September 22, 2016- ISSN# 1545-2646
Sales 99
We have all heard references to a topic such as Sales 101 or Accounting 101. These typically call upon the entry level academic level classes one might find in school. They are the starting point for education and understanding of a topic.
These foundational sales 101 topics are very important to the success of your sales team. Your sales team needs to know your sales process, your products, your customers and they must manage the sale not just react to the sales workflow.
As important if not more important is the drive to be a sales person. This is the start of Sales 99. You have to want to be a sales person before you can excel at being one no matter how many training 101 classes you may take.
Sales is a profession. Like most professions the person doing the work needs education, training, practice and the insatiable drive to overcome obstacles or in other terms being resilient.
I find it interesting that when business leaders are seeking out candidates for sales roles they place a significant amount of confidence in their ability to detect a person’s sales skills. Many look for a duplication of the traits they use to sell their products. They figure that if they are the business owner and they can sell then if they find their duplicate then they can also sell. Unfortunately this is not always true. Many times it is very disheartening for the owner when their protégé does not pan out.
So what is a business leader to do in order to increase their odds of finding, attracting and then recruiting a top shelf sales person to their business?
It starts with first committing to a continuous recruiting mentality for the business. Not only does the business need to market their goods and services but they must also market to attract talent.
College education and sports are BIG business. Lots of dollars are being transacted on a daily basis. As part of the marketing of the university, they promote their degree programs – BS, BA, Masters etc. They also promote their sports programs and the college coaches are in fulltime all the time recruit mode.
As business leaders we can learn from these recruiters the value and benefit from a continuous recruiting effort. The days of employees coming to work for your business and retiring from your organization are long gone. In todays marketplace designed turn over by either the organization of the employee place a large portion of the employable work in a 2 to 5 year employment status before a change occurs. Much like the college coaches, as their complete team turns over every 3 to 5 years, your business must not adapt to this same level of designed turnover.
The second part of the process is identifying the candidates that not only want employment but are so driven by the company and job that they won’t stand for anything but the position you are looking for.
It is more effective to take an emotional driven talent and refine their skills into a great resource than to take a person with great skills and try and create the environment in which they can find motivation. All of us are different and have various motivational drivers. For a business to try to set up an environment for each and everyone of them would be not only costly but not practical. Therefore define your organizations culture and recruit people who are driven by that environment.
It has been working for years in college sports and it can work for your business as well. This week take a look at your organizations talent attraction efforts. Are you recruiting or just hiring?
Need a hand in setting up a recruiting process? Call JKL Associates at (313) 527-7945. We can bring some strategies to your organizations success.
Questions or comments – email us at partners@jklassociates.com or call our Office at (313) 527-7945
Copyright – JKL Associates 2016
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