The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

How does “FIT” enter into your decision making when hiring salespeople?

Does this sound familiar? “This is a GREAT candidate!  He has wonderful experience in the industry and he has so much in common with me and with my current sales staff!”

You liked them!

You both grew up in Southern California!

You both love College Football!

You enjoy the same music!

You both traveled to Italy this year!

Your kids are in the same soccer program!     

We all enjoy spending time with others who share our interests and/or our lifestyle. It is easy to fall into the trap of allowing familiarity to dictate how a potential candidate seems to FIT with you and with your organization. 

As a Talent Analyst for The Center for Sales Strategy, my job is to measure the talent of candidates for our clients. Our Talent services help you as an employer select people with the best innate sales and management related talents, using very measured and scientific methods.  While we can help you to frame your needs, the responsibility for sizing up the FIT of a potential employee falls to the sales management within your organization. 

The point you press, the importance of thorough organization, is felt, and appreciated by our friends everywhere. And yet it involves so much more of the dry, and irksome labor, that most of them shrink from it... from a September 1, 1860 Letter to Henry Wilson.

I love the way Lincoln spoke. He is clearly acknowledging the importance of organization and yet laments that many will not have the resolve to do it. This principle of course holds true in many areas beyond organization. Deficiency of execution will more often cause you trouble, not the deficiency of knowledge. Planning for the coming year and having the discipline to take a look at your sales structure and process are good examples of things that are easy to talk about, but take some resolve to actually do.

Planning for Next Year

This is the second in a series of four blogs designed to help you work on your planning for the coming year. The concept I introduced in the first blog was our Performance Prism.

You will see things more clearly in your sales department if you break down the components or disciplines that lead to strong sales performance—in the same way that a prism breaks a light beam into its various colors. There is great value in looking at each area separately.  

The four components of the Performance Prism are: 

That was exactly what I thought and then did after reading an email I received from a salesperson trying to sell me something. In fact, just to add perspective… here is what the email said:

Demrie,

Just wanted to reconnect with you. The organization is experiencing very exciting growth and I would like to update you. Would you be open to chatting tomorrow?

When I opened this email I immediately thought about a conversation I recently had with a client about how his salespeople seem to ‘just check-in’ with their prospects. He told me they don’t call them with a valid business reason nor do they offer any real value… or in other words, a compelling reason for the prospect to believe that having a conversation with them would actually help their business. He said his salespeople tend to call prospects and say something like: “Hi, I just wanted to check in with you to see how things are going? Is there anything new going on that I can help you with?”

If you want your prospects to take time out of their schedule to meet with you or talk with you, you must make them believe you can add value to their business.  

When I first started selling media, I had a sales manager whose mantra was to always get new business. So one of his expectations was that each week, each seller would make 20 new business calls.  Even as a new seller, I knew this was not the best use of my time, so I asked how he would determine these calls would be completed. His solution was that we deliver a business card. Simple enough.

I was recently coaching a very talented seller who was having some communication issues with her sales manager. Before getting into the specifics, it is important to understand how this seller is “wired.” She is extremely strong in her organizational skills and her attention to detail is off the charts. She is exact, structured, and precise – in fact; she is a complete perfectionist and ALWAYS has a plan. 

During her last individualized focus meeting, her manager gave her some feedback on her performance. He told her that although she was doing a good job, he would like for her to “loosen up” and “wing it” more. 

A Full On Panic

Decades ago, I was involved in some emergency response training that—even though I did not pursue a career in the field—sticks with me today. They dropped a group of us off at a road-side ditch where a fake car accident had been staged, complete with actors and dummies representing the victims. The challenge was simple:

“What would you do right here, right now, with what you have to work with?”

What a great question, challenging each of us to improvise… and take action.  

We live in an age where there are all kinds of new technologies and tools that are supposed to make our lives easier, our work more productive, and our time more efficient. So it’s easy to want all of those awesome tools!  But just as your household budget does not expand with every wish and desire that crosses your mind, your company must invest according to priorities and available resources. 

So you can't always have every new computer, tablet, app, or piece of office equipment you’d like. You can’t go to every educational conference you’d like to attend, and you aren’t allowed to donate a bunch of “bonus inventory” to every client who’s asking for a better (no, cheaper) deal.

Here’s how the strongest professionals WON’T respond to those situations (insert whiny voice here):

The best inbound marketing programs and the ones that create the most leads are not necessarily the ones that develop the most content or have the prettiest infographics.  The most successful inbound marketing programs are the ones that embrace inbound marketing throughout the organization, and understand that in order to succeed it will take more than just the efforts of one person.  An inbound culture differs from an outbound culture in that the expectation within an inbound culture is that the company’s website and blog will be sought out and found by our prospects, because of the great content that’s created rather than having to utilize outbound methods to attract prospects to their website.  

In a very basic sense, an inbound culture understands that the very core of their existence is based upon trying to solve their prospect’s needs and explaining to them in a non-sales oriented way how they can do that for them.  

There are several characteristics that successful inbound marketing organizations share and we have listed our top 5 below.

Winston Churchill said “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.” There is a sweet spot you need to find as a leader.  You can’t spend too much time dreaming about a future you aren’t sure how to get to, but you also can’t fail to set goals and develop plans that will improve revenue performance.  Churchill is encouraging us not to look so far ahead that we set our eyes on a destination for which we have no clear route in which to get there. This is very important advice! 

As the calendar moves toward the end of the year and you look ahead to the start of another, it’s time to evaluate how your sales department is doing and determine changes you will make in the coming year.  We have a tool we use for this process that is called the Performance Prism.  The metaphor is this… “Just as a prism separates light into its component colors, our Performance Prism separates a sales organization into its components.” This approach will force you to break down each important area (like the prism separates light) and search for opportunities for improvement. It will also prevent you from looking too far ahead, but instead will help you focus on the next link in the chain that will move you along the desired path.

The key areas of the Performance Prism are:

• Goals & Values
• Structure & Process
• Metrics & Accountability
• Talent & Skill

For several years The Center for Sales Strategy has been saying that the combination of outbound marketing plus inbound marketing is the exact sweet spot where marketers can earn the greatest results. This is a reality because it's how the consumer wants it, and when it comes to achieving results that's what matters most. 

It happens all the time when you hear or see a commercial message; it sparks an interest or a thought or an idea and while you might not be ready to be a customer at that exact moment, you are interested enough to want a little more information. So what do you do?  Nowadays most people take out their phone and google it! Or if there is a memorable (vanity) URL they might even go directly there. And if the marketer has done their job correctly, when the consumer arrives to the site, it will be the perfect landing page optimized with responsive design and presenting the exact information the consumer is looking for. 

What happens next?

Tomorrow is going to have 24 hours, whether you like it or not. And just as this very hour is slipping by as you read this article, tomorrow’s hours are going to drift away, too.  There’s nothing you can do to “manage” time.