How To Outsmart Our Tight Labor Market

8 Strategies to Override Our “Supposed” Shortage of Sales and Management Talent.

By Dr. Russ Riendeau

How clever are you? How creative are you? How bold are you? How self-aware are you? How long will you wait to act while others stand paralyzed by reports?

With our current skilled labor market as tight as a  New York City marathon runner’s ham strings, executives nationwide are being challenged with two critical problems that stand in their way to sales growth and profits:

1. The need to extract more results from their existing sales and management team.

2. Becoming more creative and proactive in expanding the strike zone to find qualified sales and management talent to keep the sales funnel full. 

 Just how executives can accomplish these two critical goals in a tight labor market is achievable, but not without modifications and evaluation of current compensation plans, on-boarding and additional sales training.

 While the media and researchers continue to tout the tight labor market’s stranglehold on companies expansion plans, there is fact and fiction to the data. Yes, there is a skilled labor shortage and even the Census Bureau got it right, warning us 20 years ago. Welcome to today via the prediction 20 years ago. Finding topnotch engineers, designers, manufacturing leaders and the like, is difficult. And, considering many companies build plants on cheap land, in a galaxy far, far away from suburban neighborhoods and bigger cities, it’s harder to attract higher wage-earning talent to rural county, USA.

 Conversely, on the sales, marketing and management talent hunt, there is a wide range of viable, proven sales and marketing professionals working in the plastics industry and outlying industries that are looking for a better career track. These individuals are smart, driven and selling technically-oriented  products and services. They can learn, work from home  and have proven they can transition into other industries easier than many executives are willing to believe. A recent survey showed that over 75% of companies had not introduced updated sales training techniques in the past 3 years. Do you think that selling strategies, tools and arguments are significantly different than 3 years ago. Indeed.

 Proactive hiring executives in today’s market, need to take more initiative to shift  budget dollars  to create stronger on-boarding programs and sales training strategies. These two improvements will help to  insure faster and more successful crossover while building in better accountability and benchmarking tools. The latter will reduce the risk of keeping weak performers on the payroll too long. (Note: Salary and benefits budgeted for open positions is a viable source to shift those monies into sales-training and on-boarding enhancements.)

 Over the past 7 years, every industry has seen it’s share of aging boomers leaving the rank and file workforce. Retirements, fatigue, challenges of keeping up with new technology and sales techniques, as well as weaning motivation to hit the road are some primary factors. Less desire to chase new business causes many aging workers to  see retirement and less stress as a more viable alternative. Couple this societal shift in demographics with the ever-growing “remote worker” trend, leaves hiring executives with a lot of new aspects of how to lead, motivate, train and monitor activities of their sales people.

 What can hiring executives implement right now to enhance recruiting, build as stronger sales funnel and insure the current team is functioning at a higher level?

 Here are 8 viable, proven strategies that successful leaders are engaging in today:

 1.   Invest in a sales training program of some kind. Be it a video series, an on-line sales mentoring program, a great new book, an in-house training session—any activities you can begin that sends a message to your sales team that you want them to earn more money and that they are accountable to drive sales. This message also serves as a subtle message to the under-performers that they need to up their game.

2.  Expand the strike zone for new sales talent. “Industry experience” is a limiting step to securing even better, more creative sales professionals to add to your team. Industry experience is not a risk-reducing trait in hiring—it is a lazy way out of creating better on-boarding and better sales training and tools. Hire the frontal cortex, not a Rolodex.

3.  Get professional interview training for yourself and every hiring manager on your team. Less than 10% of managers in today’s workforce have had any formal interview training. Wow. If you don’t know how to effectively interview to secure a deeper understanding of an another human being’s potential, skills and ability to succeed, you will not be able to expand the labor pool beyond your small sphere of contacts.

4.  Compensation and incentives. Correct your variable compensation plan to insure you are rewarding for the desired behaviors. If you want to grow sales, then reward for activities that will lead to sales: meetings, plant visits, proposals, number of calls, meetings and emails. Note: If you pay sales people on bonus-- instead of commission—if the company is profitable, you will not see sale growth you expect.

5.   Take charge of your budget. With all due respect to your HR team, you are the hiring manager. You are responsible to grow sales increase profits and take the heat when things break bad. If the HR team is not able to quickly and assertively source, recruit and qualify elusive talent for you, then you should have the authority to use any outside candidate sourcing methods you can to insure the open sales, marketing or management position is filled quickly. The investment of using a search firm, or spending on more sales training, for example, is far less than the $100-$400,000 or more that can be lost opportunity costs due to vacant territories or turnover issues from over-worked employees trying to cover.

6.  Hold sales professionals accountable to engage in the disciplines of selling. Monitor activity, calls, emails, prospecting techniques and time management. Managing accounts is not selling and selling takes effort to put aside projects that don’t lead to writing proposals and closing deals.

7.  Reward for activities leading to sales, not merely making the sale. If you reward and pay a bounty or some incentive in the first 6-8 months to a new sales person, you will see instantly if that person has the drive and self-discipline to chase the right carrot and behaviors. The cost of these bounties are far less than wasting salary, severance and legal fees  up to the time you fire them 7 months down the road.

8.  Be proactive and start sourcing talent immediately after a position is vacated. Sales people are savvy professionals. Leaving an open sales territory to allow the competition to barge in makes it harder to rebound sales and reclaim confidence of customers.