The Maverick: The art of selling is the American dream

When I was 19 I spent a summer working the phones in a "pen room" in Beverly Hills, California. I worked as a commission-only salesman, cold-calling firms listed in the Yellow Pages all across America, trying to persuade them to buy personalised ball-point pens. We read from a script, and if my patter was faltering, the boss grabbed the receiver and closed the sale.

So said Luke Johnson, Chairman of Channel 4 and Risk Capital partners . The article proposes that the sales embarassment that European organisations feel is not felt in the USA. It is this sales dynamism which has led to the strength of the USA's econoomy and it's ideolgical belief in free markets. Sales is the American Dream.

Further to this, I would argue that we have sales forces who can't conjour compelling reasons to buy. Why is this? They have Major weaknesses: Self limiting record collection, non-supportive buy cycle's, need for approval, emtionally tied into a deal, and not money motivated (high basics leading to complacency)

How do you overcome this? Answers on a postcard.

Is Good enough, good enough ? Do PSLs or RPO for recruitment attract the Best of the Best, or are they a de facto pathway to mediocrity ? by blocking the best talent

Is Good enough, good enough ? Do PSLs or RPO for recruitment attract the Best of the Best, or are they a de facto pathway to mediocrity ? by blocking the best talent.
The best senior people are passive job seekers, the smart ones use recruiters to find their next career move for them, just as really succesful people use house hunters and personal shoppers. They are cash rich, time poor.
So what do PSLs achieve, apart from making the lives of internal recruiters easier ?

The Lex Overpaid CEO Award

Published: July 15 2008 09:10 | Last updated: July 15 2008 16:35

Mervyn King’s rejection of a £100,000 pay rise merits applause. Towers Perrin, a consultancy, had recommended the Bank of England governor receive a salary of £375,000-£400,000, up from about £290,000. Yet how it reached this number is unclear. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who both have greater responsibilities, make considerably less, at €345,252 and $191,300, respectively. With Tuesday’s UK inflation numbers showing prices rising at 3.8 per cent year-on-year in June, the highest rate in 11 years, a monster pay rise would have sent the wrong signal to wage setters across the UK. The governor cannot be held responsible for inflation imported through rising food and oil prices, or even for the collapse of Northern Rock, given that the Bank was stripped of its financial oversight powers. But the last year has hardly been a triumph. Mr King’s caution is sensible and highlights how rarely chief executives demonstrate such tasteful self-denial.

Rewards for failure remain the single greatest weakness of corporate governance regimes in developed economies. Pay is all too often ludicrously out of step with performance, extravagantly inflated and layered with complexity by self-serving boards. Pliable outside advisers (“Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo”, as Warren Buffett dubs them) are often called in to provide little more than spurious validation for greed that can verge on kleptocracy. Make no mistake, Lex admires wealth creation. To become rich is glorious, as Deng Xiaoping said. But executive remuneration must be better monitored. When value is being flagrantly destroyed, lavish compensation packages demand explanation. To do its bit to rein in egregious excesses, Lex will name and shame the chief executives who offer the worst value for money, the least bang per buck.
















I found this to very amusing, in the way that only Lex can be. I would like to see who comes up with alternates and perhaps we can discuss executive compensation.

Young persons game

I took a call at about ten O' clock last night. A good friend of mine and an excellent recruiter told me he had handed in his notice at the giant he works for. He's in his 30's, has a wife and a young son.

I knew he'd been having a tough time with process. Process is important, especially in a large organisation. If you adhere to it and don't perform then at least you are doing the right thing and can be helped. Mavericks like me never fit in well to that environment so my expectations of keeping my job if my numbers dropped off were never great. Anyway, I digress.

Post code territories, splits, top drawing candidates and clients and youthful idiocy of the management were his tipping point (just finished Malcom Gladwell's book). The story he told was that the director of one of the companies elite brands (the brand in which my friend worked) had called a sales conference. He divided the teams into the regions and called them things like the "London louts", "Northern Monkeys" etc..........

My former colleague said that he couldn't go home to his wife with any degree of pride. That's when it hit me. Recruitment in the traditional sense is a young man's game. How many seasoned recruiters are left in any of the factories. I commend those that are. The stamina and energy to work in that environment for that length of time equals super human to me so kudos!!!!

Grown up's though are less likely to make the mistakes that ruin recruitment for users. They are reliable, honest(more so) and more likely to fulfill a scope of requirement with the care and attention that a client deserves. I was a young pup and definitely appreciate what I learnt as I do the opposite now!!!!

Profiling to help your brand

I am currently reading Heidrick & Struggles GTI (Global Talent Index) collection of essays. It raises some questions that are pertinent to anyone who cares about talent acquisition.

One of the most interesting facts in my opinion is that my generation, generation Y (1977-2005) will have (on average) had 14 jobs by the time they are 38. Contrast this with my parents generation who will typically have had 4 or 5 in a lifetime, possibly within the same company. What are the drivers behind this?

It is an increase in sophistication. Our current pool of bright, young things are enamoured by employee brand, corporate responsibility and have an understanding of opportunity. This means that you need to acquire them and manage them with the sophistication they expect.

Ultimately the paradigm has shifted in the favour of the candidate and you have to win them. FACT! How do you do this? By offering a work environment that is compelling, diverse and challenging and supplementing your employee brand with a comitment to them.

Testing and profiling enables this buy in from a candidate and shows them how much you care about you capturing the best (for YOUR business).

One of my candidates expressed this to me the other day. He said "Gerry, I see the value in this. When I hire I have had to take things at face value and have been burnt consistently." I think his statement leads to another interesting facet.

Staff turnover can be limited comprehensively by testing for core values and capabilities at the levels that a standard interview process just can't qualify.

I was reflecting this morning on a number of incidents over the lat couple of days. It all came about when I took a Dave Kurlan (tm) assessment of myself as a sales person. I loved the results, particularly as there were 2 areas for improvement that I could act on immediately ( I always knew deep down they were there but needed a jolt) and that's propelled me into doing something about starting this business with Gerry.

We have spoken, formally and informally to number of people about what we have decided to do - which is use the Dave Kurlan(tm) systems to help senior management point their salesforce in the best direction and fire silver bullets, not lead pellets.

Dave talks about uncovering the hidden barriers to sales. And we will be developing that.

Anyway back to reflection. We are doing something substantially different, with measurable outcomes which, anecdotally at least, is needed; but, everytime we do something someone tries to put up a barrier. Most along the lines of "it won't work here".

Except for the SD I have just phoned who has almost bitten my arm off.

ROI

I don't get the feeling that HR understand real ROI. Nigel Dunn said in his blog recently that a Manchester Partner study indicated that senior hires were inaccurate 40% of the time.

I have to agree with him and state too that this is a frightening figure based on a fast and ignorantly enginereed process that hides behind a Preferred supplier list. The recruiters who made these guarentees of delivery will have been full of cliched promises from the vendors. I know because I used to make them. An example please, I hear you ask?

"We have a database of 20,000 candidates"; "we like to work in partnership to assure a match"; "candidates come to us because of our standing in the market"; " we've been doing this for (insert number of years here) so our track record speaks for itself"

That's fine and they are valid sales concepts but they aren't USP's. The one common factor is that these companies will flex to the rate dictated to them by the company who has the requirement. They will deliver candidates at a margin which is just viable on the promise of volume. However, 40% of those candidates will fail meaning that the rate has to be paid for the cost of hiring in the first instance, the cost of missed opportunity for a more credible but inaccessable candidate and the cost of re-hiring the failed hire. Needless to say there are huge implications about the failed impact on delivery within the employees remit so the cost of one poor decision drives higher (not hire) and higher.

So who works this out as the most cost effective way to bring senior personalities into a business? Answers on a postcard please?

Recruitment is rotten

“Recruitment has a bad image. How do I know this? I am one of the hundred’s of thousands of recruiters who used to be the typical gun for hire: business developing and slinging candidates to make quick money. I was pretty good at my job (by the standards of my employers and peers) and thought I knew all the answers. The numbers I produced, the fact that all my KPI’s were adhered to and that my quarterly bonus was big reflected this. Right?”

“In spite of all this I was becoming more hollow because the level of service I was giving was dictated to me, not by my clients, but by my company. In the push to provide bums on seats, the need to be at the Chairman’s club for top producers or to be at the top table on the latest incentive lunch drove me. In reality I should have let my dedication to my clients drive me. So what changed my outlook?”

“I changed when I saw the dis-satisfaction in hiring accuracy and my attitude towards it. I qualified my candidates well, but there were times when I just never understood the argument against my candidate’s when they weren’t hired. I felt there had to be a better way; a way to ensure greater accuracy beyond the norm of sending a written profile and a CV. This was more for my clients benefit. Making a gut decision could potentially have a devastating cost implication and I wanted them to avoid this”

“So what is my point? Did you realise that 25% of new hires leave within 6 months of starting a job. The cost to the business is huge: recruitment costs, lost productivity, training and re-hire mean that losing an individual will cost your organisation up to 8 times basic salary (some consultancies place the figure higher at 12 times basic salary).”

“Can you overcome this? Most managers believe that the typical recruitment proposal is effective and saves on time and money. Why persist with this belief when the reality of the scenario is that a process which engages a candidate and manager for a maximum of 2, one hour face to face interviews and a 15 minute presentation hours prior to hire is ultimately flawed. Where is the understanding of the candidate’s core values, assessment of their intellect or understanding of their motivations other than the candidates say so?”

“Have you ever had a recruiter say “I will share the risk?” Ultimately the process we have designed enables us to confidently back this up and put our money where our mouth is!”

Don't worry I'm not sick I'm just unemployable

“So I just got my test results back. No, don’t worry, I’m not sick. I was referring to my psychometric test results. In spite of the months of study and validation I was still a bit sceptical about the 99% accuracy claims etc.”

“These tests formulate the backbone of my business and boy was I impressed by them. The accuracy was astounding as my parents can attest to (who knows me better, right?). I took home the feedback and let my parents loose on them. In fact my Mother said “How true, I’ve been telling you this for years.”

“I guess you want to know what I am all about. My intellect test was interesting and I guess I have to be honest. I don’t have the engine I thought. When it comes to the verbal reasoning I am a Ferrari, the numerical reasoning a soviet era Skoda. I was placed in the 95^th and 48^th percentiles respectively. That means there are 5 people in my norm group of 100 who are better at words than me whilst there are 53 (see what I did there) who can reason with numbers much more fluently.”

“My intrinsic motivators saw no shocks but it is nice to be validated. To summarise my results my ideal role is a strong GM role with the ability to drive conceptual projects to reality. I have a low need for structure but really enjoy consensus and group decision making. I don’t like the day to day responsibilities of line management but certainly do enjoy engaging the wider business when it comes to development. I want to seek new challenges constantly as opposed to consolidating and am Very entrepreneurial.”

“My Orpheus personality test also, validated some areas I was aware of but others I wasn’t. With reflection they ring very true. On a scale of 1-9 my fellowship or social skills were high, scoring an 8; authority too was high scoring a 7; scoring a low conformity was fine as it’s my business but others may not be too willing to take me on board as I would be difficult to manage. The next trait is my emotion level which again scored low at 2. Great if you have to make hard decisions and don’t panic when things go wrong.”

“So where am I going with this? When I worked for a spray and prey recruiter (they weren’t that bad compared to most) I always saw the testing phase as an evil that compromised speed to market and slowed down my number generation. The biggest frustration was seeing credible, qualified and very senior people being phased out of the process.”

“What was I doing wrong as I always prided myself on my ability to qualify my candidates? Surely that hour (on a good day) that I spent with them was enough to go back to the market place and scream: “look who I’ve got”. It clicked. I didn’t know them well at all. I had no understanding of their core values, their behaviours, motivations or intellect.”

“That’s the value of testing. It gives you the chance to see what’s on the inside and to validate the skill set claimed by the applicants. It will help you make the right decisions consistently based on hard data: will this person be loyal, will they be honest? Are they easy to manage, can they lead a team effectively? Do they understand your companies core values? Are they motivated by money or by delivering your product well? Are their behaviours sophisticated enough to fulfil the function you want them to? Can they reason well numerically and apply that data to a complex problem?”

“The scope is accurate and helps you make the right choice for the future of your business. In fact a combination of Testing, Behavioural event interviewing and Assessment centres will increase the odds of you getting your hire right first time from 25% to 90-100%.”