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I was reminded today about the creed of the ethical headhunter. Once your company is a client, there is no poaching of talent. Because of this, companies that are hard to work for and thus have a revolving door of talent, are seen as headhunter hunting grounds. If approached by such a company, the market wise headhunter will defer to be engaged. They know a good crop opportunity when they see it. So the lesson for you folks is to look at yourself in the mirror and see if your company is  worthy enough to employ a headhunter?  Of course if you are a reader of this blog, you are worthy anyway.   However you probably know of some that are unfit.  I certainly hope you have not invested in any of them1

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Topgrading for Sales. World-class methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives.  Bradford D. Smart &  Greg Alexander. 2008. ISBN 9781591842064.  Stats from this book:  In the USA the national failure rate in the sales profession is 40% which is also the annual turnover/ termination rate.  The life of a sales manager is 19 months.  The cost of a sales mis hire is easily $600 000, which translates into a mis hires annually in the US of about 8  million people annually ( or 8million  * $600k = ?) . Alexander teamed up with Smart to bring top grading to Sales.  While at GE, Alexander did wonders with this approach. He strive to only hire the top 5 % of the sales guys. This book contains everything you want to know on how to do this.  Lots of very very useful advice here.  My only  concern is for those of us in small regional markets like Canada etc, how big is that 5% pool?  Not very, so what is a smaller co to do?  I think there are great ideas here on how to hire better people which will make your management  tasks that much easier. If you have to take folks as they come, you will know out of the gate that some of them are going to take lots of your resources in order to be successful   The gem for me was the idea of having a virtual bench, ie knowing who in your market you woudl like ot have working for you that are not, nurturing reltionships so that when you need fresh faces in the filed you have a connectors/prospects  bench to go to. Lots of work, but it is a valid idea.  Every Sales manager should have this one on their shelf.

Rain Making. 2nd Ed. Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field. Ford Harding. 2008. I read ed.1 in 1995 and found it a terrific resource. Ed.2 has been completely rewritten with much new material, so it is a essentially new book. Every client I work with has service as a significant part of their revenue. This book is the definitive guide to sales and marketing of services. It is clearly written, making it an easy read, but there is so much pragmatic material on measuring and implementing these tested and true ideas, that this should be your revenue bible. Buy it, read it, and keep it close.

Also check out Ford’s site and blog

What do recent graduates want out of companies these days?

Data touch points from a cross Canada survey of University students in Mining Engineering. I heard a very useful presentation from a graduating Mining Engineering student at UBC yesterday. Michael Fuller (Remember that name 6 years from now) , in response to a past question from an Industry Advisory Committee I sit in on, surveyed students across nine universities coast to coast about what companies could do to attract and retain new grads. (Now this in an industry where there are three to five jobs calling with signing bonuses for every graduate. Ave starting salary is $80k/annum. There may be 150 of these students graduate each year in Canada)

And the biggest issues were not for higher salaries. I was impressed that the issues exposed were in line with what we see in the technology industry. What did they want companies to support in order to be interesting to work for?;

• Opportunities to pursue more education once they were out of school ( with some financial help)
• A structured growth program for employees, where the grads help shape their program
• Mentorship
• International and multi department experience
• Compensation for overtime hours (in time , not money), these folks are not overtime hounds.
• Flexible work hours, such as nine day fortnights, 4 - 10 hour days and then 3 off. Fourteen days straight and then fourteen off when the location is not great. They want to maintain a work-life balance.
• Evidence of concern for employees and others. e.g. A company with the highest safety rating was seen as one that would also have high environmental and social responsibility values.
• An HR dept that can be very punctual, with quick turnarounds, yes or no. Job interviews that are casual and personal - learn about the person while they learn about who they would work for.
  • If you really want to alienate young grads use a top grader/behavioral interview method. Seen as gimmicks and not of any value. (This was a surprise to me) These are smart people who want to be treated as such. It is a candidates market where you can not afford to put people off.
• Very last on the list was stock options and profit sharing.

This is very current stuff for a demographic of high performing 20 - 26 year olds. Did you know that the CEO of Computer Associates is an alumnus of UBC Mining Engineering? Past UBC Mining graduates are now CEOs of major international firms.

Marketing Genius. Peter Fisk. 2006. ISBN184112681. How is that the English can write and publish such terrific business books? This is one of them. Not for the reading trifler, as the book is an opus , not a 100 Aways to Wow Your Audience so like the US market writers. This is a thoughtful, well written, easy to follow guide to all there is about marketing. It is the best all time marketing book I have read. I took voluminous notes and the pages are festooned with numerous sticky flags. If you are a CEO, CMO, VP sales with aspirations to more, you must buy, read and reread this book. The plethora of case studies is worth the price of the book alone. Eg. Did you know that Mercedes only has to approach 107, prospects to get 100, 000 customers, but GM has to hit 500, 000 prospects to get 100,000 customers?

I took 2 enjoyable weeks to get through this one.

Customers for Life.

It is likely that you sell many more different products than customers buy individually from you. You may have been happy to just get the annual service/upgrade revenue from them. Knowing that getting new customers is harder and costlier each quarter, it makes sense to me that getting more sales from present clients is a great investment regardless of the economy. We had a client who received 75% of his annual target income every year,  one week into the first quarter from upgrades, new product buys and service contracts. And that amount grew 10% every year regardless. Now he was an good businessman. Oh, if you are just a one trick (one product) company,  shame on you, what are you thinking?

Present customers are more than a nice to have. They are your well run gold mine to develop. All it requires is a structured process and hard work. As much work as you put into getting new customers and replacement ones for those you lost should be the least you put into present customers. The client above also had a 95% client retention rate. But I digress.

A clients for life attitude starts by knowing when you look at the account, that the dollar figure that should come to you is not the first sale amount or the annual fee, but the total dollars possible from this client for the next 10 to 15 years. If you do not have this number or know how to come up with it, its time to do some serious market research on your customers and what else they are buying.

This research is more than the annual client customer survey of additional product features you need to add to the same product to keep the customer. (You do not do that? Obviously you are in a lifestyle business, not a real business - so how is that working for you? )

Real example Zappos: 3/4 of purchases are from repeat customers. Loyalty is a huge competitive advantage. Let’s say the average cost of customer acquisition in their field is $50. They are always $37.50 ahead of the competition. How can you beat that? (a - Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos)

Then its a matter of creating a systematic process of educating the client about all the other things you can do to make their life easier and less painful. Wait for it , what am I talking about? It sounds like ——it is, a nurturing campaign, run by marketing to educate your clients over the year about new value you could bring to them. You have to do the research, identify the pains , identify the numerous audiences in the target and the appropriate messages for them and launch a program, just as if they were a new client. Wouldn’t your clients like you to pay attention to them after the sale like you did before?

Here is where your customer support group really can shine. They are often more in contact with the client than the sales folks after the sale. They too need material and help in extracting where else you could be helping the client, what issues are arising. That’s why I love to bonus Customer Service for new business. I once had a Service Rep who ran our repair counter. He consistently sold the same hard drives at a 40% higher margin than they were displayed on the store floor. He sold lots of other add ons as well. Customers left the choice up to him because he was not a salesman - but his sales commissions were often higher than most floor sales guys. I just loved that guy. What are you doing to help your Customer Service guys increase their salaries and become a real company hero? Word to the wise, you are not turning these CS folks into salesmen (they did not choose that path), you are helping them help each customer more.

I surprises me so much that we meet companies who know so little about their own customers that they have made only one sale to one department in a gazillion dollar client. Or to one location to a multi location company. That would keep me awake at night, scheming how to do better. How do you grow without spending your brains out if every sale is to a new client? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Talk about drive-by selling. Or sell and forget. You let the customer forget about you. And all it takes is some concentrated research effort and work to make just so much recurring money

And that’s 30.

A client mentioned this week that at a recent US trade show, sales were off by millions of dollars. Attendees were fewer and they were skittish. This client had done well over the years with Trade Shows as his major marketing effort. What had been working for several years wrto sales is not working as well. This is not news to us, see below.

Some of the recent research Rocket Builders has been compiling indicates that
companies that did reasonably/adequately well after the dotcom meltdown are finding that their
marketing is now hurting them in the present economy. What worked for
years (I.e. sales calls, cold calls, outbound lead gen vs. lead nurturing) is not working as well or not at all. Targets are looking for innovative and advanced solutions and are not as accepting as previously. Plus technology moves on. The opportunities are out there looking for solutions that match their perception of their business needs.

We see the more successful companies now allocating 30-40% of revenue to new marketing in traditional sectors. These are guys who got away with 20% on marketing, 20% on selling for years. Just adding sales costs
does not improve their situations.

New and old clients are coming to us with this declining revenue and increased competition
story. I expect with the US $ woes (fiscal and inflation) it will only get worse for 24
months more, driving up oil and gold. (Some currency houses in Europe will not change US dollars now, sending people to the bank. How the mighty have fallen) . Let me know what you are finding out.

Remarkable Leadership. Unleashing your leadership potential one skill at a time. 2007. ISBN 9780787996192. This is a handbook for improving your leadership skills. Each chapter starts with a self assessment on skill level and then it carefully lays out what you can do to improve. He gives tips, tactics and techniques to implement and measure how you are doing in each area. It is a valuable book, but I had a tough time completing it. What was missing for me was a method to engage me personally/emotionally in the book. I was taken by his comment on Q/As after a presentation. He suggests that the Q/A is never the thing you end on. You invite Q/As throughout and just before the end. But, after the Q/A you must wrap up and summarize the talk yourself in order to best present and control the key messages and call to action. If questions do continue, answer and then do a condensed close again. Borrow this one from the library.