There is a cliché that sales people don’t typically have the best resumes, so there is a tendency to dismiss or reduce the importance of the resume in sales hiring. And good selling is about the personal interaction anyway, right? Well, most of us don’t have time to meet everyone to find our whether they
How are your numbers looking one month into the quarter? We polled our network of VP Sales to see what is at the top of their dashboard for evaluating the health of the sales effort running towards quarter end. Here are the top responses: 1. Pipeline – is it above or below the target multiple
Right now with a lagging economy, there are more sales reps on the street or looking for work. Many companies with open sales positions have a deluge of applicants, desperate to secure a job. Successfully screening sales applicants is one of the toughest jobs at the best of times, but when there is intense competition
We tackle projects of all different shapes and sizes. The most exciting ones revolve around a tech company with under-performing sales, where a recruiting project must not only hire great sales rep but create a culture change on the whole sales team. Anyone who has tried to create large scale change knows how challenging this
A colleague pointed me to a great Seth Godin post this morning on hiring (thanks G): “It only takes 10% as much effort to hire someone in the bottom 90% of the class. And it takes the other 90% to find and cajole and retain the top 10%.” Many companies are lackadaisical about hiring, so
Spending on marketing vs. spending on sales in B2B companies? The debate over which path yields higher results will continue into perpetuity. In a recent SoftwareCEO.com article, author Maureen Blandford asks some good questions about how marketing investments actually benefit B2B sales: “what happens if you stop producing marcom material, for a year? And most
Great short post about how many recruiters fear sales assessments –> (Many Recruiters Fear Sales Assessments, by the Objective Management Group, a sales assessment company so it’s a bit of an advertorial). He is right that most recruiters, are not inclined to use assessments – and it should be no surprise, whether they are internal
Talk to any sales manager and they will tell you that hiring reliable sales people is one of the most difficult things to do. Even the ones who say they have a good hiring track record will typically admit that too few of their reps are at target. Why is that? What makes hiring great tech
We believe persistence is a critical contributor to success. In fact, Calvin Coolidge once said: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of
We are often asked which sales methodology we advocate. This is a loaded question. We like them all, as long as they are used in the right situation. While there is no confusion over the value of employing a sales methodology (see some stats on the impact of employing a methodology), many of the methodologies
