The Hair Shop blog

Sales Recruitment

In module 5 we are talking about hiring sales people, and this is a valid subject for a sales management course as the one we are taking.

If we are thinking of making a career change, the question that should be on our minds as we near the end of our education at Northwood is what are they looking for in the job I am turning my resume for?

Yes I know that they will put down that they are looking for a person with a degree and sales experience along with a list of attributes they should have. But if every sales manager only hired people with experience then there would never be another opening.

So what are they looking for well besides eye contact and posture, I haven’t a clue since I have never worked in sales. The one reoccurring theme is the term self-starter and results driven. Of course you have to so that you are a people person and are able to communicate effectively, but before you go in make sure you can give examples of what you have done and how you have gotten results in tasks that you have been given.

Exhibit 5.5 and 5.6 on pgs. 143, 144 and 145 looks to be a great outline of what to look for and some questions to ask when interviewing and this could be a great tool to prepare a person for an interview.

Monster search

Sales Forecasting

Ah accurate sales forecast, a manufacturing managers dream.

I really liked the topics here and will need to reread them because quite frankly I am not that sharp sometimes. But an accurate sales forecast is very difficult to attain in some industries. Yes you are in the medical supply you know how many people are at what age and the population in your area of responsibility and you can generally get pretty accurate on what the demand is going to be for any given period of time.

Now when you are dealing with products that are affected by fluctuations in the housing market to name one of many, it can be a totally different story. Yes there was a predicted drop in new home starts but it has turned much worse than forecasted and all the so called experts are unsure of when it will turn around.

So what effect does this have on the manufacturing companies making products for the new home market, well most have slowed or stopped producing and some are sitting on large amounts of raw material that were bought according to the sales forecast that was loaded in the MRP systems that they use.

Yes sales forecast are an important tool becasue that is what the business sets its financial plan to, but one cannot rely solely on them and they must be updated periodically to be effective.

Sales Forecast spreadsheet

sales forecast

Sales Forecast

SBU objectives

I really liked Exhibit 3.2 on pg. 52 in the book.

I think that most people think of salespeople as going out and getting new sales and that is all that they do. But this exhibit shows that there are a lot of different functions depending on what how the salespeople are paid and it also depends on what mode the company is in at the time also.

We just went through such a transition of going from Build, Hold and Harvest in the last few years. Starting out the company was aggressively going after business to build market share so we were in the Build mode, and we stayed in that mode for quite some time.

Once we our production process started filling up the sales focus switched to a more Hold mode, and focused on servicing our existing accounts and making fewer calls on new accounts. At this point the production pipeline had filled up to capacity.

When production capacity had been reached we switched to the Harvest mode, servicing the high yield customers to insure they stayed and pushing price increases on the low yield to increase yield and if they left so be it.

This is a continuing process because if a lot of the low yield customers left then you reverted back to the Build mode, but if only a few left and the remaining took the price increase you moved back to the Hold mode.

Ideally a company would move in and out of the Hold and Harvest mode and not revert all the way back to the Build mode, but it does happen.

We went through this when a company had oversold capacity and when it came down to getting material we were lower on the list because our sourcing department did a great job of negotiating a low price so in some cases when they had production issues we did not get material because we were a low margin customer. Low profit meant low priority when it came to customer service. Needless to say we left them and went to another company, but about six months later they came back to us and tried to win our business back which we refused.

It is a very slippery slope to walk because you want business to fill up your production, but you have to be aware of the consequences once the pipeline is full if there is any production or supply issues.

If you have any thoughts I would like to hear them.

Tutor

SBU def

What is more important

Below is a link to a Blog on sales, it was an interesting take on what is better for a sales person to have Confidence or Enthusiasm and though most people went one way or the other with this post I am not sure I totally agree with either. Because I feel you need both to be an effective salesperson.

What is a salesperson that is enthusiastic but has no confidence? Would that not be a person that was excited about something but was to self-doubting to tell anyone else?

How about a salesperson that is very confident but was not enthusiastic about the product. Would you want to talk to that person? You can tell when a person is not excited about what they are pushing and if they are not excited then I am not going to be excited.

Right or wrong I look at it this way.

First if you are a new salesperson you better have one or the other when you walk in the door. If you’re enthusiastic we will work on the confidence, and if you have the confidence we will train you and get you excited about the product.

Second in you are an experienced salesperson then you better have the confidence when you walk in the door. Because after lets say ten years of sales you still are not confident in your abilities, then I would not hire you.

Either way after the training process and your probationary period, if I do not see that you have or are developing both of them, then I am not sure how long you will be around.

Sales article

Dogers Sales and Marketing Move

This has nothing to do with sales but it is a Marketing ploy. (using that as and excuses to blog on the topic)

Who all has heard about what the LA Dodgers are doing to try and sell tickets?

Well they are selling all you can eat tickets; yep buy a ticket for the right field bleachers for a measly $35 dollars in advance or $40 at the gate and you get all you can eat at the concession stand (excluding alcohol and candy) or at an server you self buffet line they are going to put in.

Wow, is there attendance that low that they need to make this type of move. Or is it a move if it works out that might possibly turning the whole stadium in to the same type of tickets?

They will not lose money by any means because if you do eat the $25 to $30 dollars worth of food it takes to pay for the tickets then you will be consuming a lot of beverages and at 3.75 a pop for 25 cents worth of drink they might even make more money on this than before. If this works how easy would it be for them to collect all the money up front and not have to deal with it at the point of sale? You just walk up order and leave because you have already paid for it.

But my question is, do you really want to sit in that section? I know on a hot summers day that I don’t want to sit with a couple thousand people or more that can eat $25 worth of nachos or hot dogs.

Dig in

Skill of a salesperson

I really like the section on skills required for success by a salesperson. The order in which they were presented made very good sense as well.

Most of us consider ourselves good at reading people, but in sales you find out how good you really are at reading visual cues.

Now some might think that Interpersonal skills should be second on the list but I agree with the book at putting the desire to achieve their goals and the strength of their psyche as the next on the list. The number of times that a salesperson is shoot down is astounding and only the strong can take that kind of ego crushing on a daily basis. The good ones know that it is all part of setting up a new territory and continue working through it. While the weak on the other hand can not deal with it and quit there job for another career.

Then comes the Enthusiasm, I am good friends with a few very successful salespeople and I do have to admit that sometimes the perky in them makes me want to go Tonya Harding on them, but that is the way they are for most of the week and they just cannot turn it off right away, but it makes them great at their jobs with both of them making into the six figures.

I think that will be my biggest hurdle if I do change my career and go into sales because I tend to want to tell a person when they are being an idiot and a salesperson cannot do that.

Tonya Harding

Prfessionalism

Now there were a few interesting comments on pg.22 that caused me to blog on this topic and the first was that sales in not viewed as a profession and then it tries to put sales in the same category with lawyers and medicals professionals.

I do disagree that sales is not a profession but to put it out there with law and medicine is crazy. When was the last time a medical supply salesperson saved a life, or an office furniture salesperson keeping someone from going to jail? I mean common now what are we doing comparing them to these other professions?

Now as far as sales being a profession, if you are talking about ethics then as long as you include car sales in the equation they will never meet the criteria. All joking a side it would be very difficult to write a standard code of ethics with so many different types of sales activities.

Even when looking up the definition of Profession you will not find Salesperson listed.

Regardless if it is considered a profession or not I know one thing for sure, sale people generally make a lot more than I do. So I guess my goal is to become an amateur.

SAMA

Profession definition

old VS new sales approach

The book talks about the old sales ways, the high-pressure sales or the old traveling sales man and how sales are changing and they are, now it is subtler but the goods are still being pushed on daily.

When was the last time you went through a drive through and they did not ask if you wanted to value size it, or maybe add cheese or a side of cheese sticks to your order. Or how about the last time you were in a restaurant did they ask you if you wanted to start with an appetizer or at the end of the meal when they bring you your check did they ask if you had room for dessert (just one look at me and you know I love dessert).

Whether it is Sonic or a Chili’s the employees you talk to are sales people and they are always trying to sell you something extra. Now granted they are not a pushy as the old door-to-door sales people but they are still pushing it in a very subtle ways and the advertising that you see on TV helps their job. When was the last time you saw one of those Sonic adds when they are in the car talking and they did not have a large drink in their hands.

I have even made it a point a few times when ordering at Sonic that when I was done placing my order I would say that is it nothing else, then across the intercom I hear would you like to add cheese to that burger. It is so ingrained in them that they just blow right past what you say and ask any way. Once I even said that is all I want and if you ask if I want cheese I am leaving and what happened, well I drove off hungry.

I know the book is talking more about sales professionals for medical supplies and such but just wanted to talk about hamburgers.

Sonic

Chili's

Working for GE for the last 6 years I have seen a complete difference between the medium sized company I worked for before when it comes to sales volume VS sales productivity.

With the smaller company they pushed sales dollars and rewarded the sales team for reaching their goals based off of this. The only problem was that they were out offering discounts and promotions that gave away almost all if not all of the profits. This caused net profits to be around 5%, now for a privately owned company this may not be to bad to net 5% off of 200 million in sales, but for a large publicly traded company this is terrible. GE for instance stress that each division should shoot for 35% profit on all their products. Yes there will be some accompanying products that we sell for less than that but at the end we need to get as close to that 35% mark as we can. GE is famous for buy and selling off companies, but what most people do not know is when they are selling off a company that does not mean it is a bad company or losing money, odds are it is only making 15% profit and that is unacceptable by their standards.

Now companies like Dell advertise the low-end models for there computers but they have there inside sales reps (the one you get to talk to on the phone) to push the upgrades and higher end models. Which basically is pushing their sales productivity with direct contact to the customer.

Good or bad, well I am not sure. If I am the customer I want it as cheap as I can get it, but if I am a stockholder I want the higher profits.

Love to hear any of your thoughts on the topic.

GE

DELL

MKT301 intro

Hello, I am JeffL

I am a Manufacturing manager attending night school to attain my degree.

I started as a Level 1 shop hand and have worked my way up to Manufacturing, Scheduling and Shiping Manager, with 60 employees reporting to me.

If everything goes well I will have my degree by Jan 2008, if not then by May 2008.

Currently I am enrolled in Marketing 301 along with 2 other classes this semester.

Part of this class is to start my own blog on marketing.

Hello, I am JeffL

I am a Manufacturing manager attending night school to attain my degree.

I started as a Level 1 shop hand and have worked my way up to Manufacturing, Scheduling and Shiping Manager, with 60 employees reporting to me.

If everything goes well I will have my degree by Jan 2008, if not then by May 2008.

Currently I am enrolled in Marketing 301 along with 2 other classes this semester.

Part of this class is to start my own blog on marketing.