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Strategies That Get You Hired | Subscribe to this Blog |
August 11, 2008
If you are in sales, pursuing a new job is much like pursuing a sales prospect. Your marketing tools have to present you in the most relevant light. This article tells you how to effectively use them.
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The compensation plan changed again. The revolving door of company executives spins out of control. You look at the corporate direction and you’d like to give the CEO a compass so he can find his way. Concerned, you’ve decided that today is the day that you will peek your head over the cubicle wall and see what other opportunities are out there. After all, you’ve been successful. No need to go down with the ship.
The morning you wake up with the inspiration to begin a job search is a little scary. There is the factor of the unknown. Yet, you pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone to open the doors to new opportunity. It’s been a while since you last looked for a new sales home. How do you go from where you are today to a new, fresh opportunity?
Know what you want. In sales, you often work with the profile of your ideal client. The same applies when looking for a job. You need to know what the ideal fit is for your sales pedigree. If you don’t know what you are looking for, how will you know when you find it? This introspective exercise is the subject of another article of mine titled, “Finding the Right Home For Your Sales Skills.” That article walks you through the exercise of defining your ideal sales role. Don’t go another step in the process until you have read that article.
Develop your marketing tools. Marketing tools? Yes, that is what a cover letter and resume are all about. When you think of marketing, you also think of messaging. Many forget this when they develop their cover letter and resume. However, these marketing tools communicate a message, a story. The key is to make sure they convey the story you intend.
While the easy thing to do is to create one cover letter and one resume, it is not the most effective way to pursue a new job. As someone who has screened thousands of these documents from sales candidates, I can share with you a little nugget of insight. Hiring managers ask themselves a simple question when they first peruse your cover letter and resume. “Do they want my job or just a job?” We know when you are mass emailing your marketing tools just like prospects know when you mass email them.
In sales, you are taught to make sure your message matches your audience. Sales is not taught as a one-size-fits-all, but rather a template that is adjusted to match the need and circumstance. When prospects feel that they are the sales call of the day, they don’t respond. The same applies to hiring managers. Hiring managers are looking to hire people that want to work in their organization. They can feel when someone just wants a job, not necessarily theirs. Thus, when they get that feeling, your candidacy for the job goes into the trash.
The cover letter is one of the first ways it becomes obvious that you are treating this as a mass event. The sales person applies for a specific job, but the cover letter communicates a message that says they want a different job. It is not intentional on the part of the sales person. After all, they paid a copywriter a thousand dollars to create this masterpiece. Copywriters are very helpful to those in need of assistance in creating the story of their background. However, the effective cover letter recipe has three ingredients to it, making it somewhat difficult for the copywriter to unilaterally assist you.
1. Share what you know about the company. Hiring managers want to see that you have at least done a little research about them. This is easily done by visiting their website, performing an online search, and studying them on Hoover’s.
2. Present your relevant qualifications/accomplishments. The keyword here is “relevant.” We’ve all done a lot of things in our lives. Pick the ones that you feel are most relevant to the reader based on what you read when you researched the company. You can also ascertain this from the job posting.
3. Show the synergy between the opportunity and your background. Connect the dots for the reader. If the company is looking for a sales person that has developed a new territory and you are an expert at doing that, make sure the message comes out in the cover letter. Don’t expect the reader to see the synergy. You need to map it out just like you do for sales prospects. When presenting the synergies, use their language. If they call the position “a hunter,” refer to yourself as one. If they call bringing in new accounts as “territory development,” you are in expert in territory development, not hunting.
When the objective, isn’t the objective. The same holds true for the resume. Many sales people write an objective at the top of their resume. Yet, they fail to adjust the title based on the position for which they are applying. My favorite is when someone writes as an objective, “To get a sales or sales management position.” I can assure you that approach is a guaranteed way to get yourself removed from consideration in an instant. Those are two completely different jobs. “I want to be a pitcher or the manager of the team. It doesn’t matter to me.” Again, I just heard you want a job, not necessarily my job.
What you’ve done. The resume is an extension of the cover letter. The message should be the same. Highlight the results and areas of expertise that are most relevant to this opportunity. I’m not suggesting that you leave certain jobs or employment off your resume. However, package each one as best as you can to convey the synergy between you and the company.
From the job posting, you can usually infer what is most important to the sales manager. Those usually can be found in the section of the job description that highlights the candidate requirements for the job. Include bulleted descriptions and statistics that map back to those elements.
While the work to customize these marketing tools may seem huge and painful, it really isn’t. Earlier, I mentioned that you should start the search process by identifying the right home for your sales skills. The reason for that recommendation was to give focus to your search. It allows you to laser-in on those opportunities that best match you. Thus, isn’t it worth the time investment to customize your marketing tools for those job prospects that are best suited for you? Wouldn’t you do the same thing in pursuit of a major prospect? I certainly hope so.
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Lee B. Salz is the CEO of Business Expert Webinars, President of Sales Dodo, and author of “Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager.” Known as “The Sales Dodo,” Lee specializes in helping companies and their sales organizations adapt and thrive in the ever-changing world of business. He is an online columnist for Sales and Marketing Management Magazine and the host of the Internet radio show, “Secrets of Business Gurus.” Look for Lee’s new book in 2009 titled, “The Sales Marriage… How to Hire the Right Sales People.” He is a passionate, dynamic speaker and a business consultant. Lee can be reached via email at lsalz@salesdodo.com, or by phone at 763.416.4321.
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Compensate to Motivate | Subscribe to this Blog |
August 5, 2008
Channeling the energy of a sales team can be challenging. How you compensate them determines where they invest their time and the results you get.
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When I speak to business executives, one of the challenges I often hear is that their sales team is not doing the things they feel are most critical to the success of the company. I then ask to see their compensation plan. After a thorough read, I share my impression of the message of the compensation plan and ask if this is their intention. That’s when things get scary! They look at me blankly and say, “No, our intention is for our sales people to…” For them, the disconnect has been exposed.
What many forget is that the blessing of sales is that a compensation plan doubles as a job description. However, that blessing is also a curse as a compensation plan doubles as a job description. As one executive shared after going through the aforementioned exercise, “We want our sales people to focus on selling our new product to our existing clients. Yet, we are compensating the sales people in a way that they are better off pursuing new clients.” He got it!
The incongruence of sales compensation is one of the biggest disconnects in companies. Executives sit in a board room with strategic plans of grandeur, but the plan collapses when they don’t address the compensation for the sales troops. It is a very simple equation. Sales people invest their time on activities that drive their compensation. Plain and simple. The thought that sales people will actively and consistently perform activities that are not in their best financial interests is naïve.
Further complicating matters, there are instances where sales people are compensated for delivering certain results while their managers are compensated on a different set of results. Thus, the sales managers are driving their team consistently with their compensation message, but inconsistently with their sales team members. It creates the visual of the sales manager pushing a boulder up a hill trying to get their team to focus on activities that contradict their income. Best of luck!
When structuring sales compensation plans, a company should strongly consider the goals for the company. Working backwards, the goals for the company drive the structure of the sales compensation plan. Thus, they should be directly aligned. If the company’s goal is to gain adoption of a new product in the marketplace, the plan should reward sales people for accomplishing this feat. If the goal is to increase revenue with their current clientele, the plan should reward for that. Anyone should be able to read the plan and derive the intended message.
The second consideration, when structuring sales compensation plans, is that sales managers and sales people should have alignment with their respective results. If one is compensated for adding new clients and the other for selling a new product to existing clients, and it does matter which is compensated for which, the incongruence causes a paralysis of performance.
Making this more daunting is that in complex sales environments, those that have protracted buying cycles, the standard salary and commission model does not create enough of a framework to ensure that the sales team performs the right activities every day. How do you structure the plan so that the team is motivated to do the right things every hour of every day?
Employers also face a challenge of hiring sales people who are concerned about the length of time of the buying cycle in contrast to their earnings. The standard solution is to bridge the gap with a draw. As you probably know, there are two types of draws. There is the recoverable draw which is, in essence, a loan against the sales person’s future commissions. Then, there is the other, the non-recoverable draw which is money, free and clear, to the sales person for some period of time. Nothing good comes out of either of these. The recoverable draw, almost always, puts the sales person in a financial hole. They wake up each morning knowing they owe the company money. No one enjoys the feeling of debt. The non-recoverable draw, often times, creates an earnings cliff. Let’s say that the draw is for three months at $2,000 per month. In month four, the sales person probably experiences a significant fall-off in their earnings. The end result is relationship damage between the sales person and the company and a poor corporate investment. How do you structure the sales compensation plan to bridge the earnings gap when recruiting new sales people?
The challenge of motivating sales people and bridging the sales earnings gap can be solved with a creative compensation approach. In the 1980s and 1990s, the big buzz term was MBO (Management by Objective). Business people were provided with a series of objectives, and following a performance review, were compensated for achievement of such. What if the MBO concept was applied to sales compensation? What if you created a Sales Behavioral Objective or SBO?
If you are reading this and think that I’ve just created additional sales cost, think again. I’m proposing a reallocation of the dollars paid to your sales team. A percentage of the dollars normally budgeted for commissions would be allocated for an SBO bonus.
Consider this. A company has a typical buying process with its clientele that is six months long. They pay their sales people a base salary of $60,000. At 100% of plan, the sales person earns $90,000 or $30,000 over their base salary. However, no commissions are earned in their first six months of employment due to the buying cycle. The company, as a means of managing sales behaviors and attracting strong sales talent, budgets $15,000 of the $30,000 of commissions for the SBO bonus. The sales person is then eligible to earn a $3,500 bonus each quarter in year one.
At the beginning of each quarter, the sales person has a formal review where the results of the prior quarter are shared and the mission for the second is presented. The SBO changes from quarter to quarter based on the tenure of the sales person and the needs of the business. The SBO is also not a “gimme.” 100% accomplishment should be a stretch goal, but achievable for the sales person.
In the first quarter, the overall mission is getting the sales person assimilated into the company’s environment. The measurements of success at the end of the quarter are: a business/territory plan, the ability for the sales person to call on prospects, and knowledge of the products. As measurement of achievement, the company provides a written test on product knowledge, a scored, mock sales call, a scored, mock, sales presentation, and review of their business/territory plan. Based on the sales person’s accomplishments, they will receive a percentage of the $3,500 up to 100%.
In future quarters, a points system is put in place, making the SBO entirely objective, tied to performing the activities deemed critical for the success of the business. In each quarter, the goal is for the sales person to achieve 100 points. The main objective in the second quarter for this company is to have face-to-face meetings with qualified prospects. They are looking for their sales person to have twenty face-to-face meetings in the quarter as a way to jump start their sales pipeline. Thus, the SBO compensates five points for each meeting held. At the end of the quarter, whatever percentage the sales person delivers of the 100 points, with a minimum achievement of 75%, is paid as a bonus. This includes those who over perform. Why penalize them for doing more of the right things? What about quality? How do you know they are doing the right things in the prospect meeting? Hopefully, you measured their proficiency in doing those things in the first quarter.
The SBO program, in future quarters, is designed by identifying key, measurable sales activities aligned with the needs of the business. Place weighting on the activities commensurate with your expectations of the sales person.
Some of you are probably thinking, “No way, I pay for results!” Well, results are a function of doing the right things each and every day. Results are not miraculous. They are formulaic. The reality is that you have skin in the game with the SBO. As a business executive, you and your team are tasked with determining what it takes for a sales person to generate the results you desire. If you have done your job of identifying the success metrics and the sales person achieves those, the results take care of themselves. The SBO is not just for year one since the challenge of managing sales behaviors is perpetual. One important key is to budget enough dollars for the SBO bonus that it gets the attention of the sales people, but not so high that it overshadows commissions.
The bottom line is that the SBO program gives you the tool kit to channel the energy of the sales team toward achieving that goal. It also provides you with a mechanism to attract sales talent to your company where, right on day one, they need to perform to earn dollars over their salary. One other benefit of this program for those companies with lengthy buying processes, the SBO provides you with a way to assess the sales person’s performance in a way that you can identify, more quickly, those who will not be successful in your company.
One thing is for sure, the executive team of the company in the story knows that if they paid a sales person $15,000 SBO bonus in year one, year two and beyond are going to be stellar.
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Lee B. Salz is the C.E.O. of Business Expert Webinars, President of Sales Dodo, and author of “Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager.” He specializes in helping business professionals to adapt and thrive in the ever-changing world of business. A dynamic speaker, Lee can be reached via email at lsalz@salesdodo.com or by phone at 763.416.4321.
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What Is Leadership? | Subscribe to this Blog |
July 24, 2008
People are often told to “be a leader,” but what does that mean? How do people know how to act as a leader when no one defines it for them? There is a simple mantra that defines leadership.
The other day my nine-year old daughter and two sons (seven and five years old respectively) were playing with neighborhood friends. Out of the blue, my two sons came running home upset because the girls in the group told them they didn’t want to play with them. I was puzzled. Wasn’t my daughter also in the group? How could she allow these girls to tell her younger brothers that they couldn’t also play in the group? Why didn’t she defend her brothers?
I sat down with my daughter and asked her about what had occurred. The bottom-line was that the popular opinion of the group was that the boys should not play with the girls. However, my daughter acknowledged that she did not agree with the group’s opinion. She thought it was wrong, but she did not say anything because the popular feeling was that the boys should leave. At times, my wife and I talk with our children about being a leader instead of a follower. Great advice, but if you don’t know what leadership is all about, how can you put it in play? What is leadership?
I’ve read many books, articles, and journals on the subject of leadership and they offer wonderful ideas about being an effective leader. However, I have not found any that made the following statement. “Leadership is about having the self-confidence to do what is right even when it is not popular.”
The scenario that I saw play out with my daughter reminded me of a commonplace business occurrence. How often are business people told to show leadership skills, but not taught what that means? You can yell to people from the highest mountaintop to be leaders, but if you don’t help them to understand what leadership means, what ability do they have to change their behavior? How do you help people to feel confident doing what is right when it is not necessarily the popular thing to do?
Not long ago, Bud Selig, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, was faced with declining game attendance. As Commissioner, he was tasked with reversing the attendance trend. One idea he had was to enact interleague play where National League and American League teams play against each other during the season. Historically, the two leagues only played one another in the World Series. Most baseball fans were appalled. They considered this move to be blasphemous. Yet, Bud Selig was un-phased and put the program in place. Today, baseball attendance is booming and interleague play is a hit. Where would baseball be today if Bud Selig let the popular perspective change his decision?
This leadership mantra is not just for managers. It is for everyone. I worked in workplace drug testing for a number of years. Amazingly, five of every one hundred people who take a drug test, fail it. Do the math. That’s a lot of people. Are these bad people? Or, at some point in their life, were these people faced with right versus popular and chose the wrong one? “Come on, we’re all doing it. Be one of us. Join the crowd.” Many of these people knew that drugs were wrong, but elected the easy route of following the popular opinion. At the moment, popular was made to feel right, but only for the moment.
Truth be told, I’ve made this mistake myself. Years ago, when I ran sales for a mid-sized company, my manager had me terminate the employment of a sales person (for performance) prematurely. This employee had not gone through traditional progressive discipline procedures. However, the COO of the company had decided that this sales person was not going to be successful in the company and should be let go immediately. While I agreed that the sales person was not going to be successful, I disagreed with the timing and the methodology. I pushed back a little, but not hard enough. I should not have let popular win over right.
Sales people allow popular to win versus right, too. Imagine a sales person has been working with a client for three years. He has gotten to know the people in the account. He knows them personally. Now it is time for an account review, a periodic meeting on the performance of the relationship. A manager inserts himself into the process and informs the sales person of what is going to be done in that meeting. The sales person listens to the strategy and knows that it is not right for the account. If anything, it will jeopardize the relationship and cause the decision-maker to look foolish. However, the sales person says nothing to the manager because, after all, he is the boss.
The mantra is not about arrogance. It does not operate under the auspice that you know everything, and thus, your decision is always the right one. Those of you who are Greek mythology fans would call this hubris. No one knows everything. However, it is always easiest to follow the popular direction and not research to form your own opinion of what is right. In today’s information world, there is no excuse for not taking a few minutes to research meaningful decisions before making them.
The mantra is not an advocation for insubordination. Yes, that sales person was correct. His manager is the boss. However, managers don’t always have all of the necessary information to make an informed, educated decision. Managers count on their employees to share with them, in a diplomatic manner, information that will help them make the right decision. Few managers try to make decisions without the counsel of others. However, not enough employees step up and raise their concerns early in the process. They are masters of water-cooler speaker. “That will never work. They don’t know about this factor that will cause the project to fail.”
Executives have some responsibility for this issue. Employees are often fearful of repercussion when sharing their thoughts, particularly when they are not consistent with the mainstream feeling (a.k.a. not the popular opinion). “Rather than get rebuked, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Companies need to create a culture where it is not only acceptable, but encouraged, for employees to raise their hand before the ship hits the iceberg. Growth comes from people challenging the status quo and feeling confident that they can present ideas, in contradiction to the popular, without retribution. At the same time, companies should show intolerance for those who fail to raise their hand, but say, “Yup, I knew we would sink when we hit the iceberg. I knew it all along.”
The “ivory-tower” is famous, or is it infamous, for making decisions without having all of the most relevant information to do so prudently. The “ivory tower” is called a tower because of the gap between executives and employees. That gap might as well be an ocean if employees are not empowered to share what they feel is right when it is not popular. If it is culturally encouraged for employees to participate in decision-making, data gathering, the company is better positioned to be successful. Oftentimes, the best ideas are found by talking with those who do the work every day. People need to feel empowered to share what they feel is right. Some refer to this as “no sacred cows.”
I recently started a new company and I’ve had so many people tell me what a great job I’m doing. “This idea is brilliant!” However, I’m not looking for a pat on the back, but rather a kick in the pants. The easy thing to do is to tell me that my idea is great. However, I’d much prefer those who tell me what can be better. Tell me you see an iceberg before I hit it.
Lee B. Salz is the CEO of Business Expert Webinars, President of Sales Dodo, and author of “Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager.” Known as “The Sales Dodo,” Lee specializes in helping companies and their sales organizations adapt and thrive in the ever-changing world of business. He is an online columnist for Sales and Marketing Management Magazine and the host of the Internet radio show, “Secrets of Business Gurus.” Look for Lee’s new book in 2009 titled, “The Sales Marriage… How to Hire the Right Sales People.” He is a passionate, dynamic speaker and a business consultant. Lee can be reached via email at lsalz@salesdodo.com, or by phone at 763.416.4321.
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