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

Why DISC Scores Consistenly Lead Sales Managers to Ruin

When I first came across DISC in 1989, I was skeptical about DISC. How could the 20-30 set of words in a DISC test help me recruit quality salespeople?

I had signed up for a marketing conference in L.A together with 200 other attendees. One of the presenters Jim Cecil, a Vistage coach, distrtibuted my first exposure to DISC .

It was pre-Internet so administering the test was quite different. in the end, 200 attendees to a $25,000 a seat conference were“ooing” and “ahing.”

Jim explained that DISC alone, is not enough to identify best sales candidate. Without an test to elicit Values, you won’t find top performers.

That said, I took that tool back to Virginia and we began running 100’s of profiles every month. And what I discovered very quickly was the version of DISC we were using was too difficult to use in sales hiring.

Today, sales hiring done right, means getting lasrge numbers of applicants.

We tell our clients 50 applicants per postion minmum. (We used to say 20-30 but applicants have become more clever at faking a track record of success.)

Using the version we had been using with its 20-30 pages of dialogue was too confusing. Plus the verbiage was open to interpretation in any number of different ways.

SInce 1989 I tested 14 different versions but never got closer to a tool that gave us “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

In 2003 I decided to create my own proprietary DISC. What I needed was a sales test that told me, “Should I call this applicant in for an interview or not?”

Most DISC tests have one fatal flaw: They are too vague because they are for many positions. That’s why the Advanced Hiring CORE Style Filtration Extractor(tm) is a sales-only.

We’re happy to share it with any sales manager who is sick and tired of being disappointed with their sales hires. Click the button below and we’re happy to show you an easier, more accurate way to use DISC.

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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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