The VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America today. The reason is simple. Their forecast number is tattooed on their foreheads for everyone to see. Make it and the Sales VP is a hero for a day. Miss it and well….

But consider this. Before any sale goes up on the big board, there are at least 10 critical functions that your sales leader has to perform. As CEO’s, and business leaders, we would do well to inspect these critical functions and to help our sales management succeed. Otherwise, you’re going to start over, which can be even more costly.

You can help sales management by looking at what’s not working. Here are a few questions to ask when your sales management is not delivering the number you both agreed to.

1. Do we have the right sales and go-to-market strategy?
2. What kind of sales structure do we have in place to support them?
3. What kind of motivation and comp system will accelerate results?
4. Is the team sufficiently trained on our product or services?
5. Are they trained on industry and competition?
6. Do we follow an effective and predictable sales process?
7. Is marketing providing qualified leads?
8. Are we supporting sales with the right tools?
9. Are we mentoring and coaching our sales team?
10. Are we hiring the right high-performance sales people?

If your first reaction is to fire the VP when the number on his or her forehead doesn’t match yours, then ask these questions. If you’ve asked, and coached to these questions, and not gotten answers, only then must you answer question number 10 with respect to your VP of Sales. But the final question to ask is, “What makes a great sales leader?”

(Take our 90 Second Sales Performance Benchmark)

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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Why don’t you pay your VP of Marketing or CMO the same as your VP of Sales?

This may seem like a radical concept. But as CEOs and business leaders, our success is often in how we hire, and how we motivate our team.

The classic answer to the question is that the VP of Sales is more important. They bring in the revenue. Power in a company is directly proportional to proximity to the revenue stream. Marketing is behind the lines. Therefore they should be paid less.

But in today’s environment, buyers say they find their vendors 80% of the time rather than the other way around. When they do find you, they are much further down the sales funnel than they used to be. They no longer rely as much on sales people to provide information, or help them understand how your products and services help them solve a problem. When the prospect doesn’t buy from you, 80% buy a similar product or service within 18 to 24 months. Sales doesn’t nurture prospects for that amount of time. Their attention span is too short. You don’t want sales doing these things, because they also aren’t very good at it, and you want them selling. <see How Many Sales People Does It Take To Screw In A Forecast?>

Who does these valuable things? Marketing.

Our prejudice is to believe Marketing offers less value. That the return is harder to measure. But whose fault is this? While there is a lot of crappy marketing going on out there, a big portion of it is our fault.

For what other function would you lower your expectations, and therefore pay less? When you set low expectations, you get crappy results. This doesn’t mean you should pay for crappy results. But what if you changed your expectations?

There’s a new wave of brilliant marketers out there, using sophisticated new tools to bring prospects through your funnel. They are going to work for the people who “get” marketing and who challenge them. They are going to add tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to their company’s revenues. But maybe not yours.

At minimum, they are going to want the same goals as sales if not similar incentives. Because when Sales and Marketing don’t have the same goals and rewards, they piss at each other, and your company suffers.

You get what you pay for. Raise your expectations… and your pay.

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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I once had the choice between six smart engineering students to hire a summer intern.  They all had good things to recommend them.  When I made my choice, the students’ professor challenged me.  I picked a poor foreign student with an accent.  He asked what was wrong with the other students, and pushed them on me.  I told him nothing was wrong with them.  They were all good kids.  Then he asked why I picked Jimmy C.  I told him that he had more drive.

What motivates sales people is a subset of what motivates people.  The common response to the question of sales motivation is money.  Many people assume that because someone is “coin operated” that is a sufficient indication for motivation.  Can you find someone who is coin operated?  You can.  But coin operation is often circumstantial, and may not be consistent over time.

Motivation isn’t always demonstrated by forecast achievement either.   Many things affect sales forecast, for example a rising market.

Motivation to do or accomplish anything comes from two sources.  One is external (i.e. money, prestige, etc) and the other is internal.

In the case of sales, I call this internal motivation, Drive.  Drive is different from other words we associate with the successful sales rep.  I’ve heard words like, desire-to-win, competitiveness, and so on to describe the characteristic for a motivated rep.  Some of these may be externally motivated.

Drive is the harnessing of innate internal motivation to accomplish great things.  It gets to the core of who we are.  Why we exist, and why we get up in the morning. This motivation can be as different as desire to succeed, or at the opposite pole, simple survival.  But we don’t need always need to determine why.  Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, it is difficult to both determine position (why) and the mass (what).

So the strongest indicator of Drive is past behavior.  What has the candidate done to demonstrate Drive?  Have they run a marathon or a triathlon?  Have they overcome adverse circumstances?  Have they started and run their own business?  How have they reacted to failure?  Are they a working mother going to night school?

Drive isn’t always just hard work.  It requires hard work, but it often involves some element of risk.  Has the candidate achieved something while taking a calculated risk?  Have they faced a fear, subjugated it, and or succeeded in spite of it?

In Jimmy C’s case, the odds were against him.  He managed to leave his birth country and learn a new language.  Like the other students, he held a degree in Electrical Engineering.  But he was also pursuing another degree in software engineering at the same time.  His grade point was 4.0.  And he was working to pay his way through school.  He was taking some risks.  He was smiling while he did it.  He was driven.

Look for drive.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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When many types of pelagic sharks stop swimming they die.  Swimming to forces water over their gills and provides oxygen for life.

I believe that there is a similar necessity for sales.  Since the sales and customer environment is changing so fast, when a sales person stops learning, he or she becomes less effective, and dies as a sales person.

What has curiosity (See my post Curiosity Killed the Cat) got to do with learning?  It’s simple.  Curiosity is the catalyst for learning.  If you aren’t curious or interested, it’s very difficult to learn.

I believe learning is important in sales for two reasons.  First to stay current in your own disciplines, both sales skills, and the product/service areas you sell.  The second is to learn about your prospect’s business.  Are you curious about their business problems?  Do you ask yourself how you can help solve them?  Can you learn a way to help them?  Curiosity is also a catalyst for problem solving.

Can curiosity be measured?  Not directly or easily.  But we can ask interview questions on learning.
•    Give me an example of the last time you learned a new sales skill, or technology.
•    Give me an example of when you uncovered a problem your prospect didn’t know they had.
•    Give me an example of how you provided a unique solution to a customer problem.
•    Give me an example of the last thing you read and how you used it.
•    How many good questions did they ask you about your business problems?

And how many of you bothered to look up the word “pelagic”? Is the candidate confident enough to stop you when they don’t understand something?

Keep swimming, and look for others that are curious.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Empathy may seem like a strange quality to look for in a sales person.  (See my previous posts on Empathy.)  But when you think about empathy, it’s the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person and feel what they’re feeling.  It’s related to EQ mentioned in a previous post but goes further.  In normal people, it elicits the need to help.  It’s different from sympathy, which to me is a quality of recognizing someone’s pain.

You are empathetic when learning of another’s critical illness when you react, “Oh my God, that’s terrible.  I have no idea of what you’re going though, but how can I help?”  You are or seem sympathetic when you say, “Oh, how terrible. I’m so sorry.  What are you going to do?”  And then perhaps think, “Thank God, it’s not me.”

I’ve heard people say that Sales is a “Hurt” and “Rescue” game.  First you “Hurt” the prospect by uncovering and amplifying their pain, then you “Rescue” them by providing a way to take away the pain.  I don’t agree.  This approach may work for some, but it has sociopathic characteristics.

If you are hiring an exceptional sales person, look for someone who wants to help his or her prospects.   The emphasis is on help.  For the “Me” generation, it’s not about “You,” it’s about “Them.”  And as long as it is about “You” and only making the sale, your prospects won’t trust you, and you won’t make the sale.

One filter is to ask a sales candidate is if they’ve ever told a prospect that what they had to sell wouldn’t help them, or that they needed to do something else first before it was appropriate to look at your product or service?  If they have, they’ve helped the prospect, and perhaps shown some actual concern and empathy for the prospects situation.

Another filter is to ask your potential sales candidate to give some examples of how they’ve actually helped others, both in their business lives and their personal lives.  The better candidate will be able to answer quickly.

Look for the ability to be empathetic and you will improve your odds of hiring a great sales person.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Part V.  People buy from people they like, and who empower them.  We all recognize when we like someone, but what characteristics make a likeable person?  The list would be long, and we don’t all like the same type of people.

I believe one characteristic of likeability is “Authenticity.”  The dictionary defines authenticity as the quality of being genuine.  As an adjective, “Accurate in representation of the facts, trustworthy, reliable.”

When I think about authenticity, the people that come to mind are young children.  They are innocent and simply say what’s on their minds.  “Grandpa, why do you have wrinkles?”  There is no duplicity.

Those who are authentic, are true to themselves and are content to be who they are.  If you say what you think, you are genuine, and even if people disagree, they respect the honesty.  And that helps build trust.  Trust is essential in sales.

I haven’t quite figured out how to filter candidates for authenticity.  One way might be to challenge them and see what they do.  Do they agree immediately and seek to eliminate awkward discomforts, or do they stop and think, then feel comfortable speaking their truth and disagreeing?  Are they respectful in their disagreement?  Comfortable enough to appreciate another position, or do they defend when challenged?  Are they afraid to ask a question that causes you to think differently?   Are they interviewing you, as well as being interviewed?

If they aren’t authentic, then how can they challenge your prospects and help them think differently about how to solve problems?

Look for authenticity.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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Part IV. There is a popular trend stressing importance of Emotional Intelligence and it’s connection to sales ability.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand other’s emotional and psychological state as well as one’s own reactions and emotions. Intuitively it makes sense that to do well in sales, you not only need to understand your prospects emotions, but your own as well.

An increasing number of books are making the connection between the two.

However, I’ve done a literature search and can find very little quantitative evidence on this correlation. (If you know of actual data and not anecdotal data, please leave a comment sitting the source.) The link between the two has become a “credo;” something that seems true through repetition, but maybe true, somewhat true, or entirely false. (Check out There Are Alligators in the Sewers of New York City.)

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to have emotional intelligence in dealing with prospects.

One interesting data point comes from a study by Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and referenced in Daniel Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human. Grant asked the question, who is better at selling, Introverts or Extraverts? Conventional wisdom might say that extraverts are better. They are more social, gregarious and able to hold conversations with others. On the other hand, maybe introverts are better since they probably listen more and talk less. Again, conventional wisdom is wrong.

There is no significant correlation between extraversion and sales performance. There is also none for strong introversion. Interestingly, it is the “ambiverts” who performed significantly higher in sales results.

(http://www.danpink.com/2013/01/why-it-pays-to-be-an-ambivert-and-why-you-probably-are-one)

It’s relatively easy to test for Introversion and Extraversion. Bottom line: yes, Emotional Intelligence makes sense, but try looking at the Extraversion scale and since we often hire people like ourselves, take the test yourself.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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I prefer to hire smart sales people.   The smarter the better.

Here’s why.  The sales environment has changed extensively over the last ten years.  It’s bifurcated.

Products and services that were once complex are less complex because of the availability of information.  That information is easily available to buyers on the Internet.  At the same time the Internet has changed the competitive landscape and how we buy products and services.   So the skill sets required to sell some things have been dumbed down.

However, other portions of our lives have become more complex.  Think about the rapid changes in the Internet, communications, information technology, software, security, energy, environment, healthcare and medicine.   Think about how the world has shrunk.  How our world has flattened, so that now I do business with someone living in Mexico, using programmers from Brazil and the Philippines.

These changes require smart people to help prospects solve problems.  Not just the problems the prospect knows about, but problems they haven’t thought about yet.  I want a sales rep who can understand the impact of a new technology, see how it might be applied to solve a problem the prospect doesn’t even know exists.  This requires smart.

While we have many societal stereotypes around smartness such as “The Nerd,” it’s been my experience that intelligence is an asset in sales.  And I’m not talking street smarts, or emotional intelligence here.

I often hear managers say that they want street-smart individuals to sell.  I think there’s a clichéd credo that street smarts and intelligence are two different things.  I don’t believe they are.  I’m not discounting street-smarts, but I’ve rarely found someone who is street smart who is not also intelligent.   A recent publication in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience by Aron Barbey finds evidence of s a strong link between the two.

“Intelligence, to a large extent, does depend on basic cognitive abilities, like attention and perception and memory and language,” said study coauthor Aron Barbey, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, in a statement. “But it also depends on interacting with other people. We’re fundamentally social beings and our understanding not only involves basic cognitive abilities but also involves productively applying those abilities to social situations so that we can navigate the social world and understand others.”

So leave the Bubbas behind.  Test for general intelligence.  Hire smart people.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Part II – It’s the category of internal candidate criteria we tend to focus on the most when hiring sales people.  We tend to hire people we like, and we like people like ourselves.  So hiring for internal criteria his is where our gut takes over.

Humans are visual and we are evolved to make quick decisions on what we see.  One study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Doctor’s often evaluate their patients within the first ten seconds of entering the room, even without speaking to the patient, although they will deny it.  Jurors often select a jury foreman within the first twenty seconds, though the actual process may take much longer.  How long does it take them to judge the defendant?

I can’t say that I want to be diagnosed that quickly, or be judged by a jury of my peers based on how I look, so what can we do about this when we interview sales people, especially for the intangible internal criteria?  Do we hire for looks?

The first filter used in interviewing intangible criteria is match to your corporate values.  Why?  Because corporate values help you make triage decisions when there is a conflict.   Your values may say something like… always do right by the customer.  But you might also want to hire candidates that have a “desire to win.”  What happens when these are in conflict?  Values help you decide.  And if someone doesn’t exhibit your core values, how can you expect them to support your company?

The second filter should be your own list of inner characteristics that you believe make good sales people.   As an exercise, take a minute and write down the first five inner characteristics that you believe a sales person should exhibit.  Then prioritize them.  Regardless of how hard it is to determine these in the candidate, you won’t have any consistency among multiple interviewers if they each have their own list.   It’s a hard exercise and requires both discussion among your interviewers, and hopefully a way to generate evidence.

Lastly, you can look for external testing to verify these traits or generate a set of question focused on these characteristics.  So for example, if you value Intelligence, you can use a simple intelligence test.  If you value honesty, maybe you ask them if they’ve ever lied to a prospect.  I’ll cover testing in another post.

Some of my own criteria and the reason for them are listed here.  I’m not prescribing them; it’s just that I’ve found them useful.  Your situation will be different.

Intelligence:
Emotional Intelligence:
Authenticity
Empathy
Curiosity
Drive
They are all connected but represent different vectors.  I’ll discuss each in upcoming posts.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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Part I – I once ran into a Sales Manager printing his own interview questions for hiring a sales candidate.  I asked if I could look at them.  One of his first questions was what kind of car do you drive?  I asked why this was important, and he indicated that if the person was a good sales rep that they would drive an expensive car.  I pointed out to him that the best sales person I had met in twenty years drove an old pickup truck.

What are your criteria for hiring a great sales person, and what qualifications are you looking for?  There seem to be as many processes and sets of qualifications as there are sales managers.

I believe there are three types of criteria.
1) Circumstantial Assignment Criteria.  Those job criteria, such as experience in the industry you serve, location, or salary range you can afford.
2) External Candidate Criteria.  Those criteria you believe qualify the candidate and are verifiable, such as whether they have a college degree, references, and so on.
3) Internal Candidate Criteria.  Those criteria that tell you what kind of person you are hiring, such as whether they are honest, hard working, or have high EQ.  These traits are a little harder to determine, and they are the ones we tend to focus on with our “gut.”  There are also whole industries set up to help you “test” your candidate and “predict” their potential for success on internal criteria.  But one question is do they work?

Just as there is no single sales process, or single type of buyer, there is no single hiring process.  It depends.

So you begin by filtering your candidates for circumstantial and external criteria then bring them in for an interview.  Like the sales manager above, we all have our pet interview questions, but which ones should you use, and how should you interview and hire?

One of the best techniques for interviewing is called “behavioral interviewing,” and if you are not using the technique, it’s worth evaluating.  Its premise is that the best indicator of future success is past results.

So the questions asked focus on what the candidate has accomplished or the behaviors they’ve exhibited in past situations.  As an example, you could ask a candidate to “explain” what they do when they run into a roadblock in a sale.  Or you can ask them to give you an “example” of how they’ve overcome a roadblock in a recent sale.

The questions sound similar, but the first one is simply an intellectual or theoretical exercise.  Someone could know theoretically what to do, but have never done it.  The second question actually demands they tell how they have demonstrated the behavior in the past.   This type of questioning helps sort the BS’ers from the Doers.

In the next posts, I’ll explore Internal Candidate Criteria.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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