So, when is it really okay to accept a drop in Sales?

There is a simple but tough answer to this question, which is never.

It may seem like a blunt response and a lot of people will come up with a lot of reasons why the above statement is not true. Some of the answers we have heard from our clients as reasons why their sales drop for a period are as follows;

1. I work with builders and they are on holidays for six weeks over Christmas so the whole industry shuts down.
2. It was the Global Financial Crisis and everyone was doing it tough.
3. I work with business people and they are not at work over Christmas so therefore I can’t make money in January.
4. We can’t find enough sales people to grow the business.
5. We sell plants and people don’t spend time in the gardens over the Winter.

I am sure there were some people that read these reasons and thought “but hang on, they all make sense, some businesses are seasonal and you can’t control everything”.

Let’s have a closer look at these answers.

“I work with builders and they are on holidays for six weeks over Christmas so the whole industry shuts down.”

This quote comes from a client of ours who is a window cleaner and cleans new houses when they are built. He spent a number of years with no work from mid December until the end of January when the building industry went on holidays. One year we sat down with him in January and said “OK, So what is your plan to avoid this happening next year?” He had a look at what opportunities there are and came up with a couple. One of them was to promote to schools, as they were usually cleaned over Christmas and were similar work to what he was set up to do. He then sent out a lot of promotional material and now one of his most busiest periods is during December and January.

“It was the Global Financial Crisis and everyone was doing it tough.”

This came from a Recruitment Consultant in Melbourne. The truth is our recruitment business – “Exelect Recruitment” had its best ever month of the time in November 2008 and we later found out that job ads fell 50% that month on the year before. If you think about it, Exelect grew during the so-called “Global Financial Crisis”. Unless you are a company the size of Coles or if the market you are working in gets smaller you will only be affected if your results are no good.

“I work with business people and they are not at work over Christmas so therefore I can’t make money in January.”

This client managed to work out how to solve this problem each year in two ways. The first method is that he asks all of his clients in November who is taking holidays and if they are not he books them in for appointments over the break. The second method is that he makes sure he has home phone numbers and not work ones to call in December/ January. Again the Christmas period is now his best sales period.

“We can’t find enough sales people to grow the business.”

This one will affect sales, I agree. With the client who said this, we worked out a plan to find more sales people for him and now he has to hire more technicians to keep up with all of the work.

“We sell plants and people don’t spend time in the gardens over the Winter.”

This client looked at the mix of products they were selling and decided to introduce indoor plants and accessories and promoted them to increase their sales in Winter. Last year was their busiest Winter ever.

Overall it is important to realise that there are a lot of opinions and ideas that float around such as the ones that have been included above that aren’t very helpful to your business if you look at them.

If you want to increase your sales or any area of your business,
as a business owner or manager it is your job to look outside the usual and find a solution.

So build your team by hiring productive and easy to manage staff, give them the basic training needed to help them get established and manage them by their results and statistics to create a productive atmosphere.

This way you can also ensure your only reason for losing sleep at night is because of the excitement up ahead and the expansion awaiting your business!

We’re always open to your feedback and knowing how we can help, so call now on 1800 603 023 or email info@performia.com.au if you need support in any area of your business.

We wish you lots of great production and success!

Negar Riazati
General Manager

Performia Australia
Ph: 1800 603 023
Negar@performia.com.au

©2010 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Recruiting [Part 7]

Finally we arrive at the last instalment of this series of common mistakes people make when hiring. In the previous blogs I have discussed many issues that cost a lot of time and money for business owners, managers and HR people. I highly suggest reading the previous articles to give you more insight into what not to do and how it will help your bottom line.

This is the whole list of the seven part series on what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:

1.       Making the job ad too good to be true.
 
2.       Focussing on education, “experience” and other wastes of time.
        
3.       Listening but not looking.
 
4.       Let’s find someone just like me!
 
5.       Making personality a priority.
 
6.       Not reference checking.
 
7.       Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

THE SEVENTH DEADLY SIN: Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

It is sometimes a long process to find a candidate you are really confident about but when you do, make sure you get her signed up ASAP.

You rarely find an amazing performer between jobs for very long. These people are so productive that you’ll find they get job offers practically every week even while they are working and so they have incredible choices in terms of job opportunities. This is one reason why moving fast when hiring is so important.

The other thing is that if you find a really productive person, they usually want to get the results right now, if not sooner! So if you leave them waiting, they will sometimes interpret this, either rightly or wrongly, as the company being indecisive and not results orientated or will have found a job in the meantime. Of course, some interview processes can take months especially for hiring executive positions, however, if the interview techniques are highly honed this need not be the case.

I’ve known companies which have long drawn out interview processes and usually they receive no more vital information than an expertly executed process that takes a month from job ad to induction. To get all the necessary information it does not need to take a long time and really all you want to know if this person will get you results. You will notice that people in the top of their field tend to get high quality results fast. I would like to emphasise that speed should not be put ahead of quality, however, when the process is done expertly and precisely you will find that you can get a high quality result in a relatively short time.

All the information you need to know about a candidate is:

1.  Ability to get good results in a viable volume (primary)

2.  Personality

• Fit to the position (You don’t  want a sales person who hates people)
• Ability to work in the group and fit with the culture
• How long they will stay with the company

3.  Motivation

• Are they motivated by money or results

4.  Knowledge

• Are they qualified and have the skill set to do the job (please note we are talking about ability to apply, not necessarily just some piece of paper which says “certified”)

You’ll notice that results are number 1. If you have read along with the previous articles you know there is no use hiring someone who gets along with the others and has the skills for the job if she doesn’t end up getting the result at the end of the day. If I hire a builder, I don’t care how much of a great and skilled person she is if she doesn’t build enough houses to make her viable (ie if I pay her 50k a year, I’m going to lose money if she only builds 50k worth of a house in that time). So the first thing you can do is screen out unproductive people.

Obviously having experience in the area you are hiring can be an advantage, and in some fields (such as a doctor, engineer etc) is vital and you can screen out the basic necessities pretty rapidly in a short phone call or looking at their resume. However, in many instances what you really want to do is reduce the pile of candidates to only those who are productive. At Performia we use an interview, which allows you to know with certainty whether this person is able to get results in 15 minutes or less (if you are interested I can get you a ticket to a free seminar which shows you how to do this). Once you have this information and can see whether the person is productive, it is just a matter of seeing their fit to the job and whether they have the skills to get the job done and this again can be a simple process which I can go into detail in a later blog.

So you can see that the entire process can be accurate while being relatively short. When you can get the information you need quickly and accurately, you won’t risk losing the right candidate because of acting too slowly and the entire hiring process itself can be shorter and more cost effective.

 

Alexander Bell
National Course Supervisor
Performia Australia
alex@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023

©2011 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Performia Australiais part of an international business that are experts on helping business owners and managers know how to get the best results from their staff as well as recruit the most productive people to business.

Build Your Team is a revolutionary course which allows business to get more productivity from their staff and hire people who will they know will be exceptional performers.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Recruiting [Part 6]

Having spoken to many HR Mangers, General Managers and Business Owners I have trained on how to hire really effective and valuable employees, I have noticed there are a lot of common ideas concerning what to look for in an interview. Unfortunately, a lot of these concepts are built upon preconceived notions that certain qualities are necessary in a candidate in order for them to be considered for hiring – and many of these notions are not based on fact or what really works. In the end who really cares if a person seems like a great guy, can sell himself or wears a nice tie if he doesn’t get soaring results that make the company and his department prosper and grow?

So I’ve created this seven part series on what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:

1.       Making the job ad too good to be true.
 
2.       Focussing on education, “experience” and other wastes of time.
 
3.       Listening but not looking.
 
4.       Let’s find someone just like me!
 
5.       Making personality a priority.
 
6.       Not reference checking.
 
7.       Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

THE SIXTH DEADLY SIN: Not reference checking.

There has been some recent debate concerning the necessity to reference check. I’ve heard people say that by the reference checking  stage you pretty much know all you need to know about the candidate and you have already made your decision  – the references just serve to further support this. Other people have mentioned that it is hard to know whether the reference given truly demonstrates the ability of the candidate. This can be for several reasons:

• The candidate got fired at her previous job for being hopeless and the employer simply agreed to give her a good reference.
•  They became friends during employment and the reference would say anything to help the candidate.
• The reference never worked with the candidate and is just a family member trying to help out.

So there are a lot of reasons to neglect the reference checking, however, my advice is DON’T.

References are essential to ensure that the candidate is accurate with all the data she has presented you. If you cannot verify the amazing things she told you in the interview, what is the point of listening to what she said? Some people, and I’ve found especially sales people, tend to use a bit of artistic licence on the truth. We know sales people embellish the truth, we want to find out how much they have embellished.

So how do we do it? First of all you need to have interviewed the person in a way that has given you raw, objective data. All jobs have a way of measuring results and this is the primary information you need about the candidate (if you want further data on how to interview this way, contact me and the team at Performia so we can send you a short video on how to do this and how it works).

Once you have raw, unaltered statistics you can easily verify these. Sure the reference can tell you all about how nice she was, how busy she was and how everyone loved her, however, all you care about is whether she could get a result and be viable. While people can bend the truth about subjective things like personality, they are far less likely to lie about objective data like statistics. So you need to get the reference to give you the exact measurable results that the candidate did, and this will verify their claims.

I interviewed this guy once and he told me he made $9mill of revenue in a year in his last job. Damn good results, amazing interview and seemed like a good guy for the job: he even told me how he was willing to work at a lower pay and be rewarded for his results. He mentioned that there were some issues with his previous employer and he’d prefer if I didn’t contact him, however, he did have a bunch of mobile numbers that he was happy for me to call. I Googled the previous employer’s number and with a hell of a lot of effort got a hold of the candidate’s previous boss. Turns out this candidate was a conman and didn’t make a dollar for the company. I did some more digging and found out he lied about several previous positions, stolen money from previous jobs and generally produced nothing and had several legal investigations being done on him. Despite this, one previous employer told me how much the staff loved him, how he worked in excess of 80 hours weeks etc, however, he could not give me any results: and the candidate was a sales manager!

Suffice to say we didn’t hire him. However, this example serves to highlight two points:

• Never call mobile numbers or numbers given to you by the candidate. Google them and get the details yourself.
• Get figures in the interview. Verify these figures in the reference check. Asking questions such as, “how did you measure X’s results?” and “do you have any record of this?” are useful questions.

I hope this gives some insight into the necessity of reference checking. This has been a long article yet has only touched the surface of how to reference check in a way which will work –if you want any more information please contact me. However, if you have got only one thing out of the blog, I hope it is this: reference check, it could save you a lot of money!

Alexander Bell
National Course Supervisor
Performia Australia
alex@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023

©2011 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Performia Australiais part of an international business that are experts on helping business owners and managers know how to get the best results from their staff as well as recruit the most productive people to business.

Build Your Team is a revolutionary course which allows business to get more productivity from their staff and hire people who will they know will be exceptional performers.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Recruiting [Part 4]

If you have checked out the previous blogs in the series, you will have seen I’ve been covering several habits that people have when they hire which may lead to a less than ideal outcome. Through observation and having trained many business owners and HR managers, I’ve noticed some common mistakes which can be easily avoided and have arranged them in the list that follows. We are now on to the fourth factor that should be avoided: finding someone just like you and this may not be necessary to Build Your Team.

Here is the rest of what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:

 1.       Making the job ad too good to be true.

 2.       Focussing on education, “experience” and other wastes of time.

 3.       Listening but not looking.

 4.       Let’s find someone just like me!

 5.       Making personality a priority.

 6.       Not reference checking.

 7.       Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

THE FOURTH DEADLY SIN: Let’s find someone just like me!

Whether it is subconsciously or consciously, one thing I’ve noticed is that people generally tend to hire people like themselves.  Now this is not necessarily a huge problem but it can cause a couple of issues:

1)      By focussing too much on peripheral factors (i.e. not their results) it can slow down the hiring process and waste time unnecessarily. A good employee comes in many forms.

2)      If the person who is doing the hiring is not productive, he won’t hire someone who is of any use in your company.

The first point is that a productive person comes in many forms and may be productive like you but not have all the personally traits, interests and employment history that you have but will still get results despite that. The problem is people tend to focus on these other factors rather than results. For instance, if you are a direct and loud person, you will be more attracted to direct and loud candidates but just because the candidate has these qualities doesn’t mean he will get the same results that you do. So you want to make sure you don’t hire someone that seems like you, you want to hire someone who can get results like you. To illustrate this, would you prefer to tolerate an annoying employee who gets $1 million of sales per week or have someone who produces zero but you really get along with? So first off look for productivity, then you can focus on all the factors and really evaluate whether these qualities are really needed for that role. Otherwise, you may spend months on finding the “perfect” person or even worse, have someone who looks perfect but is completely useless.

So let’s look at point 2. Since people hire people like themselves, the guy who is doing the hiring should be very productive. You might find that the head of your HR department is a really nice guy who everyone likes but has never produced a valuable impact on the business. He’ll unfortunately focus on hiring more very nice guys who aren’t results driven, which is not so good if he is trying to fill up the results motivated departments such as sales or management. So your Recruitment Manager should be a person who gets things done and makes a big contribution to the company around him so he is more likely to look for someone who gets results.

So moral of the story is look at results first, has the candidate made a noticeable impact in his previous roles? If he has, then you look at all the other factors. Also, if you are going to get someone else to do the hiring, make sure they are productive otherwise results will be the last thing on their mind.

Alexander Bell
National Course Supervisor
Performia Australia
alex@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023

©2011 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Performia Australiais part of an international business that are experts on helping business owners and managers know how to get the best results from their staff as well as recruit the most productive people to business.

Build Your Team is a revolutionary course which allows business to get more productivity from their staff and hire people who will they know will be exceptional performers.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Recruiting [Part 3]

Today is my third blog on what deadly mistakes you can make when hiring someone. Last week we looked at the issue of focussing on the wrong thing while hiring, which is a very common problem. This week we are going to look at something which usually takes a lot of practise to learn: how to avoid the meaningless filler people tell you in interviews and get to the important stuff that will show you whether you should hire a person. This is essential to be able to successfully Build Your Team.

So I’ve created this seven part series on what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:

 1.       Making the job ad too good to be true.

 2.       Focussing on education, “experience” and

other wastes of time.

 3.       Listening but not looking.

 4.       Let’s find someone just like me!

 5.       Making personality a priority.

 6.       Not reference checking.

 7.       Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

THE THIRD DEADLY SIN: Listening but not looking.

This is insanely important. In fact, once you have read this blog perhaps you will see how important it is to apply to managing staff and just about everything else in business.

What you want to find out is usually right there in front of you if you decided to really look. You want to look and find out FACTS not just hear how a person can sell themselves. A person can give you a lot of babble about how good he is, what he has done, how busy he was, and how important he was to the company. The problem is what does busy mean? What does important mean? And pretty soon you realise a lot of these things are based on opinion.

So when you are hiring someone don’t just hear all the “reasons” you should hire this person, but look for the results that the person has produced.  I’ll give you an example, you have two sales people: one is sitting on the computer playing with facebook and the other is running around, super busy, working twice the amount of hours, telling people about all the new potential clients he has got and constantly on the phone. Who would you prefer in your company?

The answer is you don’t have enough information. The guy on facebook might have closed a $3mill sale ever day for the last month and so takes most of the day off and the other guy could have not even got an appointment. On the other hand, the salesman on facebook might be trying to avoid work and the other guy is putting in extra effort to beat his weekly sales record.

So if you are going to hire a person, look for the facts you can verify, the sales the person has made or result he has produced. If those are good, sure you can listen to the rest of it but until you know the raw data on his production, I wouldn’t waste my time.

Alexander Bell
National Course Supervisor
Performia Australia
alex@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023

©2011 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Performia Australiais part of an international business that are experts on helping business owners and managers know how to get the best results from their staff as well as recruit the most productive people to business.

Build Your Team is a revolutionary course which allows business to get more productivity from their staff and hire people who will they know will be exceptional performers.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Recruiting [part 2]

Having spoken to many HR Mangers, General Managers and Business Owners I have trained on how to hire really effective and valuable employees, I have noticed there are a lot of common ideas concerning what to look for in an interview. Unfortunately, a lot of these concepts are built upon preconceived notions that certain qualities are necessary in a candidate in order for them to be considered for hiring – and many of these notions are not based on fact or what really works. In the end who really cares if a person seems like a great guy, can sell himself or wears a nice tie if he doesn’t get soaring results that make the company and his department prosper and grow?

So I’ve created this seven part series on what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:

1.       Making the job ad too good to be true.
 
2.       Focussing on education, “experience” and other wastes of time.
 
3.       Listening but not looking.
 
4.       Let’s find someone just like me!
 
5.       Making personality a priority.
 
6.       Not reference checking.
 
7.       Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.

THE SECOND DEADLY SIN: Focussing on education, “experience” and other wastes of time.

Simply, how many engineer graduates have you met who have the ability to build a bridge right after they finish their final exam? How many successful people credit their MBA for their success?

Don’t get me wrong, education and training is important – but only to the degree a person applies the knowledge and subsequently gets results from it. I know from experience, most of the most successful people I’ve come across didn’t even make it all the way through high school, let alone university. If you look at the top 100 most successful people in the country, you will see my observation is supported.  Ironically, they demand their employees to have a university degree!

The other credential is often experience, “We need a sales manager of 15 years experience!” Experience in what though? You might find someone who has spent the last 15 years putting the company into debt, or even that he relies on his staff to bring in the results and personally doesn’t contribute a thing. To make this point even more clear, who would you prefer: Richard Branson at age 21 with little experience or a guy who has been a nation sales manager for 20 years and only got mediocre results?

These aspects of a person’s job history may give some insight into their ability but it doesn’t prove that they will come into you company and increase sales by 50% in the next 6 months. The key to know this is the results a person has achieved in the past. You want to see what difference has this person made in their previous roles. By knowing that a person has successfully added substantial value in their previous roles, this is the best indicator to know whether they can produce in your company.

Picture this; we hired a telemarketer for a client a while back. He had never done telemarketing before, didn’t like change, no university education, was quiet, didn’t promote himself and seemed quiet nervous. Not the perfect fit for a telemarketer you would think. However, he previously managed a business and increased profit by 30% in a year – real results. This guy got into the company and in the 5 days got 10 appointments from cold calls, and these people were interested in making investments upwards of $500k.

The point is who cares about education, experience and looks. You can train a person to do a job but you can’t train someone to be productive. So sure, these factors may play a role in who you are going to hire but the first thing you need to be sure of is that they can produce results.

Part 3. Listening but not looking, next week

Alexander Bell

National Training Supervisor

Performia Australia

Performia Australia – Client Success – Franchisor

Our clients are getting so many benefits from our system.  This is an e-mail we received from a client who at first thought our reports were not so accurate.

 

I have always doubted Performia Australia as a tool that does not work and yet I kept being drawn to it.

I felt that it was me being tight with money and not trusting.

I gave a person an opportunity with employment in July 2009 to grow the business and mostly to supervise the other employee.

In September we had a reasonable month and on average was doing some 13 to 15 computers a week.

In October and November we started to decline to 3 and 5 computers a week for which is below the bottom line.

I called on Performia and asked for an evaluation of the employee.

The person that I employed in July, results came back with.

“Keep this person away from your customers.” She was also minus at the happiness area. After reading the results I asked her to move on and I took control of the Service Centre in early December.

Last week 22 computer repairs in. Wow one person mushrooming the business.

Cash Flow is moving again and most of all I am now a lot happier and the other employee is extremely happy.

I have had enough and yet if the person was put through Performia in the first place I would have saved a lot of money in paying wages for non-performance. Thousands upon thousands in wages compared to a small sum to find the right employee.

I introduced a new policy nobody gets into my organisation without first going through the Performia Australia Evaluation System.

 I am using Performia on the latest recruit coming in for the new year.

Gareth thank you and your team for being there for me. You guys are true champions.

 

Till next time.

Gareth Jekel.

CEO Performia Australia.

www.performia.net