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Desperately Seeking Sales Stars
November 09, 2006
As the competition to recruit top salespeople heats up, companies are getting strategic about how they find their next star seller.
By Julia Chang
Barry Maher wasn't sure what to think when the scantily clad young woman entered his office. Maher was working late at one of his sales offices, which, unbeknownst to him because he rented it sight-unseen, was in a seedy section of a Midwestern college town, on top of a strip club. The woman was an exotic dancer from downstairs, fed up after someone had groped her. She stormed off in the middle of her act and, seeing the "Salespeople Wanted" sign in Maher's window, dropped in for a spontaneous job interview.
"I wasn't thinking about hiring a half-naked woman, but I did admit we may have had some openings," Maher recalls. "Then we started chatting, and it turned out that she was extremely personable, charming, well-spoken and aggressive." It went against his better judgment, but he thought she showed potential and hired her on a trial basis to go door-to-door to sell coupon-book and specialty advertising. The dancer grew into a top local seller, and even recruited a few other dancers and cops who were club regulars to sell part time. Her successful recruits exhibited similar qualities. "They were all very personable, very self-assured, focused and driven," Maher says.
That meeting was more than 30 years ago, and the former exotic dancer is now a top producer for a financial-services company. The woman's ability to sell herself in that impromptu interview, Maher says, clued him in to her field potential. "There are various [hiring and assessment] tools out there, but I still tend to be a seat-of-my-pants guy," says Maher, now a speaker and sales consultant based in Helendale, Calif. "I've been hiring salespeople for over thirty-five years…and if they can sell me on their skills, that's perhaps the most impressive thing."
THE WAR FOR TALENT
The moral of this unusual story is that you can find sales stars in the unlikeliest places. And with hiring the strongest it has been in recent years, managers are looking everywhere for star candidates. Recent business headlines have recounted tales of drug companies recruiting cheerleaders as pharmaceutical reps, and car dealerships scouting for female sales recruits at malls. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Google have made public plans to grow their sales forces.
Now that companies are in revenue-generation mode, the scramble for top sellers is heating up. In a survey conducted last year by human-capital firm Sibson Consulting of 65 major North American companies, 77 percent said they planned to hire more field sales reps, and about half said they were beefing up inside and Web-based sales. But just because companies need to recruit en masse doesn't mean they should play a numbers game. "When you hire in masses, you're going to make mistakes," says Joe DiMisa, Atlanta-based senior vice president and sales and marketing practice leader for Sibson. "In a churn-and-burn business, you can take risks and hire a lot of people to knock on doors. But in business-to-business, it's more of a relationship sale," he says, which means hiring requires more strategic thinking, such as taking into account larger corporate goals. In addition, there are other factors to consider: ramp-up time—how fast do you need feet on the street?; specific skills—do you want a hunter or a farmer?; and corporate culture—do you encourage team selling or fuel individual competition?
This penchant for more targeted hiring means that the seller companies are looking for isn't necessarily looking for them. "The [recruiting] trend is up because there's a shortage of talent," says Mike Magnotta, director of business development for The SearchLogix Group, an executive search and recruiting firm based in Kennesaw, Ga. "A lot of the fallout from the 2001 to 2003 [cost-cutting] timeframe was that the strong available candidates got scooped up, are in pretty solid roles and are not necessarily looking to make a change." Magnotta says he receives a lot of requests to scope out candidates at the competition. And many companies are using trade show booths to advertise jobs or asking customers about who is calling on them from the competition, says Steve Waterhouse, president of the Waterhouse Group, a sales training consulting firm based in Orange Park, Fla. "[Trade shows] are great because the competition is right across the hall," he says. "You have a high probability of running into people who are a good match for you."
TRIMMING THE FAT
Still, the "if you place an ad, they will come" technique isn't going anywhere. But companies are doing tougher pre-screening, says Jeff Burwinkel, general manager of the sales optimization practice at Development Dimensions International (DDI), a talent-management company headquartered in Pittsburgh. A DDI survey last year revealed 53 percent of sales vice presidents believed two out of five of their representatives lacked the skills to do their jobs. "[Companies] are going to greater lengths to ensure that they've got a top performer," he says. "People are being asked to give a presentation or do an exercise. And more senior executives are willing to interview."
At Dominica Recreation Products, a manufacturer's representative that sells park and playground equipment, the hiring process involves everyone from the owner to the administrative assistant. The Longwood, Fla.–based company started using a more systematic process this spring after the typical methods—referrals, job ads, networking—failed to turn up successful candidates in its South Florida market, a territory yet to live up to its potential. The company worked with Waterhouse to institute a system that reduced the number of incoming résumés, but produced more qualified candidates.
First, Dominica Recreation executives created a profile of their ideal rep, and filled out personality tests to determine how a potential candidate might fit into the culture of the family-owned company. Then they changed the wording of their help-wanted ad to describe the qualities they were looking for—someone who worked well in teams, was skilled in customer relations, and had experience calling on public and private entities—rather than the benefits of the job. The real test, however, would be how they dealt with voice mail. Waterhouse advocated setting up a voice-mail box to screen applicants for certain skills. Those who sounded nervous likely would be weak candidates; those who called back multiple times, or who deduced that pressing 0 would lead to a live person, showed aggressiveness and resiliency. The best candidates, Waterhouse suggested, would be the ones who hung up and called back later to leave a well-thought message.
Jim Budke, Dominica Recreation's field sales manager, kept a spreadsheet detailing each candidate's voice mail and calling techniques, and also got feedback from the administrative assistant, who was in on the game and kept her own notes. "It was interesting to see how they would interact with her," he says. "After I would talk to them, I would ask her what her take was with them on the phone. The more we got into the process, the more I relied on her input."
Budke intended to hire one salesperson for South Florida, but ended up hiring two more for other markets using the process, which also included a résumé, interview and personality test. One of the reps hired was a candidate who had hung up and called back; another had figured out how to get out of the voice-mail system. Though the reps are new and have yet to prove star status, Budke says the process weeded out those who weren't serious about the position or the company's mission. "We had based our hiring on selling ourselves to them, instead of making them sell to us," Budke says. "Now we see what they bring to the table."
MOLDING STAR SELLERS
Wish you could clone your top salespeople? In some ways, you can. Using so-called competency models are becoming more popular as companies try to replicate star quality. "In order to hire the right talent and not make mistakes, [more companies] are talking to top reps to determine the skills, knowledge, behaviors and attributes that lead to high sales performance," Sibson's DiMisa says.
Toshiba America Medical Systems (TAMS), a medical-imaging equipment company based in Tustin, Calif., takes this tack to assess potential sales stars. The company considers itself lucky; it receives a ton of unsolicited resumes (more than 40 percent of their hires are through referrals), but that doesn't mean paring down the resume pile is easy. That's why the company hired a consulting firm with behavioral psychology experts to conduct focus groups of their top salespeople. "We knew these people were successful, but we weren't sure why," says Aaron Hudy, vice president of sales. "We wanted to lock onto those behavior and leadership competencies."
The studies determined that star traits included such competencies as resiliency, relationship building, good ethics and strategic thinking. TAMS executives used these traits as the basis for behavioral interviewing. They asked candidates to describe instances during which they exhibited certain skills; for example, what happened when they had to manage conflict? "It's more about drawing from the candidate's personal experience," Hudy says. "I try to stay away from hypotheticals to see what they actually did in the situation."
Bottling star sellers' skills apparently works: TAMS currently enjoys a 30 percent growth rate, versus the 3 percent industry average, and its sales force has been growing 10 percent a year over the last five years. Currently, it employs about 175 field sellers. But the company's success isn't all due to hiring stars—it tries hard to keep them, too. Hudy says TAMS incorporates a number of strategies to maintain a sales-friendly culture, including "paying people well for performance, and paying them very well for overachievement," he says. "Our pay plan attracts the overachievers in the industry." TAMS also rewards top performers with an Extreme Performers Club trip, which sends the best of the best on all-expenses-paid incentive travel, and consistently conducts public recognition at sales meetings, on top of regular training and management opportunities. "For a sales professional in the field, who is the face to the customer, being supported and empowered is very rewarding," Hudy says. "We believe in recognition, and you have to do that in a lot of different ways."
SIDEBAR: SAYING GOODBYE TO THE WANT AD
It's hard to find good salespeople. Mike Obert, associate publisher for Dallas-based Beckett Media, a publisher of sports collectibles magazines, is familiar with the trying task of finding top talent.
"My top two or three [sellers] are stable and have been around. It's the bottom two or three—we're trying to increase their revenue," says Obert, who oversees six salespeople. But he has difficulty finding strong new sellers to replace his weaker ones. "We're spinning in circles because we seem to be getting the same kind of people."
Most sales managers can echo Obert's sentiments. But standard recruiting techniques attract standard sellers—now is the time to get creative with your talent search.
Guerrilla Marketing
Harry Joiner, a former marketing consultant, has been an executive headhunter for two years and writes a marketing recruitment blog, MarketingHeadhunter.com. He bemoans staid recruitment techniques, especially in large companies that rely mainly on traditional job sites such as Monster.com. The key to innovative recruitment is guerrilla marketing, Joiner believes. Think about who sells to your target employee and try to market through those venues. For instance, contact a local dry cleaner to post recruiting ads on outgoing orders if "what you're looking for is local smart people who care about their appearance and want to look good," he says.
To Go Young, Go TechieThe younger generation of sales recruits are technology savvy, and the next wave of recruiting tactics is embracing the new ways that young people use to communicate. For instance, MobileWirelessJobs.com sends out cell-phone text messages to job seekers listed with its site. Candidates are segmented by area code, and all potential employees within a given metropolitan area are alerted to a client's networking event, career fair or open house. The site also posts job-related podcasts for employers and seekers.
Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications, a recruitment-focused ad agency based in Oak Park, Ill., is working on developing text-messaging recruiting campaigns for colleges. "Text-message marketing is a very interactive medium. It combines the impact of telemarketing, visualization of e-mail and localization of mobile commerce," says Mike Temkin, vice president of strategic planning and development. College graduates could be segmented by location, major, age and gender, allowing sales managers to run targeted campaigns.
Look Under Your Nose
Sometimes latent talent is busy fund raising, working at the corner retail store or, in Russ Lombardo's case, serving dinner. Eight years ago, Lombardo, then vice president of sales and marketing for Commence, a Tinton Falls, N.J.–based CRM company, was eating at a nice local restaurant. He found his waitress competent and personable. He learned that she was about to graduate with a business degree and had prior office experience. "I gave her my card and told her to call me," says Lombardo, now president of PEAK Sales Consulting, based in Las Vegas. "She called me the next week, we interviewed, I hired her—and I found one of the most talented, enjoyable employees I ever had."
—TA
For more tips on how to hire and recruit star sellers, read Sniffing Out Sales Stars.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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