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Steve Ludlow, Director with Harlow Group speaks about recruiting IT sales people.

#Linkedin #B2BSales #OnlineMarketing #Marketing #SocialMedia #B2BMarketing #B2BLeadGeneration #LinkedinforSales

Market Conditions
As the 2022 FY comes to a close, we've released our Software Sales Salary Guide for Australia. We've found that year-on-year remuneration growth for technology sales professionals in Australia continues to far out-pace what is observed across the broader Australian labour market. According to the ABS, the full-time adult average weekly total earnings grew by 2.4% from November 2020 to November 2021. We have seen average remuneration growth between 10% to 12% in technology sales positions over the same period. This speaks not only to the continued talent squeeze in software sales (not a unique challenge in 2022), but also to technology vendors' ability and preparedness to compete on package in order to attract the best talent. Why are technology sales packages growing at such a rate?
In recent years, the technology sectors' strong customer retention rates, the SaaS recurring revenue model, venture capital funding and high revenue growth, have all enabled the sector to continue offering the remuneration carrot in order to attract the best talent.  We can only speculate as to when the heat may come off this seemingly unsustainable remuneration growth, which has continued for some years now.  As inflationary pressure has risen and the economic outlook has dipped, we have observed a slight cooling of the software sales jobs market in recent weeks, particularly for pre-profit start-ups and scale-ups with venture capital backing.  We are seeing a small number of jobs put on hold with a 'wait and see' approach.
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Innovation is required in the war for talent
In the past 12 months we've seen a notable rise in organisations offering shares and equity positions to their salespeople as a way to attract and retain top talent. With shares vesting over 3 to 4 years, or equity positions in pre-IPO's being offered, what was historically reserved for higher levels of management and the executive level is being offered to many salespeople who are seeking this benefit as a preference to a higher salary package. What's more, we are seeing an increase in sales professionals not willing to move where they otherwise may have, as they find themselves in the proverbial golden handcuffs. Whilst equity seems to be the most meaningful and in demand benefit to candidates right now, other impactful benefits being offered range from increased holiday leave to paid premium family health insurance and paid volunteering days. There is no limit to the creativity companies have when it comes to attracting top performers.

The recruitment process is playing a significant role
In such a competitive market, we are seeing most quota achieving sales professionals receiving more than one offer. While this may draw our minds eye to remuneration and visions of bidding wars, it rarely plays out this way. These conditions are shining a spotlight on the recruitment process itself. Over the past decade, in an effort to become more accurate in selection and avoid failed sales hires, many organisations have created a three to five interview recruitment process. In the wake of a pattern of losing talent to their competition mid-way through recruitment processes, many organisations are streamlining their recruitment procedure in order to remain in the race. With this change, we are now seeing companies who have not made this shift, consistently losing out to those with an eye on speed and efficiency of recruitment process. If you'd like a copy of the 2022-23 Software Sales Salary Guide, you can download it here for free. If you are hiring or working in software sales in Australia, this guide provides salary and OTE data gathered from clients and candidates and includes figures for senior, mid-range and junior roles: Account Executives / BDMs / Sales Executives Account Directors Presales Consultants Channel Sales / Partner Development Customer Success / Account Managers Sales Development Representatives ​ The guide is segmented on job variables including: Enterprise Market Software Sales Jobs Mid-Market Software Sales Jobs SME Software Sales Jobs You can download it here for free. ​Here's to your sales success in the back half of 2022.

The new fringe benefits tax year starts on 1 April 2016. The ATO have recently announced changes to tax implications for car allowances paid to sales professionals and other employees. The ATO says, “Changes to car allowances mean if you are paying your employees a car allowance in excess of 66c per kilometre, you need to withhold tax on the amount you pay over 66c. If you haven’t been doing this since July 2015, you should begin to withhold tax on the amount you pay over 66c and advise your employees.” Matthew Hunt, Client Director at SiDCOR chartered accountants says “This change will put a greater onus on employers getting a record of the employees motor vehicle log book, or at the very least an indication from the employee on an at least quarterly basis as to the work related kilometres being travelled, so the employer can satisfy themselves that they are meeting their PAYG withholding tax obligations.” By our calculations, the new rule may affect employers and sales professionals who:

Pay or receive a $15,000 car allowance who do less than 22,727 km per year, or

Pay or receive a $18,000 car allowance who do less than 27,272 km per year, or

Pay or receive a $20,000 car allowance who do less than 30,303 km per year, or

Pay or receive a $25,000 car allowance who do less than 37,878 km per year. We are not qualified to give financial or tax advise.   Further advise should be sought from a qualified accountant.  Speak with Matt Hunt from SiDCOR chartered accountants  or for more information from the ATO, click here. We’ve published this as we’ve recently discovered some employers have not yet made the necessary changes in their payroll. We hope this information helps. To your sales success! #B2BSales #CarAllowance #FBT #SalesRecruitmentAustralia

This begs the following questions: Is cold calling only necessary in junior sales roles or transactional sales environments? Is there value in cold calling in a strategic solution sales environment, where there are long sales cycles, large deal sizes and complex solutions being offered to enterprise clientele? Should you not have to make cold calls as a senior ‘new business’ sales professional? My thoughts?  The highest paid and most successful B2B sales people I’ve ever met are more than willing to pick up the phone to a prospect they or their company has never spoken to before.  They are targeted in who they approach and have good reason for their approach.  Where their own referral network or marketing efforts do not give them access to the customers they wish to do business with, they will source the key decision maker or a key influencer’s name, pick up the phone, introduce themselves and ask for a meeting.  I believe cold calling should never be your exclusive or your major business development strategy.  As we all know, qualified referrals and inbound marketing leads have much higher conversion rates.  But to exclude it as part of an overall strategy is limiting to almost any business’s growth in my opinion.  There will almost always be key target prospects that can only be accessed in this way.  You may choose to send them a letter or an email, or invite them to an event first.  If this is ignored, you still have a cold call to make if you want to have any chance of securing the client.  Coming back to my original statement about established sales people who are not prepared to cold call and feel they have moved past it; I believe this to be a career limiting outlook and one that will also limit your earnings and success capacity in almost any new business focused sales position.  Social media and inbound marketing leads are hot topics at the moment.  Our aim is that these campaigns will lead us to getting on the phone and in turn, face to face with the customer without having to cold call them.  But when these campaigns and all other avenues fail to get a particular key prospect engaged in a discussion with your company, you don’t understand their needs and you’re likely to miss out on many key profitable clients; Clients that your competition is engaging with as a result of having picked up the phone to have a real conversation. Long live the phone I say.  I’m not saying cold calling is the single most effective way to generate leads, as it’s often not efficient use of a sales person’s time.  But there will always be situations that call for you to pick up the phone, or miss out.  Especially in niche markets where there are a small few selected and named prospective clients.  I do however believe the phone will always remain the most effective piece of technology to engage and communicate with your prospective customers.  When it comes to having meaningful business conversations with prospective clients, perhaps not even the i-phone 12, with hologram capability will challenge the all mighty phone. #ITSales #Sales #SalesJobs #SalesCareers #Australia #LeadGeneration #SalesBlog #Prospecting #SalesStrategy #SalesTraining #ColdCalling #B2BSelling

#Sales #CLevelSelling #SalesRecruitmentAustralia #Australia #Procurement

The Synergy Group’s research suggests that the modern digital landscape has disarmed the B2B sales force from influencing the buying cycle to a large degree. CEO Katherine Edgar tells us that best of breed organisations are changing the way marketing and sales teams are structured to meet this change, part 1 of 6. #B2BSales #ITSales #Sales #SalesManagement #SalesRecruitmentAustralia #OnlineMarketing #SalesLeadership #SalesBlog #SteveLudlow #SalesIndustryNews #B2BLeadGeneration

Right now, people seem to naturally separate their professional lives from their personal lives on social media, not unlike their non-cyber lives. So facebook is the destination for social interaction and Linkedin is obviously the perfect outlet for professional networking. Out of the top 200 branded fan pages on facebook, not one is marketing B2B. So is this ever likely to change?  Having said this, you wouldn’t need ‘millions’ of fans to have an effective niche market facebook fan page, so maybe there are quite a few B2B successes on Facebook that I’m not aware of. So I’m very keen to hear from our readers on this. • As a ‘B2B’ marketer, have you or anyone you know of had success on Facebook?

• Would you want to, or do you currently stay up to date with business related information on Facebook? My personal feeling is that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. But it is so tempting to seriously consider facebook as a medium for B2B marketing, as the stats for usage in Australia are off the charts and far outweigh Linkedin. I’m not just talking about the take-up of Facebook (9 716 340 users in Australia; 57.04% of the on-line population and 45.70% of the general population), but how much time the average user spends on it and how they use it. I mean, look at the stats: • The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook (the only people spending that much time on Linkedin are recruiters I would have thought, and perhaps B2B sales and marketing professionals).

• The average user becomes a fan of 2 Facebook Pages each month.

• The average user clicks the ‘Like’ button on 9 pieces of content each month. So with the later two stats, if you know facebook, you will know that each time someone clicks the ‘Like’ button or becomes a fan of a page, the content or the page is then broadcasted to all of their friends on facebook (the average user has 130 friends on the site). So it’s clear that facebook is a very powerful marketing tool, but I stand by what I mentioned earlier: I feel that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. I’m no expert on facebook of course, so I would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have some conflicting views and / or success with marketing your business to other businesses on facebook. #Linkedin #Sales #OnlineMarketing #Facebook #Marketing #MarketingStrategy #SocialMedia #B2BMarketing #SalesStrategy #SocialMediainRecruitment

In a sales interview, when asked, “What percentage of budget did you achieve in the last measurable year?” often the answer is, “100%”.  Look at the leader-board in any sales organisation and a very small portion of the team is actually between 98% & 102% (100% or there abouts).  Typically it’s around one in fifteen and the remainders are either above or below.  Those that are above 100% always know that they were 109% or 120% and will mention this in an interview.  If you ask this question (and you definitely should be), I guarantee you’ll get a lot more than one in fifteen answer with, “100%”. But who is lying and who is telling the truth? Ask the candidate, “What was your budget in that year.”  Those that did just scrape in budget at 100% will remember vividly what number it was that they achieved.  They are proud of it and they would have been focusing on that number for some time throughout the year in order to get there, therefore they will recall it instantly.  Those that fell a long way short will often have forgotten what the budget number was, as they lost sight of hitting it when they fell behind throughout the year, therefore they may pause and give you a rough estimate or seem to be making up a number. It’s also good practice to ask these questions on more than one occasion to check for consistency.  Perhaps on a phone interview and then once again in the face to face interview. Performance against budget in a sales environment is the key measure of a capable sales person, so knowing who’s lying and who’s not is a very valuable tool, especially when you’re dealing with some of the best communicators and ‘potentially’ capable liars; sales people. This is not a fail safe technique of course, but definitely something worth noting, as a suspicious response will often prompt you to do more investigation where you may not have otherwise.  Obviously as part of the reference checking procedure its imperative that you or your recruiter speaks with someone the candidate has reported directly to in order to verify the results that the candidate has achieved prior to hiring them.  In a senior sales environment, the best indicator of future performance is past performance.  If you can verify someone’s prior result achieved, it goes ‘some’ way to protecting yourself against a bad hiring decision. #Sales #SalesRecruitment #SalesManagement #SalesExecutives #SalesJobs #SalesCareers #LyinginInterviews #InterviewerTips

Steve Ludlow, Director with Harlow Group speaks about recruiting technology sales people and how to interview for Business Development Discipline

One of the most common reasons why software sales people fail is due to a simple lack of pipeline development discipline. Here's how to interview for business development discipline when interviewing software salespeople. Steve Ludlow, Principal with Ludtec speaks about recruiting technology sales people.

We all do it.  It makes sense.  Why wouldn’t you? They are a proven entity; a low risk option; you know they can do the job. They already have some product knowledge so it will take them less time to become profitable for the business. They have contacts in your target market; contacts they can easily get a meeting with. They won’t absorb valuable hours out of your week for product training. They will bring market intelligence and valuable information on our competition. These justifications a very compelling.  I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had a recruitment brief to recruit “someone who has sold our products and who has sold to our market.”  There are many reasons why you might hire people from your competition or even develop an entire recruitment strategy centred around hiring people from your competition. But it’s not always a great idea, especially if this is your ongoing recruitment strategy.  Why? If you think about a recruitment decision as having long-term impact on your business, one that you will feel the consequences of in 12 months time and onwards; if you’re aim is to have the very best talent available to you; the highest sales producers, on every hire; if you intend to attract professionals that will forge a career with your company, consider this: Let’s say you are looking to hire only sales performers that represent the top 20% of sales people in Australia.   (By the way, if this is not your strategy, why not!?)  Now let’s take it one step further and say that any new comer has to have worked in your industry, selling the same or similar products to the same or similar markets (OK, so they are currently employed with a competitor). How many sales people work in your industry?  This varies dependent on the industry, so for the sake of this exercise, let’s say there are 200 serious sales people in your industry in Australia (lucky you, if there are 200 of them).  So you have 40 people (the top 20%) in your potential talent pool of candidates to select from.  Where around 30% of sales people are on the market at any one time, the majority of these are not top performers.  That’s why they are looking to move.  So let’s say only 15% of the top 20% (40 candidates) are on the market at any one time (and I think I’m being generous here).  That brings your talent pool down to 6 candidates in Australia and you have to find them.  Oh, and by the way, how many of these 6 people live in your city within Australia?  You can see where I’m going with this.  The fact is, you need to get lucky to score a great sales person from one of your competitors. Whether you like it or not, if you have an ongoing strategy to hire from your competition exclusively, you won’t end up with sales people that represent the top 20% of sales people in Australia, let alone your industry.  You’ll end up settling for what is available within your industry at the time, which will rarely be the industry’s best.  However, you have taken a low risk option; a proven entity; you won’t have to train them and they will bring their clients with them… right?  Are you looking long-term, or even mid-term?  The problem is, none of these factors are a measure of a great sales person that will have significant impact on your company’s bottom line in the long run.  You’re simply taking the seemingly safe option, not the most effective one. However, a sales person that is in the top 20% of sales people, who is not reliant on bringing clients across, who can actually sell…  Wouldn’t this be a better long-term option for your company than to hire a mediocre sales person from a competitor?  After all, even if they can bring over some clients from your competition, if they are not a true sales performer, how will they reach their target in year two?  Or is that when they will leave for another of your competitors who is offering more money?  Are you thinking long-term?  If you had have been thinking long-term two years ago, what would your sales team look like now?  OK, I know what you’re thinking.  “Who’s to say that a sales person that sells another product or service can transfer their sales skills to your industry and be successful?  These sales skills are not always transferable across industries.”  I agree.  I’ll come to that later in this article. Here’s some other factors you may want to consider when hiring people from your competition, none of which are show stopping reasons not to, but should be strong considerations. 1.  Large expectations
Often someone who moves across from a competitor is expected to bring their clients with them.  This is rarely a realistic outcome.  Sales people can find themselves in a difficult position when telling a client “I know I said that ABC & Co’s product was the best in the market, but this product is really the best product on the market right now”.  This is just one of the many obstacles that a sales person is faced with when attempting to bring a client base across.  If they are successful in doing so, due to some form of loyalty or relationship with the sales person themselves, then how long will it be before they take these clients to one of your competitors when they move again? 2.  Longevity and Loyalty
What did you offer to the sales person to encourage them to move from a competitor to your company?  Was it money?  What ever it was, how long will it be before another of your competitors offers an even better deal?  They’ve already told you they will move for better conditions, so what’s stopping them from moving to one of your competitors when they receive the next head hunt call?   You may have a good answer to this.  Let’s hope you do. 3.  What do you like about the way your competitors do business?
Or more importantly, what don’t you like?  I say this because you are potentially going to spend the next few months debating with your new recruit over the best way to do things in your industry and finding your company’s values are continually undermined as your new starter struggles to break long formed habits.  This inability to conform to your company values may spread to other staff.  Before you know it, your company’s ‘way of doing things’ has been diluted and begins to resemble that of your competition.  Of course I’m being a little dramatic here as these issues can be averted if managed correctly.  But this scenario can sneak up and catch you unawares over time if not managed closely. Now, let’s say you knew how to select sales talent from outside of your industry, talented sales people capable of performing as well, if not better than those in the top 20% of your industry, who could successfully make the transition.  If this were the case, you could select from a significantly larger pool of candidates.  You could actually afford to select exclusively from the top 20% of sales professionals in Australia, as there would be so many more available to you. So, am I saying not to hire people from your competition?  Not at all!  In fact, if you can manage the above factors and continue to attract the very best of your industry to your company, you’re obviously on a great path.  However, in reality this is rarely achieved.  What you can often end up with is a team of sales people from your competition, made up of your competitor’s left-overs.  Let’s face it, they won’t easily let go of their top performers. What I’m saying is, hire people that represent the top 20% of sales people in Australia.  Hire great sales people.  If they happen to have worked for a competitor, that will be an advantage in getting them up to speed earlier.  But make sure you hire on skills and competencies, not on whether or not they have worked at your competition.  Therein lies the challenge!  How do you qualify skills and competencies in an interview?  What skills and competencies are most important to qualify?  And furthermore, not every selling environment is the same and just because you are a great sales person in one industry, doesn’t mean you can transfer these skills to any industry.  In my experience, many sales managers simply have not been given the knowledge and training to do the following: 1.   Identify the critical environmental selling factors that exist in their industry that will most certainly exist in a selection of other industries.  These factors can be used to determine other industries to consider sales talent from, thus significantly widening the talent available to you when making a hiring decision.  These factors may include such things as value of sale, length of sales cycle market segments targeted level of decision maker they are selling to product or service technical similarity commodity Vs value selling structure of the sales process

These are among many environmental selling factors to be considered when deciding if a person’s sales skills are transferable to your industry.  2.   Some sales managers lack the knowledge to accurately identify and isolate the skills and competencies required of a sales position in the company.  3.   Of those that can identify the requisite skills and competencies, most have not been given the knowledge and training to conduct an effective interview, incorporating situational and behavioral questions to qualify the vital skills and competencies. After all, when in your sales career did your sales manager or mentor sit you down and teach you how to do these things?  It simply doesn’t happen.  We learn to rely on gut feel and instinct, but these things alone have brought many a sales manager undone.  Qualifying sales people in an interview remains a real challenge for most.  Add to this that they are interviewing sales people!   Even a mediocre sales person can normally sell themselves and build rapport.  Now, if you are a Sales Manager hiring right now, I certainly don’t admire your position if you are using gut feel and intuition as your key guide. Over the past 10 years, I have interviewed over 3000 high level B2B sales professionals.  I now work with sales directors, mentoring them in the development of robust, successful sales recruitment strategies; from identifying required skills and competencies and formally documenting them, through to sourcing, screening, interviewing, assessing and securing high performing sales talent.  We also show sales managers how to use highly sophisticated assessment tools to benchmark existing sales performers within their organisation, enabling them to judge incoming sales talent based on benchmarks created from their top performing sales people. Let me leave you with this thought.  If your sales team was made up of the top 20% of sales people in Australia, what would your sales team and your sales management career look like today? We’ll be releasing a white paper later in the year to help guide sales leaders through the maze of recruiting top performing sales people, so watch this space.  In the mean-time, I’m happy to talk further if your sales recruitment strategy could use a fine tune or perhaps even an over-haul.  My email address is steve.ludlow@ludtec.com.au . Steve.
NOTE: This article was spotted by Recruiter Daily and republished in their leading recruiter newsletter. #Talent #TalentAcquisition #SituationalandBehavioralInterviewing #SalesRecruitment #SalesManagement #TalentWar #Australia #Melbourne #SalesBlog #SalesTalent #InterviewerTips