Understanding the Sales Force

Yeah, just in case you didn’t get that, I’ll lay it out for you.

In a recent mining of Objective Management Group’s data from June of 2013, there was a huge increase in the number of salespeople using social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Spoke, Plaxo and Reachable for selling.

The battle that I inadvertently started with this post moved here where it took on a life of its own. As of this writing, there were 36 comments, some more pointed than others. Gerhard Gschwandtner added this post to the ongoing discussion. Earlier this week, I wrote this post to address most of the confusion that’s out there. Yesterday, this post appeared on the Sales Thought Leaders Blog to add fuel to the fire.

Well, it’s really happened now.

I was following a discussion in the Hubspot VAR Group on LinkedIn, where the question posed to the group was whether or not the first sales hire should be a sales or a marketing person.

Yesterday I read a White Paper about structuring sales forces and it got my blood boiling. It wasn’t that it was a study about sales forces, and it wasn’t that it was a study using large companies. I got upset because of the conclusion – that you should structure your sales force like the big companies.

Objective Management Group has evaluated nearly 10,000 sales forces. Each time, we must ignore titles and focus on roles of each individual in the evaluation. After all, a sales manager without salespeople reporting to him is really a salesperson. A VP without sales managers reporting to her is really a sales manager.

Selling has changed more in the past 5 years than ever before.

With all that, shouldn’t the quality of sales, sales management and sales leadership candidates be on the rise?  Yes, it should.

But there’s a problem.  The quality has not risen.  It seems to have worsened!

Well, are you?

I’ll bet you are. You can probably spot an energetic, motivated, likable, memorable, polished, polite and attractive salesperson from a handshake away. Aren’t those the ones you like best? Aren’t those, especially when they have industry background, the ones you hire? And don’t they all perform just swell?

When a great salesperson is recommended by Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment, and this star has a great track record, and great references, should we expect this person to succeed?

One of the first emails I came across this morning was a LinkedIn update telling me that 16% of my network had started new jobs.  16%. That’s one of every 6.25 people I am connected to.

That brings us to this question.  Who’s in a LinkedIn network?

Clients frequently ask about the percentage of candidates recommended by Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment and why it is so low. When clients are feeling the urgency to hire salespeople and too many candidates are not getting recommended, their knee-jerk reaction is to change the customized criteria on the role configuration so that more candidates can be recommended.