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Category Archives: Hiring and Interviewing

How to Update Your Hiring Techniques to Attract Younger Sales Talent

The sales profession is changing, and unfortunately, it’s graying.  Statistics show that the average age of a professional salesperson now is 47.1 years old.  Fifteen years ago, that number was 42.  That means that our profession has aged five years in the last fifteen – and that’s unsustainable.  The sales profession needs new blood.

With millennials now making up the majority of the workforce and Gen Z close behind, you might need to evolve your hiring practices to continue attracting top young sales talent. The old way of hiring salespeople – putting out a basic job description and waiting for resumes to trickle in – just won’t cut it anymore for recruiting younger generations. I’ve seen this in working with my clients – and I’ve seen some new methods generate great results.  Sales managers need to take a more proactive and strategic approach to stand out and connect with qualified candidates. Here are five updated hiring techniques that have been shown to be successful in reaching younger sales professionals.

Showcase Your Company Culture:  “Culture” isn’t just a buzzword anymore. Today’s younger workforce values culture, flexibility, and purpose when job seeking. Showcase what makes your company culture, and your job opportunity, unique when recruiting. Highlight your culture on your careers page, company website, and job posts. Let candidates know if you offer benefits like remote work options (sales is well positioned for this in my opinion) and professional development programs– these attract young talent. Use images, videos, and employee spotlights so candidates can get a feel for your work environment. Culture can make or break whether you connect with younger applicants.  One key – whatever you do, it must be authentic.  Understand – even if you fake your culture, sites like Greendoor will very quickly let candidates know the truth.

Leverage Social Sourcing:  Younger generations live their lives online and on social media. You should incorporate social sourcing strategies into your hiring process to connect with talent where they already spend time. Strategically post job openings in relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups in your industry. Share and engage with content from top performers and rising sales stars you’d like to recruit and connect with them. You can also identify passive candidates by searching profiles with relevant backgrounds or skills. Social recruiting allows you to grab the attention of talented individuals who aren’t actively job seeking.  This also means being innovative with respect to your recruiting message.  Don’t be afraid to step out of your lane and try things like a video job ad (keep it to 60 seconds or less) or memes (funny or serious).  Post not only to the “normal” mediums like LinkedIn and Facebook, but consider TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram.  Remember – you can’t hire them if they don’t know you are hiring.  Don’t be snobbish about the way you get your candidates.  Just get them.

Highlight Development Opportunities: Younger sales talent care about career growth and acquiring new skills. If your company lacks structured development programs, highlight other growth opportunities in your job posts and outreach.  Better yet, BUILD some structured development programs, starting with your 90 Day Onboarding program (you have one of those, right?). Mention if top performers have a chance to take on mentees, have access to skill-building resources, or can participate in stretch assignments. You want candidates to see that your company supports professional advancement so they envision future opportunities. Having one-on-one meetings with candidates to discuss career path trajectory is also powerful.

Showcase Tech Stack: Millennials and Gen-Z candidates expect companies to harness modern technologies and encourage innovation from employees. When recruiting, thoroughly describe your tech stack – like sales engagement platforms, LinkedIn integration, data analytics, and automation tools you leverage (and if you aren’t already, get comfortable with phrases like “tech stack”). Discuss how your sales team utilizes technology to enhance productivity. Today, you’d better be comfortable discussing AI as a sales tool. You want tech-savvy candidates to see you provide cutting-edge resources to drive results.  By the way – if you aren’t using tech to drive sales results, start doing it.  The sales profession isn’t going to be backtracking to a low-tech environment anytime soon.

Convey Company Mission & Impact: Younger people increasingly seek out purpose-driven work. When recruiting new team members, sales managers should communicate how their company mission makes a difference and highlight recent company impact metrics. For example, explain how your product or service tangibly helps customers.  If you have community involvement programs, those should be part of your messaging.  One fear I’ve heard is that sales managers are reluctant to get into politics with candidates.  That’s fine; you don’t need to.  Companies can be seen as positive without being seen as taking a particular political stance.

Respond Quickly:  Younger generations have been conditioned by social media to expect quick likes, comments, and attention.  If you want to succeed in hiring, get used to doing the same.  I used to recommend that managers collect resume’s for a week, then sort through, pick ones to call, and call.  Now the best practice is to receive a resume’, do a quick scan on it, and then call right then.  If your candidate doesn’t answer, you should also email and text.  You want the candidate to get that quick dopamine hit that comes with a quick response, and then give multiple ways to get back with you.

Never mistake this:  You are competing for talent in a highly competitive environment.  If some of the tactics above resemble ways that you’d compete for customers, that’s not an accident.  Compete for sales talent with the same intensity as you compete for customers, and you’ll have a great sales team.  And you’ll leave many of your competitors behind.

How to Build a Sales Culture in Your Organization

In my years of experience in working with (and for) companies large and small, I have discovered that there is a common element to the most successful businesses.  The most successful companies have a sales culture.  A “sales culture” is a philosophy that permeates the company, from the corner office to the loading dock, that says, essentially, “We are a sales organization, and everything else we are able to do is a product of our ability to sell our products or services to our customers.”

This flows from the top because it must.  Despite the protestations of those who advocate bottom-up leadership, the reality is that any corporate culture is set not by the employees at ground and field level, but by the overriding philosophy of management.  So, let’s assume for the moment that you have decided that your company needs to accept and embrace a sales culture.  How do we go about that?

Set the mission:  First of all, whatever your mission statement, throw it away.  I know, it’s something that you’ve put a lot of thought into and probably has some great phrasing.  It’s probably also something that your employees couldn’t remember if a gun were put to their heads.  Let’s replace it with something simple like this:  “We are a sales organization, and we grow profitably by Recruiting new customers, Re-selling current customers to greater profitability, and Retaining profitable business.”  Use the Three R’s of Business Growth as the mantra that guides your company’s decision making.

Communicate:  All good things in sales (and business) come from good communication, and most bad things happen because of insufficient communication.  Knowing this, the next step is to communicate the message to your people, and to do so consistently.  This is where a lot of companies fail, because the communication happens like this:  The Big Guy (or Gal) at the Top will have a staff meeting where he/she communicates the ‘new mission’ forcefully to his key managers, and then expects the managers to communicate it downstream.  They do, but with varying degrees of emphasis and enthusiasm.  The Sales Manager obviously embraces the mission, while the Production Manager may be less enthusiastic, and so forth.  If you really want to effect change, it has to be up to you.

Have all-company meetings, or all-department meetings, or all-branch meetings; however you need to do it in order to have the opportunity to have every employee hear the message directly from your lips.  If your people know the goals, they will act in accordance with them – if they believe that the goal is real and permanent.

Align Goals:  To accomplish your goal of profitable growth through Recruiting, Re-Selling, and Retaining customers, you must align all your departments and goals. For instance, instead of budgeting in dollar terms, budget in percentages from the top line.  This way, when departments need more resources for equipment and personnel, they know how to get it – help grow the company.  Even with the best goal setting, however, you’re going to see some internal conflict.

Remove Internal Conflict:  Good sales forces, by their nature, create internal conflict.  This isn’t because salespeople are bad people, obnoxious, or difficult to work with (although they can be, and that is a separate issue), but because good salespeople push the frontiers.  Because sales is all about growth, good sales forces are always creating extra work and pressure for the other departments which must then function at a higher level to support the sales growth created.  This creates conflict and push-back.

It’s your job to mediate and handle these conflicts and push-backs.  It’s a delicate issue because no department, or department manager, wants to feel subordinate or less important than sales.  The reality is that, if you’re truly embracing a sales culture, the other departments are exactly that – subordinate to sales.  When conflicts arise, you should go back to your mission statement; what helps your company grow profitably through Recruiting, Re-Selling, and Retaining customers?  This doesn’t mean that “sales is always right;” there are times when the sales department is actually acting against profitable growth through mistaken reasoning.  That’s why you have to be the arbiter.

Have a High Performance Sales Force:  Now it’s time to turn up the intensity with the sales department.  You have the right to demand excellence from your salespeople once you have molded the culture of the company around them.

You need a strong sales manager who actively works to strengthen and enhance the abilities of his/her salespeople.  Your sales manager must be a good coach and developer of people.  He should be willing to advocate for the needs of the sales force while simultaneously demanding the highest effort and achievement from them.  He must be capable of surrounding himself with top talent and then making that talent even better.

The sales manager must understand the basic equation of sales achievement:  Quantity of activity x Quality of activity = Results.  To this end, the sales manager should have performance metrics in place to assess both quantity and quality of sales activity, and be equipped to hold salespeople accountable for those metrics and for the results.  Struggling personnel must be either coached or changed; top performers should be rewarded and coached to even higher levels.

Reinforce the culture:  As you’ve probably guessed, it’s not enough to have some meetings, say “we are a sales organization,” and call it good.  Cultures happen because they are reinforced, directly or indirectly.  For this to work, key decisions must be made based on the new mission statement:  “Does this decision help us to Recruit, Re-Sell, or Retain customers?”  That doesn’t mean that non-sales departments starve; that new machine for the plant may be completely justified by its benefits in product quality.  The raises for the production staff may be appropriate to reward them for their part in acquiring, developing, and retaining customers.  It does mean that your company has one universal criteria for spending, personnel allocations, and any other key decision making.

The Benefits:  There are numerous benefits to aligning your company around a sales culture.  The biggest is this:  Sales focused companies tend to produce excellence in every department.  The reason is simple:  Companies with a strong sales department cannot stay bad or mediocre in other areas; if they do, those sales gains will quickly be lost through customer dissatisfaction and attrition.  As noted earlier, good sales departments tend to lift other departments through necessity.  On the whole, organizations that center their culture around the process of profitable growth tend to achieve that growth, year after year.  It’s not easy, but the results are worth it.

Three Interview Questions You Must Ask Salespeople

In my career, I have interviewed thousands of salespeople.  Some interviews were great, some were good, and let’s be honest, some were really bad.  When you do that much of anything, you tend to get pretty good at it.  That’s how I developed these three interview questions.

I discovered a long time ago that some of the most important traits for salespeople could be discovered with three quick questions that opened the interview, and that’s what this video is all about.

I should not that I’m not talking about things like lateness (don’t EVER interview a salesperson who shows up late), improper dress, bad manners, etc.  Those things really go without saying.  But, there are deeper characteristics that you need to discover, and with three interview questions, you can find some of the most important ones.

One final note here.  It’s been said that how someone behaves on an interview is a reflection of how they will behave on a sales call.  NOPE.  It’s a reflection of the BEST CASE SCENARIO of how they will behave on a sales call.  And that’s where these three interview questions come in.

Oh, and if you’re hiring, you might want to watch this video about onboarding, as well.