If you are a venture capitalist, you’re working actively and aggressively to gain high returns on your investment by putting your shareholder’s cash into companies that have an outstanding opportunity for high growth and high returns. The stakes are high and in order to get to those results, you have to have an infallible team. […]
Employers Blog
There is Still a Role for Farmers in Your Sales Organization
I have a sales person who I’ve been working very hard on coaching to improve her ability to get new business for our company. After investing lots of time and energy, what I’ve really come to as a final decision is that this individual is not going to make it as a hunter. Now the […]
Your Current Customers are a Sales Strategy for Increased Sales
We have a healthcare client whose sales strategy is to build business through its current customer base. Yet, that doesn’t mean that all its doing is trying to get its current customers to buy more. This client has a huge network of clients across the country that in turn all have networks of colleagues, former […]
Map Your Reference Checking Process To The Job You’re Recruiting For
A lot of times when people do reference checks on candidates, they fail to adapt the reference checking process to the type of position that they’re looking to fill and therefore ask very generic questions. This fails to uncover the kind of information that you really need to have in order to understand whether or […]
Observe Sales Candidates’ Behavior
So often, as a hiring manager or in the process of interviewing salespeople, we get caught up in a sales candidate’s natural ability to speak smoothly and to sell themselves in the interviewing process. The real question is, how do they behave through the interviewing process? One of the key things that I do is […]
Grow Your Own Sales & Marketing People
Another way to think about recruiting new sales and marketing talent to your company is to “grow your own.” Growing your own is a longer term strategy, but it can pay great dividends for your company, particularly in a sustained long-term growth phase of your business’s life cycle. Most people want to find opportunities for […]
Recruiting Top Sales & Marketing Talent: It’s All About Momentum
We’re working with a client right now on a sales search, and unfortunately she has dragged out the recruiting process to the point where we are considering whether or not we can complete this assignment. In particular, I’m concerned that this client is about to lose a candidate that we’ve worked very hard to put […]
Recruiting Marketing Talent: Hire the Artist or the Scientist?
Let’s talk a little bit more about the difference between the artistic and creative side of marketing communications and the science of marketing and what’s more important to a successful company. When you are recruiting a marketing executive, you should be looking for somebody who much more resembles a scientist than an artist. Why? The […]
Hiring Marketing Executives With Substance
If you’re a senior executive looking to add a key member to your marketing staff, but you’ve never hired marketing people before: buyer beware! Why do I say this? While there are a lot of talented marketing executives out there with an excellent repertoire of skills and experience, there also are marketing people who lack […]
Doing Proper Reference Checks On Salespeople (Part 2)
A third idea is when you are speaking with references, ask if you can have an offline discussion with them, during the non-working hours when they’re not in the office. The reason for this is to try to get candid information from the references about the individual, as opposed to the company’s official stance on […]