Author: Oxfordadmin@878

Research shows that companies adept at recruiting enjoyed 3.5 times the revenue growth, and 2.1 times the profit margin, of their less- capable peers.* But does your internal leadership team have the time, capacity, proven IP, or expertise needed for a truly successful executive search?

When hiring an executive, it is important to uncover his or her methods and management style to see if they will integrate into your organization. For purposes of this article, we will be concentrating on questions directed toward a VP of Sales. They could be revised to be directed toward other types of executives.

The questions are not unique. They will get the dialog moving in a direction that will assist you in discovering the real talents of the candidate and whether they can actually move your organization forward. One of the biggest factors is uncovering whether the accomplishments are his or his predecessor’s. These aren’t magical questions.

This approach will give you a starting point for a SaaS business, but it will basically work for all SaaS companies from $10,000,000 to $200,000,000.

1. How big a team do you think we need right now, given what you know? (If they can’t answer — right or wrong — pass.)
2. What is the range of your deals in dollar volume? (If it’s not a similar fit to you, pass. If they can’t answer fluidly, pass.)
3. What is your approach to dealing with fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) in the marketplace? (If they does not give a concise answer, his ability to compete in the marketplace will be limited.)
4. What is the role of sales at this phase? What is the role of marketing?   How should they work together at this phase? (It is important that they understand the process of a lead funnel. Most management candidates do not understand this unless they have been a VP of Sales before.)
5. What sales tools have you used? Which ones have you tried? What has/ hasn’t worked well? (If they don’t understand sales tools, they aren’t a real VP of Sales).
6. How did you build your sales teams? What was the process? What challenges did you face? (If they can’t describe how they built a team — pass).
7. Explain the customer life cycle and how sales and client success/management implementation and follow-up should work. (If they have no concept of this, this person has not managed implementation and life cycle management of a customer.)
8. Tell me about your approach to working with sales engineers and sales support. When you have limited resources or capital, what is their role? (This will determine if they can operate efficiently at an early stage SaaS start-up successfully and if they know how to scale.)
9. Which individuals that have worked with you in the past would join you if you came to work for us? What are their backgrounds? Quotas that they carried? (All VP of sales should have at least a few key guys. Keep in mind that recruiters make their living supplying talent and many firms will bill you for candidates that you hire that came directly from a candidate they referred if you pump them for names in the interview.)
10. Who are the top three competitors in your last position? What were three deals you lost to the competitor? Why? What is going to separate us from these companies you lost to in the past? (If they don’t understand how to answer this question, this person will not be right for your organization.)
11. What will be my company revenues after one quarter? 2 quarters? 3 quarters? 4 quarters? (There is no correct answer; however it will give you a glimpse of where this candidate’s goals would be. It will also reveal many wrong answers.

 

You should pass if the candidate’s answers to the questions do not make sense or if they are terrible. You want to hire somebody that knows more about the questions than you do. The VP of Sales should be smarter than you in building a sales team, the sales process and, yes, the actual sale itself. If he is not, you will want to pass on the candidate.

Statistics show that nearly half of all sales reps fail to follow through with a prospect.

• Over 75% of sales occurs after the fourth contact.

If your sales reps are giving up after two or three contacts, statistics show that they are giving up much too soon. Because the majority of sales results from more than four contacts, a salesperson that stops reaching out after the third contact could be giving away millions of dollars in business each year.

“Tenacity…it’s far more important than the degree of talent you have. You can learn anything, accomplish anything, if you’re tenacious enough, if you’re willing to hang in there long enough, willing to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.”
~Tom Hopkins

Evaluate your prospect lists. Are they targeted toward strong prospects?

1. Ensure that your reps are contacting prospects 5-20 times. How many contacts do your salespeople think is enough?
2. Approach from multiple angles. Are your reps relying simply on email, or are they getting their making multiple contacts in a creative manner to develop solid rapport?
3. Follow strategies used by leaders in the field. Are your reps learning from the best?
4. Be sure your reps are applying your sales strategies. If your reps are attending sales training, are they given an opportunity to see tenacity in action, and furthermore, are they able to visualize using these skills?
5. Evaluate performance. If your sales reps aren’t producing the desired results, are you monitoring them to determine which approaches they need to work on?
6. Know your salespeople. If a rep isn’t meeting the organization’s sales goals, are you able to help this person explore ways to improve his or her skills?

Personnel are critical to every company. The Oxford Group can assist you in hiring seasoned sales reps as well as your next VP of Sales. Oxford has created a lifetime warranty strategy on candidates that are hired to assist companies with their growth and budget challenges.

6 Critical Skills of Top Performers

I have interviewed 1000s of sales people over the past 20 years. Hiring good guys for Cloud Computing, Big Data and the other areas is even more difficult. I’ve condensed the critical factors for in to six vital skills:

1)      Fully understand the products / services – I cannot believe how many salespeople truly do not know their product or service offerings and have to rely way too much on the pre-sales engineers to do the selling for them.

2)      Study and be knowledgeable about your customer’s industry – Many of the sales people that were in the top 10% of their industry really knew everything about their client’s industry including where all the skeletons were buried. When interviewing you need to probe their true knowledge base. I ask many hard-hitting questions including what clients they are calling on, size of their C-level database, nature of past deals closed, and who else was on the team that closed the deals. So many times I discovered that the names they gave me were the real guys that closed the deal. There are many other unique probing questions our firm asks to uncover who was the actual culprit that closed the deal. The Oxford Group is very adept at procuring these types of salespeople for clients utilizing our Reverse Engineering Approach.

3)      Evaluate existing accounts for new opportunities – So many salespeople do not expand their reach into an existing client because they feel that they are wasting time uncovering opportunities outside of their current company’s product offering. The killer sales guy is always trying to meet more people in the account getting introduced by who they already know. They will also pull these opportunities and partner with other vendors that will reciprocate for them.

4)      Conduct in-depth research of prospects – Probing is a gift and top sales guys have it. Questions some of the top sales guys have used are: What are the three top challenges that you faced this year to hit your bonus? Top salespeople are always asking why or in what respect to go deeper and deeper. These two probing approaches always bring up more and more information to truly uncover the real hurdle to getting a deal closed. The top guns are always losing. If you could accomplish this, this and that, would you be able to get approval for the solution we provide? Why not? Another catch phrase to keep asking is what else?…until the client can’t answer anymore.

5)      Deliver what is promised – Producers always use word of mouth to carry them to the next deal. That is a precious commodity. A top gun can be your hero, but he can also be your worst enemy because he knows his next deal is only possible if the last deal was successful. His successes are predicated on building long lasting relationships with his rolodex of long term clients and relationships. If they see that you or the company are not following through, the salesman’s next call will be to our firm to lend a hand with our Stealth Reverse Search or to another recruiter to see what companies are hiring.

6)      Be tenacious – The most common trait that the top guns possess is that they must hear no six times before it registers. Most salespeople will quit after two or three calls to a client or hearing no a couple of times. Killer sales guys are relentless. They will do whatever it takes to stay in front of a potential client. No is not in their vocabulary.

Don’t be fooled by the sales guy that pontificates on the importance of focusing more on a network of contacts, engaging the client with interesting analogies, or providing customers with advice. I encountered many of both of these types of reps when we enacted our Hypergrowth Strategy and built a startup from $0–$140,000,000 in one year. The bulk of our work concentrated on uncovering what each hire could do for our client, rather than what our client could do for the hire.

There just isn’t any substitute for hard work…and successful sales reps recognize that.

The Oxford Group is prepared to help you build your successful sales team.

Contact us at: TheOxfordGroup@att.net 214 360 4000 or schedule an appointment at https://theoxfordgroup.youcanbook.me/.