LSA Global Insights Newsletter: Employee Hiring

Showing posts with label Employee Hiring. Show all posts

August 19, 2015

How to Beat the Odds 4 Tips (that Your Competition Does NOT Know) for Hiring Your Next High Performance Sales Rep

All sales teams have clear winners (high performers) and clear losers (low performers).

Finding and hiring those winners can make an immense difference in team performance. According to the McKinsey Quarterly, a top quartile performing salesperson is 14 times more productive than an average performer. Conversely, hiring losers directly hinders sales team success.

Financially, underperformers miss revenue targets and increase turnover and recruiting costs. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that turnover costs on average are $150,000 per sales person.)
Culturally, underperformers can take up to 80% of a sales manager's time while demotivating the rest of the team.
And from a customer perspective, low performers decrease customer loyalty and negatively impact your brand promise.

To be sure, the odds of finding a top notch sales rep are not very encouraging. MHI Global's recent sales best practices study found that less than 10% of the sales professionals surveyed could be considered "world class." Additionally, a sales benchmark study by Xactly, one of our clients, found that 79% of SAAS sales representatives miss quota and 14% never achieve even 10% of quota.

But here's the good news. With up to 9-out-of-10 sales professionals not performing at their peak, sales leaders have a wonderful opportunity to significantly increase performance. While assembling, engaging and retaining a world-class sales team is not easy, it is a critical factor for companies that seek to create and maintain high growth.

So how can you beat the odds and assemble a high performing sales team? While different situations require different approaches, the best way to attract, engage and retain a high performing sales team is to start with four underutilized areas to outsmart your competition.

Read About the 4 Underutilized Areas and How To Better Hire Top Talent

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

August 31, 2014

4 Smart Steps to Determine When to Hire or Fire Salespeople

One of the most important sales leadership decisions is who to hire and when.

How do you know when to grow, expand, hire, develop or fire? There are so many variables to consider...not least of which is determining what it will take to recoup any investment.

Typically sales managers wait to add a new salesperson until the current level of sales justifies the added expense. Some use a cost-to-sales ratio. Others just wait until they land a big deal to add more headcount. Unfortunately many of these strategies can backfire for different reasons. So how should you determine the best size and configuration of your sales force?

Thankfully, professionals who specialize in sales force effectiveness have come up with 4 proven guidelines to help with this challenging decision.

Watch for indications that the size of your sales force is skewed, either up or down.
While it may seem obvious, you need to pay attention to early warning signs. Are your salespeople complaining that they don't have enough opportunities? Are they being ignored by their customers? Is too much time spent on non-revenue producing sales activities? And what about your competition...are they downsizing?

These are all clues that you may need to decrease the size of your own sales team.

Conversely, are your salespeople complaining about their travel or workload? Are competitors ramping up their sales teams? Do you hear from customers that they are dissatisfied with their level of service? Are your salespeople only re-actively taking orders with little time to prospect and fill the pipeline with target accounts?

These are signs that your sales team is understaffed.

Read the Remaining 3 Tips For Growing and Shrinking Your Sales Force

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

December 31, 2013

March 31, 2013

Making Strategic Branding, Staffing and Recruiting Work

If you are like most of our fast growing clients with big ambitions, chances are that your staffing and recruiting processes are not where they should or could be to support your growth goals. Even with historically high unemployment rates, the majority of our clients are struggling to find and hire the top talent that they need to execute their strategies in a way that makes sense.

To hit ever increasing and shifting (and often ambiguous) hiring targets, talent leaders need create approaches that are strategically aligned, nimble, scale-able, and fast. From sourcing quality candidates, to hitting hiring forecasts, to employee and internal branding, an effective staffing and recruiting process is a complex challenge.

Best-in-class organizations execute each strategic staffing and recruiting phase efficiently and in alignment with their business and people strategies. Low performing functions are reactive and tactical and often at odds with hiring manager priorities.

Employee and Recruitment Branding
Employee and Recruitment branding is an essential (and often overlooked) element of an effective recruiting function. Your employee brand is your corporate calling card. It impacts your recruiting, engagement, and retention of current, potential, and future employees. If you do not start strategically, you will most likely find yourself under the gun and chasing a moving target.

Learn more recruitment branding...

Candidate Assessment
Advanced technology, social media, and a shifting economy have increased the flood of resumes (both qualified and unqualified) that bombard applicant tracking systems. Today's recruiting websites often lack proficient applicant screening tools and make it easier than ever to apply for a position. Assuming that your strategy and criteria are clear, the right applicant screening software can act as a first-level filter to eliminate potential candidates who fall short of the basic requirements for your positions so that your recruiters and hiring managers can focus on talent that fits your business and your culture.

Learn more about candidate assessment...

Workforce Planning Process
Workforce planning is the process of deciding how many people you will need in a particular area over a certain period of time. And conversely, it's also taking a hard look at the talent market and assessing how many people are available and how difficult to will be to hire them so that you can make realistic talent plans to support your business strategy.

Learn more about workforce planning...

College Recruiting
College recruiting can be an important ingredient in your overall workforce plan and recruiting strategy...or not. Depending upon historical data, key recruiting metrics, and your hiring managers , it could also be a colossal waste of resources. Do inexperienced hires make sense for your business model?

Learn more about college recruiting...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

June 29, 2009

Are You Set Up to Hire "A" Players During this Buyers Market?

As unemployment soars, will your interviewing and talent management practices help you take advantage of the available talent?

Are you hiring the best candidates to help you weather the storm and take advantage of the turnaround?

Even with record unemployment and significant cost cutting, client requests for interviewing performance support have unexpectedly spiked in the last 6 weeks.

With thousands of quality people looking for work, how could this be? Shouldn't it be easy to cherry pick "A" players in these tough times?

Not counting the negative impact on team morale and employee engagement, the costs of a bad hire range from one to five times their salary. So it is not surprising that people would like help in effectively and efficiently sifting through the hundreds of applicants landing on their doorstep. Most companies and teams cannot afford to hire "B" or "C" players.

If you would like to know how your interviewing process stacks up to leading organizations, this complimentary 10-minute Interviewing Best Practices Health Check Analysis is for you...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Are the Interviewing Odds in Your Favor in this Economy?

Unless you can count cards, your chances of winning at Blackjack are slim. In fact, on average you will lose at least $5 for every $100 that you bet. That is how casinos make money.

Unfortunately, based upon how most companies in America interview, they have better odds of beating the casino than they have of hiring the "A" players they desperately need to succeed.

If you are using the typical "give me an example" behavioral interviewing questions that are easy for candidates to prepare for, you are at risk.

In a previous issue of the Harvard Business Review, Larry Bossidy, the past CEO of AlliedSignal, describes interviewing as "the most flawed process in American business."

Based on over 25 years of experience in helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing skills and practices, we couldn't agree more. We also think the root of the problem is obvious and correctable.

Read the Behavioral Interviewing White Paper...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

April 1, 2007

Does Your Interviewing Process Work?

In a previous issue of the Harvard Business Review, Larry Bossidy, the past CEO of AlliedSignal, describes interviewing as "the most flawed process in American business."

Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we couldn't agree more.

More and more of our clients have increased hiring. More and more of our clients utilize an inconsistent and unproven interviewing process that takes too much time and does not produce the desired results.

While we know that hiring the right people significantly decreases costs and increases productivity, fewer and fewer organizations have the skills to interview effectively-they don't have a clear picture of the ideal candidate nor how to ask the questions that will predict performance once hired.

We think the problem is obvious.

About LSA Global

Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Management Tools for Hiring Top Talent

If you are working long hours while trying to add important members to your team, you should be asking yourself lots of questions.

Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we suspected you might be wondering how best to accomplish this objective.

Despite the best intentions, 90% of all terminations are due to performance factors that never appeared on a resume. Most companies exert 2-4 times more time and effort to interview and select new employees than is required.

It is possible to hire "A" players faster with less effort.