Mastering the Art of Success
quickly. The longest time in a manager’s life is the day between the
time when the manager loses faith in someone and the day he or she
does something about it.
Let’s move on to the second of thre e things that ar e critical for sales
management and that is recruiting. Recruiting is a process and not an
event. It needs to be ongoing and continuous. It is the lifeblood of the
success of our organizations and it’s all about going after the A players.
As an entrepreneur trying to grow your business, each person who is
responsible for growing the company’s sales force should have a
minimum of fifteen targeted top producers they would l ike to have
come on board in the company. And I recommend fifteen whether or
not there are fifteen open positions. The caliber of the person we’re
looking to recruit is the caliber of person that is happy doing what he or
she is doing right now and n ot looking to make a move. However, these
people will come into the marketplace, they will make a move, and they
will move when “life happens to them.” “Life happens” when th eir
company runs into financ ial difficulty, the culture changes and they’re
not pleased with it, their compensation p lan changes and they’re not
pleased with it, someone got promoted and becomes the boss who is
difficult, or the industry is facing difficulty. Any nu mber of things
comes under the bandwidth called “life happens,” and when life
ha ppens that ’s when those people tend to move and th ey tend to move to
the person or company that has been courting them along the way. As a
result that’s why we need a list of, say, fifteen people because we just
don’t know when life is going to happen to any one individual.
The second piece of recruiting that I would suggest being put as a
point of emphasis is to start them right. Starting them right means
having an orientation program in writing so that they don’t bang around
the hallways lost. What we should have is a way of bringing people
into our company where they go home after their first day, sit down
with their significant other, and say, “I made the best decision I could
have ever made. I love th is company and this is why, because this is
what happened to me today.” This is unlike most situations where
people start a new job and it’s less than what they were hoping f or
because they were, for the most part, ignored on their first day.