The respected consulting firm, Hay Group, has just announced the release of its 6th Annual Best Companies for Leadership study. The top 20 are major corporations with a global presence. Collectively, over the last five years, they have generated shareholder returns that are 36 times better than those from the Standard & Poor 500 companies.
Too many companies still insist on pumping their new hires full of product knowledge and then dumping them on unsuspecting prospects, fully expecting the new salesperson to sell up a storm. These “talking catalogues” start running around “telling” instead of “selling” and the expected storm decays to a light drizzle. The salespeople get depressed at…
I’ve blogged in the past about sales candidates who have a propensity to be verbose and why you may want to avoid them (huge timewasters). Whenever I’m tasked to do an interview with someone who our Sales Temperament Assessment has flagged as being over-social, I use the following technique to see if the person has…
Studies have shown that over 85% of the root causes of organizational performance problems are in the structures, systems, and culture within which work-groups are embedded. Structures and systems are either consciously defined with purpose and intent around a strategic direction as an Intended Culture, or they emerge naturally from the patterns-of-interaction of the personalities…
You’re hiring salespeople, right? So, at a minimum, the sales candidate should know how to sell himself. That’s why, when you’ve completed all the rest of the interview and testing process, you should ask what I call the last question, “Why should we hire you?” This gives the salesperson one last opportunity to sell himself…
I came across a quote from Oprah Winfrey, interviewed in the Dec. 26/10 issue of Parade : Everybody just wants to be heard…Do your eyes light up when I enter the room? Did you hear me and did what I say mean anything to you? That’s all they’re looking for. That’s what everybody is looking…
Michael Hammer states that, “Most companies today – no matter what business they are in, how technologically sophisticated their product or service, or what their national origin – can trace their work styles and organizational roots back to the prototypical pin factory that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.” This…
I have been touting the 4-Drive Model of Employee Motivation since I first read the 2008 Harvard Business Review article “Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model” by Nohria, , Groysberg, and Lee. You could say I’ve been a very BIG advocate for this model! It is a powerful theory on human motivation in general, and…
The late great expert on mythology, Joseph Campbell, used to tell a tale from the days of King Arthur. One day during a feast, the Holy Grail appears high in the great room but draped in a veil. Then it disappears. The bold Sir Gawain proposes that the knights all go off to find the…