Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Terry Slattery,
Slattery Sales Group:
952.832.5436
in**@***********es.com
www.slatterysales.com
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if your best salesperson marched into your office and announced it was time to move on to greener pastures?
Would you panic and try to counter with a huge raise or a bigger office? Or would you offer congratulations and good wishes?
If you’re unprepared for the departure of sales people, you’d be frantic about the nine months it typically takes to find a replacement and bring a person up to speed. You’d be calculating how much this bump will cost you in lost opportunities and accounts that become at-risk.
Let’s see, nine months is 75 percent of a salesperson’s annual revenue goal. Ouch, that hurts. But for smaller companies, it could be a death knell for expansion, a dam for cash flow, and a hurdle from which recovery may be impossible.
You’re probably shocked or at the very least surprised – unless you know that 30 percent of the sales work force changes jobs annually. So what are your options?
You could overburden your remaining sales force by dividing the departed’s quota and accounts among them, but you might as well open the door for a mass exodus.
You could bite the bullet, and tell HR to start hunting, and pray that this time they’ll find someone who can and will sell.
Or you could build a bench and get off this island.
Calm days lie ahead when you opt for building a bench. Follow this continuous process to build a pool of qualified candidates that you know will sell in your market environment. At any given time, you can call on one of three or more candidates to quickly fill a vacancy in your sales force.
The beauty of bench-building is that it’s relatively simply and inexpensive, especially when you compare it to the steep costs of potentially at-risk accounts and a nine-month revenue blackout.
This proactive approach also is your ticket to freedom from being held hostage by your sales organization. Perhaps the biggest plus that having a bench offers is not having to rush into hiring less-qualified candidates who:
Successful bench-building requires discipline. Someone must be assigned the responsibility of building the pool and maintaining it. Whether that person is a sales executive, human resources manager or the CEO, he or she must routinely check the validity of the pool at least quarterly.
For most companies, this means transforming recruiting activity from a reactive mode to a proactive mode. This is a big change, especially for small companies, which are not constantly on the lookout like large companies that visit college campuses a couple of times each year to scout talent.
Step one: Identify qualities of your ideal sales person.
If you think there is a universal sales person who can unequivocally sell any product or service to any prospect, I’m sorry to burst your bubble. There is no cookie-cutter profile of the successful sales person.
And that’s because the profile depends on many variables in any sales environment – from the type of product (technical, simple) to the prospect’s position (executive management, purchasing agent), and so on.
Step two: Market your sales positions.
Place ads in the job classifieds and online on a regular basis. I consistently find that electronic postings generate far more candidates than print ads, but for some positions, print ads generate higher quality candidates.
The response to your ads will help you determine how often to place them. The higher the response, the less frequently you’ll need to look to the market. A single ad could help you build a pool that might be valid for three to six months.
There is an art to creating ads that pull responses from qualified candidates. The ads that work best are written as though the job itself were speaking to candidates, saying “this is what I need.”
After building and validating position requirements (not the salesperson) in step one, we divide them into three ‘buckets’ within the ad: What the candidate must have, should have and would be nice to have.
Step three: Screen candidates.
Engage them in a telephone conversation – 10 minutes tops. Create an environment that closely mirrors the kind they are most likely to encounter with prospects.
If prospects are typically warm and fuzzy, make the call rather friendly. However, if your salespeople more often meet with put-offs and push-backs, the screener needs to act accordingly. The right candidate is easy to spot.
Step four: Assess online.
Candidates who excel in the brief interview take a quick, easy online assessment that provides volumes of information about their ability to sell. Analyze how closely each candidate’s assessment results match the requirements you’ve determined for successful selling in your particular marketplace.
Assessment results are 92 percent accurate in revealing who can and will sell based on your criteria. Assessment-based hiring is critical to successful bench-building and contrary to companies that rely too heavily on interviews, appearances and resumes.
Candidates can interview like John Wayne, but when it comes to selling, they shift into Woody-Allen mode. Resumes highlight successes, not failures, and references are limited by corporate policies.
The nature of a sales position is far different from other corporate positions. Sales people are required to consistently handle rejection. They must have the fortitude to bounce back, accept responsibility and forge ahead – something that’s virtually impossible to glean from interviews and resumes.
Step five: Nurture relationships with top candidates.
Once you’ve built a pool of qualified candidates, keep in touch with them no less frequently than every quarter to confirm your interest and monitor their situation.
Explain that although the timing may not be right at present, you want them to stay in touch. Suggest that they let you know if they are considering another position.
Chances are that one out of a pool of four will be ready to make a move when you need to replace a salesperson, and you won’t have to face a revenue shortfall due to an unexpected departure.
