By admin

With A Little Help From Friends…

With A Little Help From Friends…

It’s funny how our minds make connections. Over the Holidays, I couldn’t get the phrase, ‘with a little help from my friends’ out of my head. No matter where I went, that phrase kept popping into my head.

During the Christmas vacation I visited Leyland, UK. In the 1870’s, Leyland was known as the “Garden of Lancashire.”  Hewitson writes in 1872 that Leyland has a “genial, rural appearance…surrounded on all hands by a unique picture of pastoral beauty – by flowers and fruitful flocks, by blooming orchards… by grand old trees and fertile lands…you can breathe freely in the place.” The growth of the light engineering rubber and motor vehicle industries in the latter part of the 19th century changed Leyland in particular.

One local success story is that of The Leyland Steam Motor Company, founded in 1901 by James Sumner and the Spurrier brothers.  This was a significant and successful partnership and the company evolved into the world renowned Leyland Motors.  Now known as Leyland Trucks (part of Paccar), the company celebrated its 110th anniversary in 2006. “With a little help from (its) friends”, Leyland Trucks made it to the 110^th anniversary of its founding and is still going strong!

Later as I walked the grounds of Worden Park, a destroyed Manor Hall, I was fortunate to pass by a Georgian walled garden which has been restored to show the wonderful working gardens that would have served the Hall. In this garden I discovered a Cedar of Lebanon “Cedrus Libani”. This tree, like the Leyland Steam Motor Company, has seen over hundred years and been buffeted by the winds of time and change. It too has been supported by the same people that supported Leyland Steam Motor Co. – the people of Leyland! No entity whether a business or a tree can stand that long without “a little help from its friends”…

So then, if your company – or your garden – is to last one-hundred years and more like those in Leyland, what will be needed to ensure success? Employees will retire and new ones will need to be hired. Those new employees will need to be trained and over the course of time, taught new skills to meet the new demands of the marketplace. Just like Leyland Steam Motors, your company will need ‘a little help from friends’. When the time comes, WIN Programs would be happy to lend a hand…

Sign ‘Cedar of Lebanon’, Worden Park, U.K.                                       The Tree Itself, With ‘Support’ From Friends

Photo Credits: L. Loizidou

By admin

Follow 5 rules to avoid hiring sales people that won’t perform

Follow Five Rules to Avoid Hiring Sales People That Will Not Perform

When clients are feeling the urgency to hire a sales people they are expecting too many candidates from ads posting or head-hunters and in most of the cases they overlooked that quality of candidates will make or break their business.

In this case, “more” would mean more like the ones they already have instead of more like the stronger ones they said they wanted to hire…
Change the way you select new candidate have a huge impact on the business and it becomes crucial to set up the rules that will lead you to Hire Stronger yet stars sales people, sales supervisors, sales managers and also senior business developer for corporate market.

There are many possible reasons why a large percentage of sales people candidates that you will assess or meet are not being a good fit to your business, you will not discover that before you engaged them. To avoid a very expensive bill, you have to evaluate your Sales Ghost before including in your offering the following crucial elements that will attract the best sales people.

Here are some to consider:

Expectations

Clients expect at least half of the candidates to be recommended and are frustrated to have very few that are worth hiring in their pipeline. Few choices mean constraints.

Compensation

Clients often set the difficulty level of the job really high, hoping to get an extremely strong salesperson. But they fail to change the compensation, keeping it the same as what they were paying mediocre salespeople. The result is that only mediocre salespeople apply for the position.

Ambiguities

Criteria that only a strong, experienced sales people could possibly possess is included in the job posting. But so is compensation consistent with a mediocre salesperson. Result? A reduction in the overall number of candidates because the pool of candidates who meet both the criteria AND can live with the limited compensation is very small.

From the same Industry?

Organizations often demands to hire sales people from their industry. For some reason, the very people who feel that way tend to be from the industries that have the worst salespeople. Nobody gets recommended!

Sales people Profiling

Organizations create an image of the salesperson that makes it sound like profiling. They require someone dynamic, motivated, with a degree, minimum years’ of experience, well-dressed, professional, and trustworthy. What does all that have to do with selling effectiveness? They forget the sales centric and predictive criteria’s that are the elements of a successful sales person selection.

Change

If you want better salespeople, you need to do the work to make sure you attract better salespeople and use a Sales Hiring Mistake Calculator.

Stop

Hiring like you always did and begin using very specific assessment tool from the sales industry and not IQ or profile assessment but select the best ones that are sales centric assessments.