Faced with a shortage of top candidates, many Milwaukee-area companies are deploying creative strategies and incentives to recruit, identify and retain top salespeople. Most employers also want to see that their efforts, including training time and money, do not go unnoticed or undervalued.
Brian Ewald of Ewald Auto Group, Wauwatosa, offers three salary structures to employees and implemented the Ewald University to train and certify his sales staff.
Rick Smith, president of R.A. Smith & Associates Inc. in Brookfield, has started training project managers with business development skills.
Because of the costs of turnover, many employers are becoming more selective and are screening candidates with background checks, drug tests, personality-probing interview questions, behavioral assessments and meetings with other employees within the company.
The criteria for hiring and the expectations of a salesperson have changed, said Crystal Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of Elite Human Capital Group LLC in Brookfield.
“In the past, employers used to think they could take a technical person and put them into sales, but that does not happen anymore, because people are now wising up to the fact that sales is not so much about product knowledge, but relationship-building,” Schroeder said. “As the economy has tightened, there is a lot more emphasis on actual result. Real metrics. There is a harder economic push on salespeople.”
When it comes to sales positions, the market right now favors employees, rather than employers, Schroeder said. Schroeder has to sell herself and her company to the candidates, because she knows they have other options.
Dan Grobarchik, president of Green Bay-based Exsell Inc., offers nine different profile assessments to companies and sales management consulting services. The profile assessments help a company learn more about job applicants by breaking down their personality traits.
“This does not substitute (for) interviewing. Five interviews would give a company a lot more objective data,” Grobarchik said. “It helps a company come to a decision, but over time it becomes clear (what the results indicate), the data becomes more rock solid and company percentages go up considerably. We have helped a lot of companies profile up front so that they don’t even interview as many duds anymore.”
Orrin Broberg, who owns Minneapolis-based eContinuum, helps companies weed out applicants who do not fit qualifications and criteria before the company even receives the application. The Web-based program is designed to integrate within a company’s Web site as part of the Web-based employee application process. Those who are under-qualified, don’t have industry experience or answer a question in the wrong way will immediately be ranked low on the applicant list.
“We go beyond an accurate portrayal of what a person will be with a system that scientifically and qualitatively assesses who that person is and offer online job simulation where we put the candidate into a selling situation,” Broberg said. “We have them interact and perform, and assess their competency at that level.”
Once a solid salesperson is found, the challenge becomes retention.
“Retaining good salespeople is a separate and unique challenge in itself,” said Rick Olson, president of Victory Seminars in Brookfield. “Salespeople are the horses that are pulling the revenue wagon for the entire company. To retain them, I think, requires not just competitive compensation but requires recognition internally for performance, to peers and to the company as a whole through awards programs, development, instilling that positive reinforcement that they are appreciated, they are respected, they are valued within the organization and that they are important.”
Company management teams often make the key mistake of managing numbers and forgetting to manage the people, Olson said.
“It is foolish to have a meeting with a manager and say, ‘Here is my quota, this is how I will get there and this is when I will close,’ because that is not serving the salesperson,” Olson said. “The idea is to coach them, direct them and have the proper behavior in order to drive them toward their number. It is not management of the numbers, but management of themselves.”
Smith found early on that having a business development person who is completely separated from the engineers and project managers can be detrimental to his company. If they are more of a salesperson and less of a technical person, they can be perceived as insincere, he said.
“Engineering firms we compete with have gone through a whole experimental phase of hiring different people, from attractive females to seasoned public works officials, to ex-developers, but it was very difficult to develop someone in-house,” Smith said. “We have now gone to a different model where we are trying to train the people who are already in-house to become strong in business development.”
More than 70 percent of R.A. Smith’s work comes from repeat business, not a business development professional, Smith said. Smith brought on Steve Miazga, a project engineer, to head up the business development department at R.A. Smith. Miazga is charged with internally training project managers to build relationships and find out about other projects the clients are working on.
Ewald has found that with the three different salary options, he can attract people with different levels of education to the automotive sales industry. Employees can either be on 100-percent commission with incentives, an agreed-upon salary or a mix of both.
Ewald University, his diverse ongoing sales training program with staff members, is funded by Ewald Auto, Ewald said. It has proven to not only attract and retain employees, but to show them the entire business of automotive sales and to demonstrate that there is a career path for them to move into managerial positions.
Olson said he supports companies willing to have ongoing training with employees to remind them of company policy, history and customers. Just meeting to talk about numbers or role-play does not always do much good, he said.
“It is like joining the armed service,” Olson said. “You don’t take someone off of the street and throw them into combat. You put them through basic training for knowledge and training, not only for survival but also to be successful in combat. Salespeople need the appropriate training and instruction, boot camp, so to speak, before they are truly prepared to go out and conquer sales success.”
