When a hiring manager meets what appears to be a perennial top producing sales person, there can be an overwhelming temptation to go into full sales mode to get this person hired – especially if this person is working somewhere else which is almost always the case with top performing sales people (we call these
Consistently high producing salespeople are rare – they represent 5-10% of the total sales population – so leading companies pursue them aggressively and are always looking for an edge to attract better and more reliable salespeople. Top salespeople are also different from average salespeople in that they look for career opportunities differently. Since there is
Sales rep burnout is a possibility on any sales team and this is especially true if you are driving hard towards big sales goals. If your reps become exhausted, they will lose interest in their work, stop producing and/or leave your team, which will have an impact on the overall sales numbers. Over the years, I
Many sales managers, particularly new sales managers, have trouble striking the right balance between managing reps and letting them do their jobs. Too often there is micromanagement and not enough of the right kind of management. Poor Sales Management and Micromanagement Early in my own career as a sales manager, I would spend a lot
It is well known that you have to pay at, or more likely a bit above market levels in order to attract the best sales talent in the business. There are numerous surveys that indicate what sales reps are getting paid and there is always anecdotal feedback that comes to an employer either via its
For a lot of people hoping to land a new sales job, it is a priority to create a resume that is search engine friendly. Unfortunately, this often leads to resumes that are less succinct and are jammed with keywords which distract from the accomplishments and abilities of a salesperson. To those of us that
After many years of answering all sorts of sales management, recruiting and performance questions, I decided to put together an FAQ for hiring amazing sales people. These lessons have been learned from decades spent in the trenches building and managing successful sales teams as an entrepreneur and sales leader, as well as recruiting, investing and
We have written about the linkage between money and sales rep behavior (see links below), but money is not the only way to motivate your sales team members and there may be times when you need to motivate using additional methods or alternatives to financial rewards. Here are some of the key ways to motivate
We hear this story a lot. I recently hired a new sales person. During the interview process they seemed like a great hunter. They pursued me during the hiring process and actively closed me during our final interview. Now that the rep is on-board, it seems they won’t pick up the phone to save their
One in every four people in the general population has better potential for sales work than 50% of the people already in the sales profession. And in reviewing the performance of employees for thousands of large mid-sized and small companies, we found that nearly 80 percent of the workers are not filling the jobs best
