Sales Executives

By: Mike Elk

Last year, the leaders of the U.S.-based foreign labor and supply company Global Horizons were indicted in what the Department of Justice considered the biggest human trafficking case ever brought by the federal government. They were charged with holding 400 Thai guest farm workers in the United States against their will in conditions that essentially amounted to slavery.

The workers were given guest visas to work in the United States under the H-2A visa program. They were kept under brutal conditions under armed guard in Hawaii and forced to live in substandard conditions in hot shipping containers “with no carpet, beds, furniture, indoor plumbing, kitchen or air conditioning,” according to federal investigators. They were under constant threat of violence from gun-toting guards, and on one occasion a guard told the workers they would be shot if they tried to escape.

Several company officials have already pleaded guilty in plea bargain deals and several others are expected to stand trial. In 2006, when the workers’ maltreatment was discovered, the Department of Labor also debarred Global Horizons from participating in the H-2A agricultural guest worker program for the mandatory three years; it issued an additional three year debarment in 2009. Last week, a judge upheld the three year debarment after Global Horizons appealed it.

As I have previously written for In These Times, with the U.S. government giving out $530 billion dollars a year in federal contracts, debarment is a powerful tool to force corporations to obey laws that would help protect workers and their communities. But despite laws that forbid law-breaking companies from receiving government contracts, the federal government rarely enforces them.

But is debarment of Global Horizons—and similar scofflaw companies that supply workers to the United States—from the H-2A agricultural program really enough to stop human trafficking here?

“This is obviously a step in the right direction. This company shouldn’t be getting new government contracts,” says David Madland Director of the America Worker Project at the Center for American Progress. “However, you can also see that it’s so limited. It’s just for this particular program. In theory, they could keep getting other types of contracts and grants.”

The company—whose president, incidentally, sued CorpWatch in late 2006 over a story written by In These Times Contributing Editor Kari Lydersen about the abuse of Thai farm workers—did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.

Companies like BP have been barred from receiving contracts due to past environmental abuses in one part of their company, but were able to continue receiving federal contracts in parts of their company not affected by debarment.

As I wrote in February, only a handful of major corporations that have committed major crimes have been suspended from receiving government contracts since the mid-1990s, according to testimony before Congress by the Project on Government Oversight: “General Electric (for a period of five days); now-defunct companies WorldCom, Enron and Arthur Anderson; Boeing (which received multiple waivers to receive new contracts during its suspension); and IBM (for a period of eight days in 2008). The rules are not enforced vigorously due to a lack of resources and a lack of clear government guidelines for enforcement.

Some labor and immigration advocates claim that the guest workers program as a whole is the problem and that debarring labor recruitment and supply companies that abuse the system won’t solve anything.

“Debarment of Global Horizons is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the problem. It eliminates one party, but what about the farms doing it?  There still are tons of recruiters working overseas to recruit new workers for these farms,” says Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) President Baldemar Velasquez, whose union represents 23,000 farm workers in the United States.

Oftentimes, a company like Global Horizons, which functions as a middleman to recruit and provide labor to farms, will go out of business when it is debarred. However, the farms that use that slave labor will continue to operate. The farms are protected due to the limited legal liability of using a middleman labor contractor. New groups recruiting and providing guest workers will spring up in their place and continue to provide people for those same farms.

“Anytime you have a guest worker program, it is inherently very corrupt,” says Velasquez. “They are all slave labor programs to begin with because there is no oversight on the sending country.”

Often workers are forced to sign outrageous contracts or fees, wherein they mortgage their families land in order to pay for their trip to the United States, as the Thai workers did. Many workers fear speaking out to government regulators because they fear they might lose their family’s land overseas.

“This problem is not going to be solved by regulation by government,” says Velasquez. “Farm workers have to have an organization [through which] they can air their complaints without a fear of retaliation. They need some type of organization, such as a union, in place so they can police their own experience. This is the only way we are ever going to really eliminate the problem of forced labor in the United States.”

By: David Gardner

Americans gave up vacation time worth a staggering $67.5 billion last year and worked instead, according to a new survey.

With the recession still biting hard on Main Street, all work and no play has increasingly become the norm.

The average American employee got 18 paid vacation days in 2010, but only used 14 of those days off.

Altogether, Americans gave up 448 million earned vacation days last year.

Using the average full-time wage of $39,208 – that adds up to $67.5 billion worth of time.

The Expedia.com survey revealed that workers in Europe are much more determined to claim their time off.

Workers in France got 37 vacation days last year and used 35 of them while the average worker in the UK took 25 of their 28 days of paid leave.

Only 38 per cent of Americans quizzed by the travel booking website said they took all of their vacation days.

Some say their bosses frown on them taking time off, others say the financial climate is still so tough that they simply can’t afford to stay at home.

Even when they do escape from the workplace, 72 per cent said they still checked in with the office, said another poll from Rasmussen Reports.

But analyst Scott Spiker, CEO of First Command Financial Services, told CNN that Americans may have an ulterior motive for going in on their vacation days.

‘Vacations tend to suck up money,’ he said. ‘They tempt people to spend more, save less and take on more debt.

‘By forfeiting some of their vacation days, Americans are trying to eliminate the temptation to spend money,’ he added.

‘Headcount is so low, salaried employees are probably doing a job-and- a-half minimum, maybe two jobs, and they can’t get away,’ Mickey Kampsen, president of MRINetwork’s Management Recruiters of Charlottesville, also told CNN.

‘They are trying to bring as much value as possible to their company in order to keep their job,’ she said.

‘You’ve got to show you are one of the loyal soldiers.’

Siemens, Hilton, and Target are using games to train workers and improve how they design and market products

By: Rachael King

Siemens (SI) is pinning high hopes on Pete. A cheery fellow, Pete wears a yellow hard hat with his name emblazoned across the front. He’s polite and eager to lend a hand. He’s also animated: Pete the Plant Manager stars in a new online video game from Siemens called Plantville that simulates what it’s like to run a manufacturing facility. The aim is to take three dilapidated factories and make them more efficiently meet customer orders by hiring employees, redesigning layout, and buying and installing new Siemens equipment.

Germany’s Siemens, which makes power plants, scanners, and trains, created the game to fuel equipment sales and foster greater employee knowledge of its products. “Employees are sometimes siloed in their business units and don’t see the breadth and depth of our portfolio,” says Tom Varney, head of marketing communications at Siemens Industry. The company joins a growing roster of enterprises as diverse as Hilton Worldwide’s Embassy Suites hotel chain and German software maker SAP (SAP), which are using technologies that make games interesting in order to interact more effectively with customers and employees.

The trend, known as gamification, lets businesses weave elements of games into applications that otherwise have little to do with playing. The market for gamification will grow to $1.6 billion in 2015, from $100 million in 2011, according to Wanda Meloni, founder of M2 Research, a consulting firm that researches the gaming industry.

Companies such as Cold Stone Creamery and United Parcel Service (UPS) have for years used games for such tasks as training workers. Gamification is now letting managers push aspects of gaming into marketing, product design, and everyday work experience. It’s also helping companies compensate for shortfalls in traditional forms of advertising and marketing, says Gabe Zichermann, chief executive officer of Gamification, a company that runs workshops for businesses that want to implement a gamification strategy. “What we have is a crisis of engagement,” he says.

Nissan’s “eco mode” dashboard service

Nissan Motor (NSANY) brought gamification to its new electric vehicle, the Nissan Leaf. The automaker uses the technology to help drivers conserve fuel. When the car is driven in so-called eco mode, its accelerator contains a counter push-back control mechanism that is activated when it detects excess pressure. The feature informs drivers that they’re using more power than required. An online portal connected to the car’s dashboard also lets drivers know how well they’re conserving energy, compared with other drivers in the region. The most efficient drivers are given virtual bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals.

Similarly, cashiers at Target (TGT) receive a score each time they check out a customer. The score is based on the the transaction’s speed, with the checkout system also calculating the cashier’s success rate over multiple transactions.

Companies need to guard against adding a superficial gaming gloss to applications—for instance, by creating meaningless leader boards that have little lasting impact on employee behavior, says Aaron Dignan, author of Game Frame, a book published in March that explores game mechanics in the workplace. “My hope is that it grows beyond that into a real discipline that’s more rigorous than it is today,” Dignan says. Managers also need to be alert to such possible unintended consequences as hacking or employees putting too much emphasis on the wrong aspects of play. “People could pay too much attention to things that don’t matter or too little attention to things that do matter if the game is designed poorly,” he says.

U.S. Companies Helped on Plantville

Siemens spent a year designing Plantville, working with such companies as Eugene (Ore.)-based game-design company Pipeworks Software, advertising and design firm Shaw Co. in St. Louis, and Fusion Performance Marketing in Plano, Tex. The game can be downloaded at Plantville.com and Siemens is using advertising, social media, and employee communications to get the word out. While the game hasn’t been out long enough for Siemens to have amassed results, Varney says early feedback from employees has been positive.

Hilton’s Embassy Suites is using game techniques in a customer loyalty campaign. Created with a marketing company called Maritz, the campaign targeted 50,000 of Embassy Suites’ most loyal guests, then solicited their participation with 10 different approaches, including direct mail, e-mail, and asking customers to play a game. The game option proved most effective, says Christian Kuhn, director of brand marketing for Embassy Suites. The 5,000 people targeted by the game were most likely to open e-mails and later spent the most money, Kuhn says. That group accounted for about $200,000 of the additional $1 million in revenue generated by the campaign, he said.

Games may be more effective in marketing because they offer the gratification people experience when surprised and rewarded. An unexpected reward releases dopamine in the brain, giving beneficiaries a pleasurable feeling, says Barry Kirk, a vice-president at Maritz. “We don’t think you can gamify something without understanding the human brain and neuroscience,” Barry says.

Game designers are good at creating psychological hacks into how the human brain works to determine what motivates people, says author Dignan. That’s why gamification can be a good fit for companies seeking to better engage workers. “It’s about managing motivation and energy level and commitment,” he says.

SAP’s Games for Corporate Directors

Software maker SAP is turning to gamification to help corporate board members prepare for meetings. Directors typically must slog through thick binders full of documents or dashboards that feature key performance metrics. SAP is developing an application for Apple’s iPad that boasts game elements such as progress bars and leader boards to get directors “more engaged in consuming various pieces of data,” says Reuven Gorsht, senior director of strategy and global pre-sales at SAP. “We’re dealing with very high-ranking executives that sit on six or seven boards and may have a full-time job running a company,” he says. “Their time is precious and their attention span is fairly low.” he says. The app should be ready in three to four months, he says. SAP is also looking at other ways to use game mechanics to make its software easier to use and more engaging for employees.

Traci Sitzmann, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado’s business school, says games can make employees better at their jobs. She spent more than a year examining 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees in a study due to be published in the journal Personnel Psychology. Those using video games had a 14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level, an 11 percent higher factual-knowledge level, and a 9 percent higher retention rate than trainees in comparison groups, Sitzmann says.

Siemens is looking to games, not only for retaining current employees but attracting future ones as well. “With Plantville, we think there’s a big educational play with colleges and high schools,” says Siemens’ Varney. He says he hopes the game can help make manufacturing more attractive to young people. “We have about 3,000 jobs posted in the U.S. at Siemens, many in technology or manufacturing,” he says. “We’re hoping to inspire a new generation of plant managers.”

By Ivana Taylor

Slow Down, Sell Faster: Understand Your Customers’ Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales.  The author, Kevin Davis (@toplineleader on Twitter)  has over 30 years’ experience in sales and wrote Getting Into Your Customer’s Head back in 1996, so you know that he’s been drinking this lemonade for a long time.

What’s Inside the Book

Davis combines academic research and practical experience to generate a sales system you can use to not just improve your top line, but your bottom line as well.

Part I of the book is devoted to the actual sales system.  One thing I really like about this book is that it is actually written for an industrial or complex buying process.  Davis references established experts Webster and Wind, who have studied how bigger organizations make decisions to select a supplier.  And he uses decades of research and melds it with practical, real-life ways that business-to-business purchases are made.

Part II expands on the selling system by introducing what Davis calls the eight roles that you have to play in the customer’s buying process:

1. Student: Use Knowledge to Gain the Edge
2. Doctor: Diagnose Small Problems, Define Big Needs
3. Architect: Design Customer-Focused Solutions
4. Coach: Make a Plan to Defeat the Competition
5. Therapist: Understand and Resolve a Buyer’s Fears
6. Negotiator: Reach a Mutual Commitment
7. The Teacher: Teach Customers to Achieve Maximum Value
8. The Farmer: Cultivate Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Part II contains one chapter on coaching to the eight roles.  It’s written for sales managers and the people who work for them.  It provides a series of cheat sheets and troubleshooting tables to help sales managers and sales reps debrief sales calls.

If you’ve had any professional sales training, you will recognize many of the principles and techniques represented in this book.  For example, I’ve had Sandler Sales Training, and I easily recognized what I call the 10-point scale technique.  Simply ask your customer to rate the solution you’ve come up with like this: “On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is ‘not at all what I want’ and 10 is ‘this is the perfect solution,’ how would you rate the solution we’ve discussed?”  If they answer anything less than an 8, ask, “What would you need to see to bring that to a 10?”

The book is full of strategies, tips and hints at every level and at every point of the selling process.  Davis uses a layered approach where he introduces the selling system, then overlays the roles of the salesperson through the buying process and guides the reader to success.

Here are just a few examples of some of my favorite pieces of information:

The Decision-Making Hierarchy: This is perhaps the simplest and best description of what’s important to each level of the organization and how you should structure your message:

• CEOs – They are at the top of the pyramid, and profitability is what you should focus on when talking to them.
• Mid-Level Managers – The middle or core of the pyramid.  These people are most concerned about solving operational problems.  The departments typically represented here include marketing, operations and customer service.
• Support – This is the base of the pyramid and includes accounting, purchasing, training and legal departments.

While most books tell you to aim straight for the top of the pyramid, Slow Down, Sell Faster reveals the truth that most salespeople don’t have anything of substance to say to C-level execs until they’ve gotten their feet wet a little further down the pyramid.

Slow Down Sell Faster Is a Serious Sales Book Focused on Sales Training and Improvement

This is a fantastic book for any business-to-business, technical or industrial CEO with full-time, direct salespeople who sell high-priced, high-involvement products and services to companies where more than one person is involved in the decision.

Don’t expect to read Slow Down, Sell Faster in one sitting and then see immediate results.  This is a comprehensive, detailed and perceptive book about complicated sales situations.  You’ll want to read this book section by section and then take the time to implement and practice specific strategies.  I’d recommend that you visit the Slow Down, Sell Faster section of Kevin Davis’ website where you can download Chapter 1, “Why Slower is Faster,” and experience the book for yourself.

Overall, this is an extremely powerful book that will challenge your thinking and your sales process.  And like a good workout and diet, I think you’ll find the results well worth the effort.

(By MARK DEMAREE)
“What are the ‘hottest’ industries for recruiters right now?”
This question is one that we get quite often. I’m sure it’s because Top Echelon’s split placement network has several thousand jobs shared to its split system each month, and each job has an industry tied to it. We’ve been tracking industry statistics and trends for over 20 years.
At Top Echelon, we’re able to track such numbers through our split placement network. That’s because this network is a system in which recruiters share their job orders and candidates with one another for the purpose of making split placements. There are nearly 400 recruiting firms across the country that are Preferred Members of Top Echelon Network, and they share their information in order to leverage their time and resources with other recruiters. Ultimately, they want to fill their clients’ open positions with the best candidates possible in the shortest amount of time, and networking with other recruiters in a collaborative manner through our Network allows them to accomplish this.
With that in mind, we can find out which industries are the “hottest” through a couple of different means. One of those means is by the number of job orders that are submitted to the Network by Preferred Member recruiters. That’s because, of course, the number of job orders that exist within a specific industry or niche is an accurate measuring stick for how hot the industry or niche is. More job orders mean more opportunities for placements.
As you can see by chart at the top of this blog post, the number of job orders has increased in eight of the top 10 industries in Top Echelon Network, and some of the increases have been quite dramatic. Some prime examples are Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation (up 216%); Public Service, Social Programs, Government, and Legal (up 96%); and Automotive (89%). In fact, Automotive’s rise is rather surprising, considering what’s happened with that industry during the past couple of years. The same could be said of General Manufacturing, which saw a 59% increase in job orders during the past year. Overall, the job orders submitted to the Network in these 10 industries is up 43% year-to-year.
As a recruiter, one of the questions you might have right now is, “Okay, that’s all fine and good, but what are the salary figures associated with these job orders?” That’s certainly a fair question, and fortunately for us, we have a fair answer. The salaries associated with the job orders in Top Echelon Network can range anywhere from an entry-level position in the mid 40’s all the way to C-level positions in the couple hundred thousand dollar range, but overall, the average salary is about $88,000.
What’s the bottom line? These are all good signs—both for these industries and also for the recruiters that work within these industries. We talk with recruiters all the time, and they also say there’s a lot more activity than there was a year ago. That heightened activity level is further evidenced by the increase in job orders in the system.
So it’s all good news . . . and we like good news at Top Echelon, especially when it deals with the job orders that recruiters submit to the Network.

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(Mark Demaree, the President of Top Echelon, is a regular contributor to the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog.)