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Alex Chan | Paul O’Donohue
Here’s a question for you. If you’re a business owner or CEO, are you recession ready? This session discusses step number six of the SalesStar nine step high performance pathway recruitment. And here to help us to navigate our way through this pathway and particularly on this particular step, number six is SalesStar’s founder and CEO Paul O’Donohue. Paul, welcome back again. Recruitment now; that’s an interesting one because a lot of perfectly good salespeople may find themselves out of a job because of cost cutting. Wouldn’t they?
Absolutely, Alex. You know, it’s it’s an interesting one. Most business owners would be thinking, what would we recruit through a recession? We’re firing, not hiring. But I think if you want to grow sales, you’ve got to hire better salespeople. You know, recruitment is part of our second phase in our high performance pathway, which is all about activity and recruitment is a process. It’s not a one off event, and this is where fundamentally companies get it wrong. You know, they treat it as a one off event when they need to hire a rock, they go and try and find someone. They’re under time pressure and they don’t put any science behind it. And they make all the mistakes like, you know, falling in love with the candidate. Candidates always do their best selling at the interview, and we we believe them, you know. So it is this so many things that can go wrong and it can be really costly. But the interesting thing is, is companies should be recruiting all the time. Doesn’t mean they have to be hiring all the time. But you’ve always got to be looking for a players, right? It’s a it’s about upgrading your sales team. You know, your top player needs to be challenged. So what better way to bring another ‘A’ player in? You know, they break your glass ceiling and then what happens? Another ‘A’ player will rise to the occasion and do better. So interestingly, your first comment. Some top performers end up being made redundant for good reasons, like literally companies cut back or they go out of business. And we have a surplus of sales talent, not all of them. Obviously, there’s a lot of underperformers, C and B players that get they get cut out first. So we’ve got to have really good recruitment systems in place to be able to put some science behind determining what are the ‘A’ players that can specifically really rise to the occasion and to sell successfully for your business.
Yeah interesting that and I like your comment about always be recruiting even if you’re not hiring this moment you know there’s several people who work within SalesStar who we’ve spent years trying to entice coming to work for us. One of our high performance coaches, we’ve been encouraging him for about ten years and eventually he made the choice to join us and he’s one of our finest. Another one of our High-Performance coaches spent about seven years trying to get him to join us, and now she’s one of our finest as well. It’s not that we necessarily want to recruit them now, but we say, Hey, one day I’ve got this person earmarked for shoulder tapping. They’re going to join us one day. So that’s what you mean by always be recruiting, right?
You got to have the you know, your business is predicated on talent and people, so you’ve got to have a good candidate bench really to rock and roll. But the interesting thing is never waste a good crisis or a good recession, like when markets contract. What successful companies do is double down on their marketing and sales. So, you know, we’re you know, there’s two ways to think in a crisis. It’s saw the old Chinese characters as represented by the characters danger and opportunity. So when you are a leader that’s thinking of danger, you’re going to cut staff, you’re going to cut marketing spend, you’re going to cut sales spend, you’re going to get rid of some of your sales people. But I always look at, hey, what about the opportunity here? What happens if we double down on our marketing activity? What if we increased our sales resources with the right people, and what if we ended up growing market share? So when the market expands again, that’s when you become hyper successful through a recession.
And that’s something I really would want our viewers to pay close attention to. Sometimes people are busy, busy retrenching, understandably, because they’re cutting costs, but sometimes they leave themselves in a position where they cannot take advantage of the recovery. And you’re talking about good getting good people in place so they can do just that, aren’t you?
Yeah. It’s all about speed of recovery. So you can’t grow your business only if people can. And what better place to start than the sharp end of your business, and that is with your salespeople. So recruit right from the start, eliminate those expensive mistakes. And in fact, we do have an asset Alex, There is a set of interview questions if yeah, if you click on the link below, you will see all of the questions we use to determine high performers from people that won’t be successful in selling for your organization.
Well, thanks for that, Paul. I’m sure a lot of viewers will find that really helpful. So remember, friends follow the series to get the full overview of how to be recession ready as we continue our journey through the SalesStar nine step high-performance pathway. And remember also if you want to know more, reach out to a SalesStar high performance coach because we’re here to help watch out for the key strategic moves later in the series, too. And we’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you soon.
