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How Great Sales Managers Recruit and Retain Top Talent

Put People First (For Real)!

The phrase, “People are our most important asset” has rolled off of many corporate lips. The problem, says Tom Peters, is “it has mostly been bullshit!”

“I don’t mean to say that most enterprises ignore the ‘people thing.’ Of course they don’t,” Peters writes in his 2003 book Re-Imagine! “But there is a special meaning to the word ‘first,’ as in ‘putting people first.’ It means that ‘getting the people thing right’ is alpha and omega…and every letter, Greek or non-Greek, in between.”

Hiring the wrong candidate can cost up to 2½ times that worker’s salary, yet few organizations have a hiring process in place, and even fewer offer training for managers in what is arguably the most important task they tackle: intelligent hiring. Hiring top talent takes preparation. Geoff Smart and Randy Street, authors of the best-selling book Who: The A Method for Hiring (Ballantine Books, 2008), say no manager should conduct a job interview without a formal scorecard — a document that designates what they want a person to accomplish in a specific role. A scorecard is not a job description, they stress, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job well done.

For those who manage to clear the hiring hurdle, the retention hurdle awaits. No company keeps every employee it wants to hold on to, but as a manager, you have more impact on turnover than you may realize (or care to admit).

“When it comes to keeping people, managers trump companies,” states Leigh Branham in his book Keeping the People Who Keep You In Business (AMACOM,2001). “Managers of people, not human resources departments, must take primary ownership of employee retention.”

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Ask For Help
Finding and landing top talent isn’t a solo endeavor. Carefully constructed employee referral programs (ERPs) produce outstanding results with regards to cost, speed and quality of hire. A study of the top ERPs in the high-tech industry by John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, indicates that employee referrals accounted for 38 percent of all hires in 2006, 46 percent of all hires in 2007 and were expected to produce as much as 62 percent of new hires by the end of 2008.

The well-designed ERP tracks job performance of referrals and, if a new hire is rated as a top performer at the end of predetermined time, rewards the person who referred the new employee. Sullivan says a good ERP also incorporates a method to receive referrals from non-employees.

Want Allegiance? Take a Bullet for the Team
“Taking personal accountability is such an increasingly rare phenomenon that it’s a point of difference,” says Jeffrey J. Fox, author of How to Become A Great Boss (Hyperion, 2002). “A great boss is the first one to say, ‘That was my fault,’ or, ‘That good idea was Joe’s.’ ” This is not to say that you can’t hold your employees accountable. If you’ve hired smartly, you should be confident that your sales team is doing the best it can. Good people want to do well. The great boss does not sacrifice someone to save himself.

Roll Out the Red Carpet for New Hires
One study showed that up to 60 percent of employees change jobs in the first seven months of employment. As soon as they are hired, they begin looking for “better opportunities.” Have a definite plan for how you want a new hire to spend his first day, says Leigh Branham, author of Keeping the People Who Keep You In Business. If possible, provide key written materials prior to the first day; arrange for office furnishings and supplies ahead of time; meet with the employee early in the day to reaffirm the importance of his job to the company’s success; introduce him to as many team members as possible; if you can’t take him to lunch, make sure someone else does; and keep your schedule open at the beginning and end of that first day.

Know What You’re Looking For (But Don’t Reveal It)
The first step in hiring the right salesperson is to understand which talents will get the job done. Whether the sales cycle is 30 minutes long or 30 months, the person doing the hiring must know the sales process from beginning to end before ever interviewing a candidate, says Lou Adler, president of The Adler Group, a training and consulting company. But beware of providing too much detail about what you’re looking for in a candidate, advises Derek Gatehouse, author of The Perfect Salesforce: The 6 Best Practices of the World’s Best Sales Teams (Portfolio, 2007). Candidates who know exactly what you’re looking for know exactly what to say during the interview. Be generic with your job ad and continue that vagueness during the interview.

Show Them How Much You Love Them
“By far, the most important tool in leveraging talent is making employees (especially high performers) feel valued and appreciated,” says Allan Schweyer, executive director at the Human Capital Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based resource for recruiting and talent management (www.humancapitalinstitute.org). “The challenge is to find — or develop — skilled leaders who have the confidence, knowledge and experience necessary to know when to acknowledge excellence, and how to make it sincere and motivating.”

Turn Your Cab Light On
Dating coach Nancy Slotnick says just as cab drivers turn their lights on when they’re looking for a fare, single women need to let men know they are available. “It’s not about dressing slutty or actually asking a guy out. It’s more subtle than that,” she says. Managers looking for top salespeople can take a similar approach. Slotnick also says when looking for the right man, “it’s important to have a lot of pots on the stove at the same time.” So, too, when filling sales positions. “Sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them,” say Geoff Smart and Randy Street, authors of Who: The A Method for Hiring (Ballantine Books, 2008).

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Make Your Conversations Count
Customers long for greater value and more meaning from their business relationships, but the trend today is toward fewer real conversations. What used to be handled face-to-face is now tackled with an e-mail or via teleconference. “There is no real warmth or curiosity,” says Alan Gregerman, author of Surrounded by Geniuses: Unlocking the Brilliance in Yourself, Your Colleagues and Your Organization (Sourcebooks, 2007).
“We seem to have forgotten how to write or interact with any real passion, even though that’s what life is all about.” Conversations that matter require people to be engaged, to honestly care about each other more than about any financial return, and to sharing inforation, insights and questions of value. What’s more, says Gregerman, “to be capable of meaningful conversations with those we serve, we need to be capable of having them with each other in our own companies.”

Declare War on Yourself and Your Business
“Pursuing relentless improvement means declaring war on yourself — continually assessing every aspect of what you do and how you do it with the determination to raise the bar,” says Mark Stevens, CEO of MSCO, a marketing and strategy consulting firm. Too often in today’s business world, Stevens argues, what passes for leadership is really “followership” — executives imitating the icons of business stardom. “You can certainly learn from successful business leaders, but you can’t copy them. A successful manager needs to wake up in the morning and be himself instead of assuming a role that’s inconsistent with his personality. Wage war on yourself, but don’t dress in someone else’s clothes.”

Manage Yourself
The late Peter Drucker insisted that those managers who get the best from their staff are the ones who also manage themselves. He suggested that every manager periodically ask themselves three key questions:

• What am I doing that does not need to be done at all?

• What am I doing that can be done by someone else?

• What am I doing that only I can do?

Trust Others Before They Earn It
Leaders often don’t enjoy the luxury of an orderly decision-making process. Mergers, acquisitions and alliances happen quickly. Yesterday’s fierce competitor is today’s colleague in the next cubicle. The need for speed means there often is no time for a “get-to-know-you” period. “Leaders need to get past their tendency to divide the world into us-versus-them and start extending trust to partners who look, act and lead differently,” say David L. Dotlich and Peter C. Cairo, authors of Unnatural Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2002). And trust begets trust. When employees feel trusted, they are energized, more willing to initiate ideas, and more likely to fulfill expectations.

Create a Culture That Embraces Mistakes
“These tumultuous times beg for bold initiatives to increase the odds of even staying afloat,” says Tom Peters. He emphasizes that this does not mean tolerating sloppy work or reneging on accountability. Leaders improve when they learn about problems promptly, adds Kathy Bloomgarden, author of Trust: The Secret Weapon of Effective Business Leadership (St. Martin’s Press, 2007). Reacting to a major mistake provides a chance to dig down to the problems that allowed it to occur and to make fundamental changes in processes that will ensure quality. Says Peters, “My all-time favorite PowerPoint slide among the thousands in myportfolio: ‘Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.’”

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