objectives are not revenue growth, it doesn’t make sense to reward sales reps for revenue
achievement at the expense of all other outcomes such as profit or customer satisfaction.
Keep it simple – the less complicated the plan, the easier it will be for reps to act in a way
that earns rewards. The more complicated the plan the more likely that reps will either be confused and
frustrated about how their work produces rewards, or they may focus on the area of the plan that they understand
which may not in fact be the priority results the company wishes to receive.
Report regularly – sales people, like most people, want to see immediate feedback that they are
doing the right things and succeeding. Consequently, providing results on a regular basis helps motivate the
reps and react as quickly as possible when behavior needs to be adjusted in order to produce better results and
rewards.
Pay regularly – many comp plans pay long after the triggering behavior has occurred. Again we
all like to see the fruits of our labor as quickly as possible as this provides the incentive to continue
performing. While it may be great for cash flow to extend the time between a success event and paying
commissions, plans that pay out long after a rep has done “the right things” don’t necessarily provide strong
positive reinforcement of the behavior.
Don’t mess with a good thing – one of the biggest beefs for sales reps are plans that regularly
change. While it may make financial sense to change plans regularly to match changing market conditions and
company goals, it becomes self defeating if the reps are not properly motivated because they don’t understand a
new plan or if they are rewarded less for doing the same things as they did under the old plan. In a worst case
this can lead to turnover and loss of top producers who will seek to work for other employers with more
favorable sales compensation plans.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and
leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams.
He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also
Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton
University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales
Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales
team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Nothing in life is as much fun as having fun and that is why its always great to try and turn work into a game. Sales competitions are powerful motivators because they bring out the competitive spirit in sales people and encourage sales team members to have fun while they are working hard.
Put some fun into your team when you gamify your sales efforts with these sales gamification methods:
Scoreboard – we have a big screen TV in our office that tracks metrics vs Q goals and all of us look at it regularly while we scheme ways to improve the results.
Prizes – obviously the sales commission is the big prize, but find ways to add rewards for finishing first, second, and third amongst a team and watch the team compete. The prizes don’t he to be large or even financial, sometimes a toy trophy is all it takes to create the right mood.
Mini competitions -Incent the behaviors that lead to sales for instance a competition for most calls or meetings, or create energy surges by having a contes for most calls in a day or most meetings in a week.
Apps – there are several apps that tie in to CRM data and allow you to get granular with the games assigning points to different events and updating results in real time.
Have fun – encourage team members to pick goofy nicknames that can be used on the scoreboard which further enhance the sport and spirit of competition.
Your sales will never be the same. To your success!
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Dana Lewis is the Director of Human Resources at the Tomlinson Group of companies and has almost 20 years of experience as an HR professional, hiring top talent and building high performance teams. We recently had a chance to speak to her about hiring sales people.
Peak: How has hiring sales people changed over your career?
Dana: In the mid-90’s, hiring a new sales person meant calling up the Sales VP and asking for the phone numbers for his friends. You would interview a few people and choose the guy that was the best ‘people person’. Now, there is much more of a science to the process. A good sales person still needs to be likeable, but they need to understand what it means to build a partnership with their customers. It is not just about closing one deal – it is about building a long term relationship. They need to understand requirements of their customers and continual build upon their skills.
Peak: What are some of the biggest challenges in hiring sales people?
Dana: Sales people can usually sell, which means they are also good at interviewing and up-selling themselves. So, I’ve been tricked a couple of times into hiring the best interviewee, opposed to the best candidate. So, the challenge is selecting the best candidate for the role, not the best person at interviewing.
Peak: What are some of the strategies you employ to hire sales people that become consistent contributors at the companies you have worked for?
Dana: I like to get an understanding of their quota achievements, and be able to prove it with actual documentation. I find out about new customer development and how they hold on to their existing customer base. How do they follow the industry trends and what plans do they have to change with these trends.
Peak: What is the role of culture in sales hiring?
Dana: A sales person is a front line representative of your company, they need to be a reflection of what you want your company to represent. So, culture is very important.
Peak: How is hiring sales managers different from hiring sales people?
Dana: Being able to lead and motivate sales people is very different from being able to close a deal.
Peak: The sales organization and the human resource function are under very different pressures and in some companies there is tension between the two organizations. How have you managed to work effectively with sales organizations in your career?
Dana: Sometimes there are cowboy sales people, but ultimately sales people and HR all work towards the same goal – making the company successful. I find that if you try to understand the other person’s perspective and explain your reasoning to them we can usually come to a solution to work together.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
These days it is tough to talk about sales excellence without talking about the mobile computing technologies that are helping sales teams be successful. We recently caught up with tech entrepreneur, mobile industry expert, UNTETHER.TV host and author, Rob Woodbridge, to talk about the latest mobile technologies and how they are powering leading sales teams.
Peak: Mobile computing has become mainstream and some of us literally live in our devices, but how is mobile technology impacting the way businesses work?
Rob: There isn’t a piece of business today that isn’t being impacted – positively or negatively – because of the wide adoption and use of mobile. It obviously starts with real-time information that can be accessed in, er, real time. There are no longer a delays in business metrics, customer feedback and those that were built into the system that businesses used to have as an advantage over their customers – however slight it was. Real time means pricing, customer/peer reviews and product/service availability. The significance of real time is an erosion of brand loyalty with the mid-tier brands – customers have the power and they are flexing their muscle.
With this real-time access to anything the pitch and tone of sales needs to change dramatically. The world’s offerings are on display making almost everything – except the scarce things that are extracted or grown of the earth – a commodity. This puts emphasis on the way something is positioned (for example, the value of a product or the customer benefit of the service), deemphasizing the features. Sales changes from bells and whistles to driving tonnage, increasing basket size or creating deeper engagement with a customer.
Because of the way mobile intersects our day and empowers our decision-making process, the rules of engagement have been drastically altered. There are more ways to reach customers as a result but now the focus becomes about context. Context wraps a layer around sales that, if used properly, helps close deals.
Peak: CRM systems are now commonplace in sales organizations, and with such a high proportion of staff in the field, one might expect the sales function to be leading the charge in terms of adoption of new mobile technologies. Is this true? Is the salesforce behind or ahead of the curve vs the rest of the organization?
Rob: The virtual act of marrying a company’s CRM with mobile is the panacea for sales but it is really just the first steep step in integrating mobile into a business. It is one thing to have access to information on the go – contacts, documents, locations and business history for example – it is another thing altogether to use it to build business and close deals. The sales force has the most to gain from using the tools mobile brings and are often the first to adopt the physical technologies (hardware like laptops, smartphones and tablets) but not when it comes to adjusting the sales process based on the softer side of mobile (the analytics, data refinement and targeting).
Most of the emphasis these days is on marketing, customer engagement and retention – something that mobile is rapidly becoming very good at and something that most organizations understand. Bringing new sales techniques that incorporate a combination of social, local and mobile means a partial blend of the marketing and sales role – or at least a bigger awareness of how each terminate in the devices they, and their customers, carry.
Peak: What are some of the most exciting technologies you are seeing that can help the salesforce excel today?
Rob: Not to get all “touchy-feely” but tools that help in relationship discovery and development are in focus today. Web services like LinkedIn have already proven considerable value in the sales process and mobile is a natural extension to this. Mobile tools that add context to relationships and enable educated conversation are technologies that can really help in sales today. Think about using mobile as a contextual, location-aware, relationship management tool that brings these elements together with corporate and social knowledge – a strong base to build from.
Peak: What do you think the “untethered” salesforce will look like in 5 years?
Rob: 5 years is hard to predict when no one really saw the entire mobile and app revolution coming in the first place so take this in context to that. There will be two big shifts that happen to the sales force in the coming years. The first is the operationalization and mobilization of the right data to serve the right customer. This will lead to a more tailored, focused sales effort – think of it as 1 to 1 sales on a mass scale. The second broad trend is a deeper blurring of the sales and marketing responsibilities when it comes to relationship development and customer retention.
Most of the challenges ahead won’t be technology-related, they will be around our ability to modify human behaviour to adapt to the changing sales landscape brought on by the possibilities of mobile.
Exciting times indeed. Check out more of Rob’s insights at UNTETHER.tv
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Modern selling has made the sales people in movies like Tin Men, Glengarry Glenn Ross and Mad Men look dated, and a lot of people turn their nose up at sales reps that hobnob with customers like Herb Tarlek might have back in the day. But there is still that old saying that people buy from people and while the Internet has had an immense impact on selling in most sectors, there are still many sectors where relationships and face to face sales skills have an enormous impact.
Consider car sales, for instance. While more than 90% of car buyers research purchases online prior to visiting a dealer, the vast majority of buyers will interact with a sales person face to face prior to making a purchase. A study of automobile buyers by Maritz Research indicated that the top influencer on that purchase is the sales person at the dealer. Keep-in-touch calls to customers and gifts for repeat customers are still pretty common, so perhaps the titles of the sales people have changed to consultants and customer advisors, but the tactics that work haven’t changed a lot over the years.
Another sector where the internet hasn’t entirely disrupted selling is high priced products and services. No one is going to buy an SAP project online with their credit card. Sales skills, account strategy, and developing relationships with executive stakeholders is absolutely critical. While the focus may be on business case and cost/benefit, many times it is not the solution with the best business case that is selected for a variety of reasons. Face to face selling plays a huge role and will for the foreseeable future.
Lets look at highly priced competitive sectors, particularly where businesses are selling to businesses. In these sectors, the relationship between the sales rep and the buyer(s) is one of the key differentiators, along with service. Golf tournaments, customer appreciation parties and other entertainment venues are still popular in these sectors.
These are just a few examples that show that while the profession of sales is evolving rapidly, it is still often about people buying from people.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
When we say that sales people often do their best selling during interviews, we know that we sound like a broken record, but that doesn’t change the fact that getting past the sales job is a critical challenge in sales hiring. There are many ways to figure out the “real” salesperson during the hiring process, and few tests are more powerful and difficult to fake than a well structured cross-reference strategy. Notice the use of the word strategy rather than reference call?
Typically at some point in the hiring process, a candidate is asked to provide references who are then called and asked to verify employment history. A reference strategy, on the other hand, seeks to cross reference a candidate’s claims and other assumptions the employer has made during the interview process. Rather than simply calling the people provided as references, the right reference strategy involves the following;
asking the candidate to describe themselves using terms that would be used by former co-workers and managers (not impossible to fake, but the threat of follow-up keeps most interviewees honest)
speaking with the most recent former managers of the candidate (these are the most important people to speak with and failure to provide them is a red flag)
using behavioral questions (rather than confirming employment and numbers, ask how the candidate behaved in situations that are relevant to the role for which they are interviewing)
The Cross Reference Strategy works because it brings superior integrity to the sales hiring and assessment process.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Removed from the sales effort in the trenches, the CFO is not always in a great
Modern selling has made the sales people in movies like Tin Men, Glengarry Glenn Ross and Mad Men look dated, and a lot of people turn their nose up at sales reps that hobnob with customers like Herb Tarlek might have back in the day. But there is still that old saying that people buy from people and while the Internet has had an immense impact on selling in most sectors, there are still many sectors where relationships and face to face sales skills have an enormous impact.