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Friday, September 19, 2008
Inside Growth Strategies
Sales roundtable: Web 2.0, Meet Sales 101
MHT Sales Roundtable: Web 2.0, Meet Sales 101
In this online extension of Mass High Tech’s sales roundtable-- Web 2.0, Meet Sales 101 --the panel of tech sales executives discuss the challenges of hiring and managing a young sales force in the online world.
The roundtable panel: Moderator Steven Harper is CEO and founder of Plan 2 Win Software LLC in Nashua, N.H. Charlie Allieri is CEO of sales software vendor iLantern LLC in Bedford. Jim Norton is team manager for the Agency Activation team at Google Inc. Mike LaPeters is vice president for sales and services at Core Security Technologies in Boston.
Harper: Let’s talk about talent. Talk to me about building sales teams.
Allieri: It’s one of the most important and one of the most challenging things to do. We’re a pretty small company, and we don’t have the luxury of a really nice HR department that can pre-screen candidates for you. We also don’t have this household name that can get a lot of people just applying to the organization.
So we’ve gone down the LinkedIn route, and we found some people through that avenue. What we found is that the best way for us to recruit talent has been to use recruiters. That being said, it’s not as simple as it sounds. We found that the hiring organization has to put an enormous amount of effort into that process. You just have to make sure that you’re managing the process, and you’re managing the expectations. They’re going to send you a lot of names, and they’re kind of going with that throw the spaghetti on the wall and the pieces that stick. We don’t want that. We want people that fit our profile. I usually will take resumes of people we’ve hired and send them to the recruiters and say this is the type of person I’m looking for, the type of background.
LaPeters: We need folks that are ready to go in there and work without a whole lot of resources based upon the size of our organization. We tend to migrate to folks that are a little bit more inexperienced. So, the need for process is much more important for what we’re doing. We’ve used things like LinkedIn to do a lot of actual back door reference checking. You can find out who that person worked with that you knew. You get the real skinny.
Norton: Obviously, we’ve got a pretty well developed HR department and recruiting department. I think it’s literally millions of resumes per year that come across the recruiters’ desks. So, they have the luxury of being very selective. The standards are really high in terms of education and experience, but it still is all about are they a good cultural fit for that office, that team? And it’s a very democratic hiring process in the sense that the lowest level member, most junior member on the team, has literally as much say as the manager of the team in terms of making that hire. Everybody gets the opportunity to meet with that perspective candidate. It does make for a very long process to get hired, but it’s rare we have a bad hire.
Harper: You said as you move to younger sales people, they don’t have the fear to pick up the phone, but they’re more comfortable with technology. Yet, you said they also tend to hide behind e-mail. I’m wondering about that comfort level with technology. One of the issues I’ve seen in working with my clients, as you move down the experience level, I see e-mails written in text-ese. You know,”CU later”. It’s a horrible example, but you do start finding that they’re so comfortable with “I’m just going to text you.” “I will Facebook you.” Do you see that?
Allieri: I think part of the problem is those younger folks are now reaching out to more senior folks that didn’t grow up in the e-mail world, number one, and certainly not in the text world.
The VP of sales at salary.com judges people on how well they can write English language. Right? I know that sounds silly, but grammatically correct is important. Part of what we do is we actually automate some of that, where the e-mail, the base of it is written for them. So I’m not leaving it up to them to actually write it correctly.
LaPeters: That’s a real challenge, because we’re hiring the same type of people, the second job, third job type individuals, not the gun slinger from the ‘90s. That was the different type of person who’s now in their late 30s, early 40s. Those people just aren’t gravitating towards a younger type organization like us.
But the challenge is that they are a much more technologically adept group that isn’t used to as much of the more formal communication. We do the same thing. We write a lot of the e-mails for the reps. It’s sad to say that I have to do this, but I will not allow them to send out messages, e-mails for their first five or six of them. I have to review them first, before they’re communicating with prospects, because I want see how they’re writing. Then that kind of dictates. If their first five or six are really good, then I don’t need to see them anymore. If they’re not really good, then I have to start making decisions of did I make a bad hire?
You don’t want somebody that can’t communicate, especially in an e-mail capacity, because we do so much business that way. It’s cost so many deals, a poorly written e-mail, because you can’t judge tone.
Allieri: Yeah, and how often have you sent something where you meant to say, “It’s good to see you, and then it comes out to be that you’re a jerk.”
Harper: When we came into the sales force back in - -. we were put through a fairly rigorous sales training program. In my case, it was six, eight months before I was allowed to touch a customer without somebody being there. What other management challenges do you see with the next generation of sales people?
Allieri: One of the things that you said early on, Sales 101, basic blocking and tackling. I find myself having to teach that. Even basic preparation, before you get on that call. Don’t just call and say, “How are you today? Am I going to get my deal?” After you had your meeting, why are reaching out to call them? What did you do in preparation for that call? All those things that you learn just by nature you did because you got a chance, for nine months not really having the pressure. You got a chance to follow around a senior sales folk, and you learned that in the end, it’s more about the people, managing those people’s expectations, and delivering against those expectations, and making the best use of their time.
Harper: Last thing, in five seconds, biggest challenge facing sales people today?
Allieri: The blocking and tackling, knowing all the steps you need to go through to get this deal done.
LaPeters: Understanding and relating to the prospect.
Harper: Okay. So Sales 2.0 it’s actually sales 101.
Norton: Sales 101.
Harper: Leave it to the guy from Google to come up with great thing.
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