Steve Chriest

According to a recent survey conducted by Robert Half International, bad managers get the blame for most defections at U.S. companies; even though senior executives profess that employee retention is their No. 1 concern.

When polled by Robert Half International, senior executives cited unhappiness with management as the primary reason for losing top performing employees. These same managers listed limited opportunities for advancement and lack of recognition as the next most important reasons for the defection of top performers.

Surprisingly, inadequate salary was cited by only 13 percent of the executives as a prime reason for the exit of execptional employees.

There are only so many superstars available to all departments of U.S. companies. In the selling organization, defection of sales superstars should be particularly worrisome for senior executives. Like all superstars, there aren’t enough top performing sales professionals to go around, and they are...

Anyone who has managed salespeople has made hiring mistakes. At one time or another all of us have found ourselves unable to resist hiring a candidate who seemed to be a sales superstar, even though our intuition made us uneasy or something in their story just didn't jibe with reality.

Today, more than at any time in the last 80 years, business success will depend on getting the right people on the sales team and making sure they are doing jobs that best use their innate talents.

Avoid the Myth of the "Sales Personality"

When managers want to hire sales superstars, they tend to hire people with stereotypical sales personalities—people who are outgoing, talkative, personable and gregarious. And because sales managers, for a host of reasons, prefer this personality type for their teams, they convince themselves that customers will prefer them as well.

This so-called "sales personality" is a myth. Belief in this myth may be as responsible for...

In business, the Golden Rule has often been interpreted as “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Today, in this unprecedented economic environment, it’s the CFO in most organizations who hovers over corporate gold reserves and who helps write the rules for doling out the gold bars.

If sales professionals aren’t acutely aware of a new economic decision maker who is lurking behind most B2B purchasing decisions, they may be missing opportunities to make sales they are now losing.

The unseen economic decision maker in many purchasing decisions today is the CFO, and according to a recent survey by Duke University, most CFOs are worried, if not downright depressed by the prospects for the economy and for their companies in the foreseeable future.

In the Duke University survey, CFOs in the U.S. and around the world responded with unprecedented pessimism about the expected performance of their firms in 2009. Not only did most of the respondents say that they will cut...

If you knew that between fifteen and forty percent of your customers took cash out of your pocket, would you continue selling to them? It’s no small wonder that until now more senior executives haven’t paid closer attention to targeting profitable customers and eliminating the unprofitable ones. The current economic environment almost guarantees that CEOs and CFOs will focus on customer profitability in the immediate future.

Several studies conducted by the Harvard Business School and top-flight consulting firms prove that nearly all companies have customers that cost them cash out-of-pocket. In fact, it is clear that oftentimes 15% to 20% of a company’s customers subsidize its unprofitable customers and contribute most of the company’s net profit. So, why is this allowed to happen?

As senior managers respond to pressures to increase profitability and market share, they often view increased sales as the most efficient way to improve the bottom line and expand their...