The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Finding the right person for an open position can be really hard, and it can be very tempting to rush through the process or take short-cuts when possible. But, making the wrong hire can cost your company up to five times their annual salary – and once you finally get rid of them, you’ll find yourself back at square-one, sweating over your hiring process again.

If you don’t have time now to do it right, when will you have time to do it over again?

Save yourself the headache and do it right the first time!

Here are five sure-fire ways to either mess up your hiring process or invest a little time to do it right instead:

Social Media continues to change the way consumers and marketers connect. Marketers are getting smarter about how to use social media to interact with consumers and influence the path to purchase, but the landscape is ever changing. Keeping up with those changes, whether you sell digital media or use digital media to market your business is critical to success. 

Here is a look at some of the most recent changes that you should know about: 

When it comes to crafting a proposal, there is a very real temptation to include whatever one thinks can be sold. C’mon. Fess up.

Let's Be Honest

At one time or another, most sales folks have considered tossing something into a package that may not actually contribute to solving a client need. This temptation is driven by too much focus on income, whether to the organization in the form of revenue, or to the seller in the form of commissions or other incentives.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been put on notice by a prospect—right up front—that they won’t be buying unless they get a terrific price.  (I know every hand went up… I’m clairvoyant.) “Right up front” is the key phrase that guaranteed all the hands would go up, but more on that in a moment.

Ready for a Fight

It’s not that every prospect acts that way, but enough do so that every salesperson has heard it. Many of you tell me you hear it every week!  A lot of prospects think it’s their duty, their job, their role in the great game of negotiation to announce up front that nothing is more important than getting a low price or a good deal. Their purpose, not unlike a boxer’s, is to put you off-balance and make you more vulnerable to their next punch. But it’s not every prospect, is it? It’s telling which prospects typically make these threats and which don’t.

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable,” Mark Twain. An interesting quote I chose to reinforce the importance of metrics and accountability. It made me laugh because of some of the funny math I have seen sales managers use over the years. You know what I’m talking about!  Facts are stubborn and that’s a good thing for all of us. As you look ahead to the coming year, be sure you are clear on what is most important to measure and then avoid the practice of funny math. 

Cleaning out the proverbial attic, recently, I came across a box of childhood memories that my mother had gathered over the years. There were diplomas, ribbons from a few track-and-field events, and a number of professional citations for excellence in my work.

Among the least of these:  A button celebrating my perfect attendance during the school year.

Really?

Seriously. They gave me a pin… for showing up.

A few years ago when I was teaching a program for managers one of the participants came up afterward to share a point of view. Don had spent a number of years as a manager in a well-known, Fortune 500 company whose name I will not mention here. We had just finished a discussion about the important role powerful relationships play between managers and their direct reports. 

A Real Story

Don said, “You know, Jim at X Company we always believed that any interaction between a manager and a subordinate should be net gain to the manager.”  What an interesting comment. I was so taken aback I had to confirm that I had heard him correctly. “So, Don, you are telling me that every time I interact with you as my manager, you gain and I lose?” In essence, he said yes. 

I bet you’re pretty busy right now. Seems like everyone I am talking to is slammed. You have pressing things to do to wrap-up 2013 and at the same time do what is necessary to get 2014 off to a great start.

When you think of SEO (search engine optimization) do you think of keyword stuffing, poorly written content, or irrelevant links? If you do, then you’re not alone, and that’s because many people out there have tried (and failed) at trying to trick the search engines into giving them credit in search rankings that they don’t necessarily deserve. And if there’s anything search engines have taught us with their constant upgrades and revised algorithms, it’s that they don’t like being tricked, and for good reason. 

Search engines such as Google want to deliver the best, most useful content to their users. They want to answer our questions quickly and efficiently, and they have a variety of ways they determine exactly how to do that. I won’t get into those details today, but I do want to share with you how, when used correctly, keywords can help you not only get found in search engines but even more importantly… help you create content that humans (and specifically your target persona) want to read, and ideally share with their friends and colleagues. 

If your marketing plan includes a content strategy focused on publishing useful, informative, shareable content (which it should!) then unethical SEO practices simply go against everything you’re striving for. However, this doesn’t mean SEO should be viewed as a dirty word.

Research has shown that 70-80% of online shoppers are abandoning their purchases in their shopping cart. This started me thinking about how many salespeople are also being left in the shopping cart as their prospects decide to “think it over” and ultimately never buy.  

The Marketing Mind Blog did an excellent job of covering the retail marketing implications of this trend. The research cited that a consumer can have many reasons to wait to complete an order including shopping anxiety, comparison shopping, and wanting to read reviews. Looking at some of the reasons consumers are hesitating can help you understand why your prospects may not be completing the sale. 

Here are a few lessons that can be applied to B2B salespeople in closing the sale: