Sales: What Works Now

Q: I can afford to hire only one salesperson. How do I pick a winner?

A recession-proof way to boost revenues is to hire away from a competitor that top-level salesperson who has a ready book of business. Barring that, you're probably going to have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince or princess. Lots of salespeople are leaving or being laid off from big companies and failed dot-coms. But are any of those folks right for you?

"Good salespeople are usually 'expressive drivers' like me. And that's who I hire."

Meet Tony Natella, the master of sales recruiting. "Good salespeople are usually 'expressive drivers' like me," the onetime Inc 500 CEO says without a trace of modesty. "And that's who I hire." As you might gather from the psychobabble, Natella is a big fan of personality testing. But that's just part one of his rigorous screening system, which weeds out 29 of every 30 people who interview for sales positions at Diversified Communications Group, a $6-million recruiting firm in Bedford, Mass.

Personality tests are a "convenient way to categorize people, but they're not the absolute truth," says Natella, who puts test scores into context by comparing them with the average scores of his best reps. The bigger test comes when he puts potential salespeople on the phones for two half days to call potential clients. "We listen and give feedback to see how defensive the person is," Natella explains. Many candidates take themselves out of the running after a few hours. "The phone is the big differentiator. It's tough to fake it." As if the phone challenge wasn't enough, the final test is a face-to-face interview with Natella. "Part of being a great salesperson is being able to adapt your style."

Q: What motivates salespeople today?

Before September 11 and before it was clear the economy was in a recession, some salespeople yearned for perks like flextime and less travel. Be careful what you wish for. Now that travel hassles and hesitant customers have imposed more downtime on salespeople, the need for flextime has faded. Make quota and take Friday off? Forget about it. Today salespeople would be happy to just make quota.

The best way you can motivate salespeople now is to establish clear goals for the company and rational expectations for sales performance. In the current economy, for example, you may need to lower the bar on quotas. Or else kick in the incentive pay at, say, 60% of plan.

Training can also help keep salespeople on the straight and narrow and away from depressing thoughts. So fight the urge to delete all training from the budget. "Sales training has made the difference for us," says Verdie Williams, president of Facilitek Office Furniture Systems, a $20-million dealer of Haworth office furniture in Denver. "It has helped keep my eight salespeople focused. They're not distracted by headlines. Even though business is down, there are still projects out there. Training helps us listen better. We're thinking about ways to help customers rather than selling them." Must be working. After suffering several dark quarters last year, Facilitek saw daybreak: in the fourth quarter its number of new accounts was actually about 25% higher than the figure for the same quarter in 2000.

Williams uses a local trainer affiliated with the national Sandler Sales Institute. New recruits undergo Sandler training weekly while the whole sales team attends half-day sessions quarterly. In between, Williams holds weekly in-house meetings that reinforce the lessons and help keep them fresh. One Sandler theme is how to deal with rejection. "We talk about how to get back on track, how to focus again. Salespeople have to fight the urge to give the stuff away. Commissioned salespeople are under the most stress. We don't want our salespeople to feel like they have the world on their shoulders," Williams says.

Salonek, the guy who started out with his dog 10 years ago, finds that his salespeople need a daily pep talk. So he holds a "15-minute huddle" every morning. At 7:25 sharp, Salonek and his six sales reps use their cell phones to dial in from the road to the company's conference call center. They share their challenges and results from the previous day. "Someone will say, 'We got XYZ to commit yesterday, and that's another aerospace customer we can mention,'" says Salonek.

Another antidote for tough times: weekly and even daily rewards to keep the salespeople psyched. Activity-based pay is an old idea whose time has come again. Salonek, for instance, closely monitors contacts made on the phone and meetings arranged. A salesperson who has been at the company a year or less can net $20 a day for making the daily contact goal. The incentives keep changing; sometimes the reward is simply a free lunch for the winning team. "That makes it more playful. We're not just gutting it out," says Salonek. Some of his special perks -- like naming a salesperson in company promotional materials -- don't cost him anything. "They earn the right to have marketing done on their behalf," he says. "The ads are an expense we would have incurred anyway."

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