salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Any Sociopathic Tendencies?

December 2, 2008 at 2:09 pm · Filed under recruitment

With the recent blanket coverage in the UK a pair of horrific child abuse cases warrant, a recent book called The Sociopath Next Door (by Martha Stout) has received a fair amount of analytical airtime. One particular tenet is that you cannot spot a sociopath because they appear so normal whilst the ice running through their veins hides such an alienatingly different value system.

Reading said analysis, I’ve realised that there is one trait of a sociopath that appears remarkably similar to the best cold-callers I’ve known.

It is that any slight, criticism or abuse simply bounces straight off them. They are oblivious to any derogatory actions of others aimed in their direction.

Such mentality is utterly essential to cold-call success. People that rise to the top never take ‘no’ personally. They have a unflinching ability to blank out any knock-back within seconds of it derailing them. No hurdle is permitted to distract them from where they are determined to go.

Having identified this, it now makes me feel that my future recruitment of telephone terriers will be made easier if I can cunningly reveal whether this singular trait exists.

Whilst this trait is only one of many such a person may exhibit, there are a couple of questions on this checklist that you may feel could open a window into the trait I’m talking about isolating here. And judging by the other questions, you could well save yourself a bit of trouble if the other sociopathic traits are evident.

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Stop Demoralising High Achievers

February 15, 2008 at 4:04 pm · Filed under recruitment

Was a little saddened this morning to learn of a terrific rep and all-round good-guy leaving one of my customers. After ten years in his present environment, the family man is moving elsewhere in the global group.

The reason for his move should help sales management check their incentive approaches. Every year he has hit his budget. It was a real scrape for him last time out, but he knuckled down and made it to 107% on the last day. Yet the price he had to pay was, he felt, too high. No proper family holiday, Sunday’s with work spread on the dining room table and no extra cash for success.

The issue for him was that each year you hit target, your basic goes up an extra 2½%. All good, yet the following target rises. Nothing unusual in that you might think, but no extra commission comes your way for hitting the higher number.

This got him to the stage where he was selling a full 50% more than other reps (400k margin vs 600k) yet was actually earning less bonus than them on individual sales, as everyone’s OTE was the same rate. This meant that for the same say 20k deal, he’d earn 1.6k, whereas someone else could trouser 2k. Why over the course of a year should he sell half as much again as others but only earn the same bonus? Despite his massive loyalty, he eventually had enough when 2008’s commission plan came out and he got a 20% increase in his target.

With retention of stars a critical sales management issue at present this could be a timely reminder for some of us.

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Turning The Tables

January 16, 2008 at 4:34 pm · Filed under rant, recruitment

A surprising source of interview tips came from daytime Goodhope FM this morning. They wheeled an ‘expert’ in called (I think) Kashi to answer listener questions in-between snorily predictable synthetic R&B. The two posers he spent longest on were:

Where do you see yourself in five years? and

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

He was at pains to point out the correct answer for the former was not to say ‘in your job’, and that handling the latter well would mean talking about no more than two strengths, then only one weakness, which you’ve actually managed since to turn into a strength.

Nothing earth-shattering there you’ll probably think. But hang on a minute I thought, these are a couple of the most common interview questions…. they must have gotten popular for a reason. Maybe they’re good questions, period.

As you may know, I sell to sales teams, so I wonder how asking their ‘chief’ where they see themselves in a couple of years may earn me a firmer footing? And a simple ’swot’ style section may also enable focus on positives during a period of change that inevitably hears much about the negativity wishing to be erased….

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Mercy Killings Early Doors

January 8, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under grapevine, recruitment

How soon into a new salesperson’s time do you terminate their contract on the basis of a lack of performance? Well, here’s a story to send shudders down any recruiters spine.

It’s set just now in Jo’Burg. And as the world knows and connives, ‘affirmative action’, whilst laudable in principle is in reality being implemented disastrously. (Ask Kevin Pietersen). Anyway, this isn’t a rant on educational priorities, but on what happened when IBM there took on a new account manager.

For the first month, the sales manager tried to keep tabs on the new lady. Repeated requests for activity updates went unproduced. Then meetings arranged for the mornings went unattended. With no activity, meeting nor communication, a sacking was surely inevitable …..yet the local labour laws made IBM’s HR whince away from action at that time.

Then one morning, after another false meet date, the boss arrived to stifled smirks and smiles all-round in the office. That morning’s JoBurg paper ran a feature on up-and-coming black women, already making their mark. And there for all to see was one, citing their account manager position at IBM as commercial credence, along with her other job….. reading the weather out for a major local radio station.

Unbelievable.

And what’s worse (S Africa watchers take note) is HR still shied away from sacking her due to the legislation imbalance, and were lucky she got given more airtime shortly after so jacked them in of her own accord.

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Quick Success Essential

August 25, 2006 at 10:56 am · Filed under recruitment

Demo’d to a guy at global express parcel carrier, TNT, the other day. He hailed from the genre known in my youth as ‘Sales Ops’, and did indeed seem to have a good grasp on what his immediate issues were with the 400 or so people around the sales efforts.

One thing he said to me in particular caught my attention. In an industry renowned for job-hoppers and high rep attrition rates, he considered that it was vital “key people get a taste of success early” and you should set out to “get them there as quickly as possible”.

At first register, this may sound like one of those annoyingly obvious common-sense type pieces of advice. After all, isn’t this what everyone tries to do? But actually, it isn’t. So many sales organisations I come across do not think this way. In fact my very own reqires that people earn the right to get given leads, by self-generating them to an adequate degree first. Whilst I firmly believe this is the right stance, to speed up this process is what I should be helping with, and to such ends our direct marketing efforts have ramped up accordingly.

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Cross-Dressing Destruction

August 10, 2006 at 12:25 pm · Filed under grapevine, recruitment

Had a cheeky drink the other night with a few boys from one of the world’s largest solution sell organisations (IBM no less), and heard an outrageous story about how one of their number once achieved promotion, a decade or so earlier at a previous, also large, firm. The story ran like this…..

At age 28, one fella was up for promotion against a 40-yr old bloke. The younger guy thought he couldn’t compete on experience, although he was apparently pleased with his healthy track record. So he decided to fight on turf he knew much better. On the ‘opponents’ ground, he was even-steven, but on a patch he created, he felt he’d have a better chance. What was this territory? Well, he went around telling anyone that’d listen, normally in the pub, around the water cooler, somewhere similar, that the other chap was a cross-dresser. A clear slander, eventually one of the big bosses called him in, demanding an explanation. He said simply it was typical, idle, jokey, sales banter and meant nothing. The result? Incredibly, he reckons the other guy was discredited to such an extent, it helped win the youngster the job.

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What Type of Questions, though?

August 9, 2006 at 12:13 pm · Filed under recruitment

It is the perennial mystery for sales managers - how come there are so few good reps around? In any profession, there are the top performers, a few percent that stand out. Then at the bottom, are those who you wonder why they ever got into this game, about to be culled, sitting uncomfortably in departure lounges. And finally, the majority, never setting the world on fire and, depending on environment, work away for how ever long it takes for them to do just enough to cling on or move around the industry, job-hopping into under-performance elsewhere.

How you find the superstars is a whole discussion on its own. Where is the next Thierry Henry? Madonna? Tarantino? Freddie Flintoff? Such are rare indeed, yet finding someone who can nail 100% year in, year out, surely shouldn’t be hard?

I benefitted from a ‘management training’ weekend way back in 1991, ran by an English-based consultancy that featured a broad range of expertise, from world’s as diverse as academia and the military. Their lead guy that group, was a bloke called Geoff Thomas. I remember phoning him up once (as he’d invited us to do) to ask advice on how to get into his industry and he couldn’t get it out of his head I wanted a job within his organisation, when none were open. Still, frustration in lack of help and genuine interest in me aside, he did pass on one nugget.

He apparently ran a course at Harvard called “CTC 83″ (aka, ‘cut the….”!) and one element was on teaching wannabe business leaders about Fast Failure. If something is not working, you need to acknowledge rapido, and change tack.

When talking to a pal of mine who’s suffered the usual recruitment traumas recently, I realised one amazing Fast Failure indicator for sales people.

“Are they asking the right kinds of questions?”

When someone’s new to a role, industry, product in sales, think about what you think they’d be asking if they were enthused, capable and doing the right activities. If questions are neither forthcoming, nor of any real relevance, then apply Fast Failure. Put ‘em on a Plan, or make a mercy killing.

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Ask for the order, please

April 18, 2006 at 7:36 pm · Filed under rant, recruitment

I’ve been doing loads of interviews over the past ten days or so. And it’s really starting to do my head in. Spending a good while on the phone with potential candidates is a winner, yet even when they sound fairly good, it can all fall to pieces at the end of the resulting one-hour interview.

On the phone, everyone is savvy enough to ask something like “when can we get together then”. Although one obvious word of warning, is that many people make this sound too formal. Closing should be a natural progression with a flow to the language. It’s almost as if some people put this phrase into a straight-jacket… “would you, erm, can we say, meet for an interview…erm…” and the like is not good.

Then we get to the ending of the interview. Why do people not close when face-to-face? It’s a sales interview, so I need to see some evidence they can sell. They must close, and then have to handle a couple of objections. But they often don’t. I even had one guy try and joke at the end of one, “when can I start!” without any real conviction, or even proper follow-up. Anyhow, it’s got me so wound up, I’m going to now pass on a new category of how you should perform in such situations, and what to look out for when you’re the recruiter.

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salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Archive for recruitment

Any Sociopathic Tendencies?

Stop Demoralising High Achievers

Turning The Tables

Mercy Killings Early Doors

Quick Success Essential

Cross-Dressing Destruction

What Type of Questions, though?

Ask for the order, please

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