Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit стр 10.

When financial strategy drives sales strategy, quite often the result is planning for failure.

Get a Bench and a Pool

The worst recruiting practice is to wait until you have an opening. This means that you are reacting to the marketplace and only looking through the available candidates in your area. The

best practice is to build a bench within your own firm and a pool of candidates in your industry on which you can draw when you have an opening. It may take years to build this network of candidates, but it means proactively going after people and companies that may not be looking for jobs at the moment.

In our firm, it takes us about two years to recruit a principal. And we have the possibility of 100 or more at any one time who may come to work with us in the future. The building of this pool has not been an accident. Every sales manager should have a list of several dozen sales candidates within their contacts or background on which they can draw at any given time.

Recruit the Best Recruiters

The worst recruiting practice is to wait until you have an opening

If youre counting on recruiters, proceed with caution. Many recruiters try to play both sides of the fence. They may be using you as a net destination and a net supplier at the same time. You need to meet face to face with these recruiters, define your outline, and sell them not only on why your company is a good place for their candidates to come to work but also why you need to have a partnership with them. Make it clear that if they ever recruit from you at the same time they are sending you candidates, that will be the end of the relationship.

You have to be willing to share with selected recruiters the rules of engagement, including your compensation plan, competitive advantages, the direction of your company, and your recruiting process. In this way, they understand how to proceed with you and wont see it as an unduly lengthy process. The only thing that will keep recruiters loyal to you is the prospect of future business. Once they see your company in trouble and people starting to leave, unless you have a personal relationship with a particular recruiter, they will start to prey on you and take people out of your organization. Its a double-edged sword they use. Dont let them use it on you.

If you count on HR or advertisements to send you to the right candidates, you are abdicating responsibility for your own future.

Another best practice used by some organizations is to hire full-time internal recruiters. Why waste a sales headcount on a recruiter? These people are actually salespeople because they can go into organizations and find people who are not yet looking for a job and pull them out along with their friends.

The only thing that will keep recruiters loyal to you is the prospect of future business.

All I ever saw in my recruiting efforts were A and B prospects. I wasted very little time talking to turkeys because of the efforts of these people. We were able to rebuild our region from middle of the pack to number one within a year. This is an excellent investment, but like many best practices, it requires a certain economy of scale to be able to afford a full-time, aggressive internal recruiter who is not just a paper passer.

expensive habit.

Good Is the Enemy of Great

Not having a reason to not hire somebody is not a reason to hire them. The default is to keep talking or keep looking.

A regional manager I know once hired a guy and fired him within three months. When asked why we hired this person, he replied, I couldnt find a reason not to hire him, and he looked better than anyone else Id seen. (These are two bad principles that need to be removed.)

Why not? I said. Thats not true. Thats a bad principle. Throw it out. You can have all A players. Ive done it three times in my life.

People tend to hire on hope and fire on faults a very expensive habit.

While at SAP, one of our principals, Jack Barr, met with sales directors from all over the country. He would ask them each to rank their current sales teamshow many A, B, and C players they thought they had.

Their categorizations were always similar. They all defined their sales forces as having some A players, some B players, and some Cs. Their best performers were designated as A players even if they really werent. In many cases they didnt really have any A players at all.

When Jack told them that they needed to hire some As, they would always say, We cant right nowwe dont have the headcount.

But if you have four C players right now, who you dont think will ever be A players, you do have the headcount, Jack would tell them. You have room to hire four people.

As a sales manager, you have to be candid with yourself about what level players you really have. You should constantly be recruiting. When you find an A playeror someone who has the potential to become an A playerhire them and replace your Cs.

You can only perform as well as the team you have behind you. If you spend all of your time coaching the C players, helping them sell, you cant be an effective manager to the rest of your team.