Sales recruitment can be tough. Candidates will often make the right noises but how can we really be sure that they’ll ‘walk the walk?’
In our experience, the key to being (and hiring) top salespeople is the desire to do the job. Professional selling is a skill, and because it’s a skill it can be learned. But your salespeople have to want to learn how to sell effectively.
I recently saw a quote by Andy Bounds saying that that salespeople choose to “Show up and throw up”, meaning that they talk themselves out of work by verbally throwing-up all over the customer – “Sit there. Shut up. And listen while I tell you all about myself and our company. We were founded in 1922. Here’s what we do and how great our products are, let me tell you all about them…”
Most research tells us that 80% of salespeople don’t sell effectively, as Andy says they simply “Show up and throw up.”
(more…)A frustrating thing happened to me on my way home from Romania on March 9th…
…I had been working with my client smrtStudio Global Inc / smrtPhone in Brasov all week. I was pleased as the time with smrtPhone had gone very well. These are all friendly and professional people and very customer focussed. Flying home from Bucharest to Edinburgh I had to get a connecting flight at Frankfurt. The problem arose when the Lufthansa flight was an hour-and-half late leaving Bucharest.
In businesses that don’t have a sales team, the responsibility for sales activity will fall on somebody else’s shoulders. Could be the CEO of a small business without a sales team, a one-person band, or perhaps somebody that has been unwillingly ‘lumped’ with the responsibility for driving new business.
It’s the end of another eventful year, or uneventful depending upon how you look at it! Co-vid 19, Brexit, trade negotiations (trade wars?) and various other external factors have all served up influences on our businesses. Some of these influences may have been positive but we’re sure many have been negative.
