Growth Dynamics Get Down

Why Hiring Is Still a Challenge When There is Talent Available?

The pandemic is not necessarily a negative impact event, particularly if you are looking for quality sales talent to add to or upgrade your sales team. With many employers downsizing or “smart-sizing” during the Covid impacted economy, there are quality professionals looking for new places to go to work. Bad things happen to good people, and that is particularly true as we head into the new year as some people have been caught in circumstances beyond their control and find themselves suddenly unemployed. Now just might be the right time to start hiring, but it is not the right time to hire poorly and just add bodies to the roster.

I am prepared for lots of pushback on this post, so please feel no hesitation in reacting positively or negatively to my thoughts on this topic.

For the last 36 months the booming economy delivered record growth and profits for many sales organizations. That growth also created a challenge that virtually every sales organization had no success in overcoming: a lack of qualified sales talent to capture the available opportunities. The constant refrain of “where can I get some more salespeople” was heard coast to coast and there seemed to be no reliable answer. As typically happens in that business environment, sales leadership quit asking for good salespeople and settled for any available body that could walk, chew gum, and hand out product literature. The recycling of poor to mediocre talent that could get overpaid for their production became acceptable as sales managers were afraid of reporting that all the territories were not being covered. The high tide floated all ships, even those that were rusted out or never really proved sea worthiness.

Today we are all facing a challenge that two weeks ago seemed as likely as pigs flying. Yet, here we are facing a sales challenge you won’t find talked about in any sales training manuals or motivational seminars. Essentially, the world has shut down for almost everyone, and none of us can truly say, with any certainty, when it will reopen. With that reality staring us in the face I thought I’d take some time this evening and make some suggestions about how to survive the challenges in front of all salespeople. Below you will find a few ideas for each of the three points of our MAP to Success: Mindset, Activity and Process.

At 35, Rachel built a nice career for herself, and she was enjoying the benefits of that success. There was a nice house in an upscale neighborhood, the vacations in all the places she ever dreamed about and a luxury set of wheels sitting in the driveway; all of it earned through hard work and commitment to Rachel’s goals. Her life looked like the epitome of success, and Rachel was very proud of it all. There was, however, one thing Rachel didn’t have, and it seemed the more successful she became the less of this one thing she had at her disposal. Rachel hated to admit it, but all the success cost her time to enjoy her life with friends and family. To Rachel, it became obvious that success had a price and she wasn’t sure it was worth it to raise the bar and experience even more of it. She found herself admitting that being more successful just meant giving up most of what was left of her personal life.

I have always found it interesting how many different seasons there are once you become an adult. As a child you tend to believe in four seasons- spring, summer, fall, winter- or maybe two seasons- school season and summer season.

We hear it all when we talk about our High-Performance Sales Program. Our program costs too much money. The potential student doesn’t have the time to go to sales training. I’ve been selling all my life so why do I need your sales training now? I read a lot of books on selling, I’m good with those.

This article appeared in the Arizona Republic on Saturday, May 4th.

I can’t claim the original thought on this powerful acronym, but I admit I use it quite often in Growth Dynamics’ sales training programs. There is never a shortage of conversations that lead to a client/student that hears a sales tactic that makes him or her uncomfortable and blurts out a sentence that begins with these two words; what if…