"I am pretty well grounded in the HR community in Milwaukee," Zoromski notes, "and that was considered an even swap for not having prior sales experience."
Weinfurter hired a former Parson employee, Valerie Main, for Capital H's Detroit office because he thought some of the people who bought accounting consulting from her a few years ago might give her their HR business today--"to help her, because she's helped them so much in the past," he says.
When he's interviewing a candidate, Weinfurter looks for people who come across as helpful. He also asks for second and third answers to questions to see if that unnerves a candidate. "After they give you one example of an accomplishment," he explains, "you say, 'okay, now give me another one and another." If a person doesn't have more than one thing to say, they're out.
As Capital H has grown, Weinfurter has put in place an elaborate application process, which, he says, includes psychological tests and background checks. He worked with one of Capital H's consultants--an industrial psychologist--to help him set this up. Together, they devised a checklist of traits that they believe every salesperson needs to be successful. "Less than 1% of the population has all of these skills I'm looking for," he says. They are: savvy communication skills (knowing how to ask the right questions and then listen), relationship skills, critical thinking skills, self-confidence (the ability to take rejection in stride), self-management skills, goal orientation, business acumen, and professional experience (a demonstrated track record where all these skills come into play).
Three months ago, Capital H's sales staff assembled in the company's Chicago headquarters for its first all-day training session. On the agenda: how to identify prospects, gather information about them, and then make the first contact. Weinfurter uses the book Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play, by Mahan Khalsa, as a training manual. Khalsa, who ran a yoga community while earning his M.B.A. at Harvard, contends that selling is a "dysfunctional" activity because so many people try to sell preconceived solutions without listening to what clients want or ascertaining their needs. His enlightened approach to selling is instead based on the mantra: "We and our clients share identical, mutual self-interests: We both want the same thing...a solution that truly meets the client's needs," Khalsa writes.
The trick, as Weinfurter sees it, is to teach salespeople how to gather as much information about a prospect as possible, and then to offer them something they will value. But you must go about this process unobtrusively. "The natural inclination of people in organizations is to not want to tell you things because they're afraid of being sold," Weinfurter says. "You need someone very good to ask the right questions and get at the truth."
Sherri Stewart is one of those people. When she first joined Capital H last July, Weinfurter asked her to meet with HR executives at about 40 Chicago-area companies to interview them for a "market research project." The task might have been botched by a less savvy salesperson, who might have treated it like just another sales call. But Stewart handled it flawlessly. "I was amazed at how easy it was," she says. "People were eager to talk and give us ideas."
After that project was completed, Weinfurter had Stewart put together free workshops for HR people on how to spend their budgets. During each presentation, Stewart carefully looked for clues to the attendees' possible consulting needs. On a recent conference call leading up to a workshop, this paid off when a woman admitted that her company's employee rating system was wildly unpopular.ÊWisely, Stewart didn't interrupt her to say "we know how to fix that," which might have come off as pat or insincere. Instead, one of Capital H's consultants, who was sitting in on the call, will use the tip as the basis of a client proposal.
Of course, if you're not going to find out what a client needs in the first meeting, or even the third, your boss had better be patient. And Weinfurter is. At Capital H, "it really isn't a 'you have to sell something in your first three months' mentality," Zoromski says.
"Dan creates a safe environment," adds Main, "in which you can talk honestly and frankly" about your numbers.
For his part Weinfurter says, "I believe in hiring hard and managing in a more reasonable fashion." Not haranguing people over their numbers "is just sort of accepting reality," he adds. In this economy, even the most charismatic salesperson is "not going to convince people to buy something they don't need."
So instead of judging his staff by pure sales at this point, Weinfurter tracks them through logs of face-to-face meetings with prospects, which, he believes, reflect how well their relationships with prospects are jelling. All new salespeople are instructed to meet with three or four customers or potential customers per week. By the sixth month of employment, they are expected to schedule eight or more weekly meetings.
All of this is not to suggest that Capital H's top line is ignored. The company, which had $1 million in sales last year, is on track to do between $7 million and $10 million in its first year under Weinfurter. The size of the average consulting gig has grown from roughly $39,000 to $50,000, and 70% of Capital H's sales have come from people who were not previously contacts of anyone at the firm.
While these results bode well for the company, Weinfurter's investors are eager for further evidence of success. When asked if he's pleased with the firm's progress, Brett says yes, but he also expresses the wish that the company will cut its sales cycles from more than nine months to fewer than six.
But so far, Weinfurter professes satisfaction. His unconventional methods, which worked so well in the past, will succeed again, he believes. And on a recent morning, as he was striding down the office hallway, he noticed that most of his reps' offices were empty. To this boss, it was a clear signal of success.
