How much does it cost to lose a high performing employee? When you take into account their salary, benefits, orientation, training, and administration, it can be very costly.
How much does it cost to lose a top sales professional? When you add up the potential lost revenue, market share
and profitability the individual can bring in on top of the usual expenses, the costs – including turnover and rehiring – could be immeasurable.
Tom Abbott, sales manager and trainer at Soho Sales Coaching, shares five tips to help HR professionals retain sales professionals:
1. Having strong sales leaders
Sales professionals are looking to their managers for guidance, direction, and leadership. What is the vision for the department or organisation? What are the objectives as far as sales volume, sales revenue, profitability, return-on-investment, market penetration, and market share?
Leaders must share their vision with their teams and encourage them to contribute so they can take ownership of the organisational vision. Great sales leaders focus on the “what” (vision and objectives) and leave the “how” (tactics and implementation) to their sales teams.
2. Improving compensation plans
When it comes to establishing compensation plans, most organisations look at either fixed salary, commission, or combination plans. Sometimes it helps to differentiate between existing accounts and new accounts. It’s important to compare the value of each sales dollar produced from existing accounts to new accounts. You can also look at the effort needed to maintain existing customers versus acquiring new customers.
Organisations are beginning to move away from fixed prize giveaways and gift cards, and moving toward online points-based compensation and incentives catalogues. These catalogues could include tickets to concerts and sporting events, travel packages and even products on commerce websites.
3. Investing in professional development
While all sales professionals must be oriented with your products and services, you may consider providing further development activities to those who have been with you at least one year. These individuals tend to be highly motivated top performers who want to learn.
You could invest by encouraging them to use your products and services, going on plant tours to see how the products they are selling are being produced, talking to teams from other departments. It also pays to let them listen to customer feedback, read trade and technical publications, as well as go for internal and external sales training.
4. Assessing productivity and profitability
Sales professionals want to be assessed according to clearly defined objectives. Performance can be measured by incorporating quantitative and qualitative criteria.
Quantitative criteria include: sales volume in dollars or units, growth over previous years, new accounts, and profitability. Qualitative criteria includes: attitude, product knowledge, communication skills, customer feedback, selling skills, and personal initiative.
5. Automating your sales force
Sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) software helps your sales professionals track information such as: number of calls per day, time spent per contact, revenue per call, cost per call, ratio of orders to calls, number of new customers per period, and number of lost customers per period.
SFA and CRM tools are easy-to-use and provide a real-time view of sales performance and compensation. In addition, they can provide calculations of projected commissions from converting leads to opportunities. Compensation management software and commission tracking software can also integrate with CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle and Salesforce.com. These tools are much more versatile than spreadsheets for organising information and help to further incentivise sales professionals.
From: amolsledge.blogspot.com
For the umpteenth time, I just received a resume that went through 2008. The experience up until then looked interesting but with no indication of the last 2 ½ years, I probably will not call this candidate.
Why? Not because they are likely unemployed but because they left a glaring GAP in their resume. Recruiters and managers receive dozens if not hundreds of resumes a week. We literally do not have the time during the day to call everyone who submits a resume. Thus, we have to cull through to find the ones that fit our client’s criteria. If we have 10 resumes that could be a match, we are going to call the COMPLETE resumes with no gaps first. If we find enough qualified candidates from those, the resumes with gaps never get to the call stage.
If you were unemployed, list it. List “interim position”, “part-time work”, “ job search”- anything but a glaring gap.
If you took care of elderly or ill parents, list that. It’s nothing to hide and actually very commendable. It’s a reality these days and we all have family. I highly respect anyone who provided that for a family member.
If you went back to school, list that.
Whatever you’ve been doing for the last 6, 12 or 18 months, list it. Unless, of course, it’s watching “Oprah” and “General Hospital” J. I wouldn’t list that.
These tips are from John Mackin Ade*, who for quite some time I have tried to track down for permission to use these tips with no joy. John, wherever you are, these have been tucked away for me to source whenever I have needed a little reminder on what makes a great sales manager. Thanks.
50 Tips on being a better sales manager
- Always come to work as early as you want your staff to be in.
- Dress the way you want your staff to dress.
- Handle your problems on a one-to-one basis.
- Always show your boss respect in front of your sales staff.
- Never hire a friend.
- Never hire a friend of a friend.
- Spend a little time each day with individual staff members.
- Teach them what you do right.
- Admit your errors as quickly as you want others to admit theirs.
- Go on at least one sales call with each sales person each week.
- Always collect cash in advance from clubs and restaurants.
- Never tell your staff you are sold-out.
- Don’t try to teach co-op to your number one biller.
- Never assign a rookie to a major advertising agency.
- Never get drunk with your staff.
- Never get drunk with your boss.
- Never get drunk.
- If you blow up, apologize immediately upon calming down.
- Go for a walk around the block before you blow up.
- Never let programming organize a sales promotion.
- Go to two lunches per week with your biggest clients.
- Make your sales meetings informative and interesting.
- Make your sales meetings as short as possible.
- Schedule a weekly meeting with your boss to recap sales for the week.
- Work with the PD, Creative, or promotions department, not around them.
- Make all your staff live under the same rules.
- Develop a creative program with cash bonuses to copy department program department or promotions department.
- Develop a master testimonial book.
- Keep the “promotional sheets” in the sales bins fresh and current.
- Turnout at least three special packages in a month.
- Go on as many national sales trips as possible.
- Understand the role of the reps – they sell, you motivate and lead.
- Figure out a way for the reps to pick up the bar tab.
- Hire the best salespeople you can find.
- Hire your replacement.
- Don’t answer a question with “Because I said so”.
- Learn your traffic system and inventory system so you can understand it.
- Demand 10 new sales contacts per week from your direct retail staff.
- Give them a Visa , MasterCard or suitable credit card to get money upfront.
- Cold call the newest lead source-online marketers.
- Have a quarterly sales meeting outside the office.
- Invite clients to your house for dinner instead of a bar.
- Make sure you have a great assistant.
- Buy your own tape recorder and write your memo’s on it.
- Talk your boss into a mobile phone for your car.
- Convince your boss that a time management course would be useful for you and your team.
- In conjunction with creative prepare a demo tape of commercials. Or if print a series of 1 ½ ¼ page ads.
- Go to dinner with each staff member to get to know them.
- Develop a sales person of the month award.
- Give one of your sales person’s commission checks to their spouses.
There you have it – what do you think?
By: Mike Brunel
It seems logical that the more recruiters who see your resume, the better chance you have of being exposed to future employers. That’s the reasoning behind the strategy of using multiple recruiters. In reality, when you contact too many recruiters your resume could be submitted to the same employer by a different recruiter.
Top-notch recruiters can take on a consultant-like role with the employer. As with every field, you will have recruiters who really enjoy partnering with clients to assist them in bringing top talent to the organization, and you will have those who are more focused on filling positions using a quantity-versus-quality mindset.
If you want to prevent the runaround that happens when people submit their resumes to recruiters – only to get silence for weeks on end – you can, to a degree.
Ideally, you want to do your due diligence and interview recruiters before submitting your resume. You want to understand their communication style and when you can expect a follow-up call. When there is no communication, you’re left to fill in the blanks, and that can be frustrating.
Getting the runaround is a sign you could be just another candidate and lack a relationship connection. Working with recruiters is like building a good networking relationship, it’s an exchange of information.
Most of all, you can control your selection of recruiters and limit how many you will use. What message do you send an employer when they receive multiple copies of your resume from various recruiters? Using too many recruiters can take away your appearance of uniqueness to a potential employer.
By: Kim Thompson
How difficult is it?
Individuals in careers outside of IT who have project management skills and very strong and well-rounded communications skills can make the leap to information technology. Those looking to make the move must keep in mind that experience levels serve as the greatest challenge in this transition.
The extent of job opportunities for people transitioning from another field to IT is fairly consistent from market to market, according to Barry Downs, Washington D.C., branch manager for staffing firm Robert Half Technology. Downs noted that those making the transition should focus on positions such as entry-level help desk roles, analyst opportunities and quality assurance.
Jill McKay, account manager at staffing firm TrueBridge Resources’ Washington, D.C., office added that positions such as business analyst, digital marketer and project or product manager are good bets for transitioners, and went on to note that sales and recruiting positions easily translate to technology. In the D.C. area, McKay said that media and telecom industries are growing their tech departments and that people working in these industries should inquire about on-the-job tech training.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in the technology sector will be growing steadily from 2010 to 2018, and in a report released in Dec. 2010 by the Tech America Foundation, D.C. was ranked second in the nation for high-tech jobs. But those companies hiring to fill traditional IT jobs that are technical in nature still demand experience.
“Candidates that are looking to transition into the technology sector job market face several different challenges,” Downs said, “the most obvious being the lack of real-time experience. Companies that are hiring in today’s market are typically filling roles of highly skilled professionals that were let go during the downturn. Therefore, with no valid experience, candidates are up against a big challenge. Also, new and entry level roles are being filled with people that have prior experience.”
In general, Martha Heller, president of Heller Search Associates, a technology executive search firm located in the Boston area, also emphasized the importance of project management knowledge and the “ability to bring a project from inception to completion” as a valuable skill to bring to a tech job.
Terry Erdle, executive vice president of skills certification at CompTIA, an IT industry advocacy group, agreed that having project management skills with certifications eases entry into the technology sector when transitioning from other careers. He also noted that communications technicians may find the move easier than most. Still, he cautioned, those applying for jobs with very specific skill sets, such as working with relational databases, will be challenged without experience.
Augmenting acquired skills with education and training can help ease the transition. Erdle noted that certifications can trump degrees when the job is specific to the certification, and that vendor-neutral certifications such as CISSP and CPP can broaden opportunities.
Michelle Mercurio, associate dean of career services for DeVry University, consistently sees people with in-demand technology certifications, especially those with MCITP, MCSE, CCNA, Security+, CISSP and PMP certifications in the D.C. market.
CompTIA advises via its Web site to pay close attention to your references, get certifications, be willing to start at the bottom and try entry-level positions as springboards to the desired job.
by Duane Craig and Leigh Goessl, in conjunction with The Washington Post Custom Content department