Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

Not having a reason not to hire someone is not a reason to hire them.

What did it cost you to settle for someone who was adequate if you missed the star who would have come along one month later and would have been a quota exceeder for the next 10 years? How much did it cost because you settled for someone who was adequate rather than someone who was exceptional? The principle is—if they aren’t exceptional, they aren’t acceptable.

Whatever the gap is between what you hire and what you need, the manager pays for in the long run. If your new hire is not exceptional, they are not acceptable.

Additionally, you have the out-of-pocket costs of recruiter fees, moving expenses, and training and travel to get someone new up to speed. What is the real cost? Most of the sales managers I talk with estimate the cost of a bad hire at — when they add it all up — a minimum of one to two year’s sales quota. It takes three to six months to figure out if the new hire can do the job; then you may have to give them a probation period of another 90 days; and then it takes another three to six months to hire someone else and get them up to speed again.

Here is an example based on a salesperson with a $1.5 million quota:

	Range	Average
Initial hire period	1-3 months	2 months
Ramp-up and training time	3-6 months	3 months
Time to realize poor performance	6 months	6 months
Time to review and fire	3-6 months	5 months
Time to hire new rep	1-3 months	2 months
Total		18 months
Additional costs
18-month sales quota x $1.5 million		$2.25 million
Recruiting fees		$25,000
Training		$50,000
Total		$2.325 million

If our accounting practices required us to take a writeoff or write a check for this amount every time an employee went out the door, this would stop.

In addition to money, the other costs of a bad hire include

• Lost productivity.

• Time and stress.

• Error correction.

• Angry customers.

• Employee morale.

• Wasted support resources.

• Missed opportunities.

• Management reputation.

However, a very successful rep could produce quota for 10 years or more. How much time would you spend on a prospect that size? Why would you spend less time on a rep?

The next best thing is to figure out how much your real costs are so that you can figure out where your time is best spent. It's not only pay me now or pay me later—paying me later is several multiples of the time invested now.

Recruiting and interviewing are two of the most valuable investments sales managers can make of their time. But it has to be proactive, and it has to be in advance of an open territory or you will end up settling for someone who is adequate rather than being able to wait for somebody who is exceptional.

A colleague of ours, Rob Jeppsen, tells a story of when he was the CEO of a young technology company:

“You may only get one good shot at a particular client, and the wrong rep can blow this shot. You could lose the opportunity to do business with the client for years—if ever.

Our firm needed to hire two reps. I had the board putting all kinds of pressure on me to fill the territories ASAP. As important as these territories were to the company, we were unwilling to pay market rates.

I was told that 'good would be good enough. As a result, I hired the best two guys I could find for the right price.

As it turned out, the two I chose were not people I would have hired if I had the option of waiting.These guys could not speak the language of our customers and drove away far more customers than they attracted.

As they struggled to succeed, not only did they cause us to lose real opportunities, [but] they [also] became negative energy sources, complaining about all of the things that were making it impossible for them to sell. This caused significant damage as other employees joined sides of management or salespeople.

Ultimately, good was not good enough, and it took us nearly 18 months to fully recover.”

Proactive Sourcing

Another way to be proactive and get ahead of the curve is to nurture your network—take care of your people — and keep in contact with the salespeople who have been successful for you in the past. When you get your next sales management job, those people could be your pool. I know a lot of sales managers who have put themselves out of business because they not only didn’t nurture the network, they burned bridges.

Another source is to cultivate professional organizations. That dead time during trade shows and conferences can be well spent getting to know the competitive salespeople who always assemble there.

A very successful rep could produce quota for 10 years or more. How much would you spend on a prospect that size?

It can be dangerous to recruit from clients, but there are times when clients can be a good source of candidates without destroying the relationship. You also can consider rehires—good people who have left you. Maybe the grass is greener for a reason; maybe it’s the stuff they are spreading around over there. Good people can come back if you keep the door open.

Most managers, in their interviewing process, consider only two dimensions—performance and personality. If this is as deep as you look, you’re not going deep enough.

There are a number of reasons salespeople fail and one of the biggest ones isn’t a lack of confidence or commitment. It’s character. And most interviewers fail to ask enough questions in this area.

In our management training course, we teach people how to drill down to character issues in addition to performance. We teach them to ask questions they wouldn’t normally ask otherwise.

During one of our management training classes, one manager said, “I’m not comfortable asking these personal questions.” The most recent exercise we had done in class was to study why employees fail. When we looked at the chart paper around the room, the irony was that 80 percent of their failures had to do with character issues, yet they weren’t interviewing in that area.

What skills, experience, intelligence level, behavior traits, etc. will predict success? The answer is unique to you and your organization.

Your Sales Process Should Drive Your Talent Profile

The first step is to define your best-practices sales cycle— the template for an ideal sale in your industry segment. Then the next step is to work backwards to the activities, information, and strategies needed for each phase of your sales cycle.

FIGURE 4–1 Best-practice sales cycle competency model.

Then work into the skills, competencies, behaviors, and experience needed to effectively execute each of these activities for each of the roles on your sales team (see Figure 4–1). The last step is to create the interview questions that help you to discover these traits—or their absence—and compare them to your profile.