Talent Acquisition

Outsourcing Your Sales Department?

In a recent call with a prospect, the question of “outsourcing the sales function” came up.

Outsourcing your sales department
Another bad idea

Rather than answer the question directly, I asked him what he meant by that. He proceeded to tell me that he had read how some companies are outsourcing everything, including their sales effort. However, he said, from his perspective it was not a particularly good idea.

He’s right.

Rather than tell you why outsourcing sales won’t work for most companies, let me tell you where it does work.

One client has been successfully outsourcing their sales effort. They are in the Internet advertising business and are now placing their inventory with brokers. This  company sells  “clicks”. This is a totally generic product. Where one click might be better than another click, it is adjusted through tracking results. Their click and Google’s click are essentially the same thing. If their click is better than Google’s click, the results are all tracked and balanced out. There is no way that Google will get more than his click.

On the other hand, client David W. is moving from a rep strategy for his internationally marketed industrial products. Rep firms are outsourced sales teams. However David is reversing the “outsourcing” because he knows that having his own rep in a territory means better sales focus and better accountability.

Another example is when, ten years ago the radio advertising business got all excited about selling its inventory like Google sells clicks. A former partner created a company to do this and sold it to Google. It was a giant dud. He made millions. Google ended up shutting it down and writing off their investment. Why? Because local advertising is not a commodity. It responds to sales effort and it cannot be tracked the way clicks on the Internet can.

Where its true, in my view, that business has used the excuse of this Crash of 2008 to outsource and downsize, efforts to outsource the sales effort have been a failure. In fact, when the Government stops QE whatever number we’re on, companies who’ve been ramping up sales efforts will prosper. Nothing works better than a great sales team to improve the top and bottom line.

photo credit: markhillary via photopin cc

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Uncategorized

Hire Salespeople By Keeping a Journal Will Make You More Money

Let’s face it, when it come to hire salespeople is like crawling around in the dark for most managers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I was lucky when I first started at 25 as a Sales Manager to hire salespeople. My boss, Mike, told me that training was secondary to sales hiring. He taught me that if you hire a lousy salesperson, all the training in the world will not make him great. He’ll just be a well-trained lousy salesperson.

He also taught me that if you want to get great when you hire salespeople, you have to keep records. For me that morphed in keeping a journal — well actually two journals. I’ll talk about the second journal in a minute.

But first in the management journal it is important to track which candidates you get with each ad. In this way, you know which ad pulled winners. (And which one pulled mostly duds.)

You also then track how your salespeople do at regular benchmarks. My benchmarks are 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years. At those dates I jot down the level of productivity of the salesperson.

In the Advanced Hiring System, we have incorporated this journal into the sales hiring system. (We’re looking out for your career here.) Plus we want to make it easier foir you to see how well you’re doing with the system.

If you follow this very simple system, you’ll improve every time you make a sales hire.

The second journal, well, that is a personal journal. Life is tough and having a record of your thoughts is invaluable. Being able to look back at notes I made 40 years ago are the most powerful self-improvement tool.

If you’d like to know more about tracking candidates click the button below. We’ve put together a short survey that will help you improve your sales hiring strategy.

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Talent Acquisition

Hiring Quality Salespeople in the New Year

Anyone who feels unaffected by the Covid Crisis this year has missed the point. This was the year for us all to look inside ourselves, figure out what we stand for, and work at discarding the rest.

For Advanced Hiring it’s been a good year. Revenues were solid, but most of all we’ve been able to help you, our valued clients, find super talent.

Clients who’ve jumped into the fray have said they got talent they had never been able to find before.

One of our clients and good friends, Cameron Robinson, described a hire we found as “like dating way out of my league.” She of course was being overly modest, as she and her company is an example of people and a company that cares, but you get the point.

The amount of high-quality sales talent available is amazing. You owe it to yourself to upgrade the quality of your sales team now.

Years ago I was a very active stock trader. I specialized in down markets. But one rule I learned the hard way is the economy is more optimistic than pessimistic. After a downturn things always come back. I expect we’ll see a revitalization of small and medium sized businesses soon.

If you need help getting starting using the System, please reach out. We’re here to help.

Best wishes for a Happy and Prosperous New Year from all of us here at Advanced Hiring System to all of you!

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