E-commerce forces retailers to elbow into the ever-steepening competition for tech talent.

Before the end of 2017 89,000 Americans were laid off from merchandise stores. That’s more people than the coal industry employs in the entire US. If you look to LinkedIn you’ll see that the number of profiles identified as retail associates shrunk from almost 200,000 in 2013 to just under 116,000 in 2017, and you may be able to guess why. It’s e-commerce: The wonderful world of shopping at home, watching Netflix in your pajamas.

Cyber retail holds great appeal for the busy, the lazy, and the deal-seeker alike, but contrary to the perception of online anonymous automation, online shopping is not an inhuman experience, you just don’t see them. In fact, the Amazons of the world are only made possible by oodles of people working behind the scenes, to make sure when you press order, it actually arrives on your doorstep. So it only makes sense that this dip in sales associates means a push for another type of talent: software engineers.

That’s right, the retail industry is now seeking invisible architects to construct your retail experience. So don’t forget, from homepage to confirmation email, the e-shopping experience is still human assisted, only you don’t have to be intimidated by a super chic sales clerk.

However, IRL associates (cool or not) haven’t disappeared entirely – though 2017 was a record year for retail closures with 7,000 stores boarded up in the US alone –  sales is still the number one function in retail, at 29 percent, followed by operations at 14 percent, and engineering/IT at 9 percent.

Though 29 percent may seem like a respectable chunk of the jobs to be had, it’s down from 32 percent in 2013, and the on-the-ground workers are feeling the earth get shaky beneath their feet. One former retail associate who was recently laid off from Saks Fifth Avenue related to the New York Times that she is leaving the industry entirely.

“I really like helping customers create a new style,” the 27-year-old relayed, who was once paid $16 an hour. “But there is no job security anymore.”

Software developers, on the other hand, have popped up from the eighth most popular retail title in 2013, up to third in 2017, overleaping (in its growth from seven to nine percent of retail jobs) both “marketing specialist” and “operations specialist”. And while still under a third of the sales fraction, the need for these programmers will grow as it has in the last four years, given that e-commerce has gone from 3.5 percent of retails sales to 11.9 percent in the past decade, and twice as many online retailers with 100 employees or more have gone to market than traditional brick and mortar between 2011 and 2015.

We are still a bit sad about #toysrus closing, am I right ? pic.twitter.com/ftZscOY2Jf

— Chocolate Fudge (@tchocolatefudge) July 10, 2018

Interestingly, it seems that engineering and sales demands have an inverse relationship in retail, where 25 percent online retail functions are tech or IT, and 35 percent of brick and mortar functions are sales, while operations and marketing stay consistent at 14 percent and 6 percent respectively, whether online or in store.

So what does this mean for recruiting? Number one, the competition for tech talent will only grow fiercer. Number two, retailers are going to have to change their recruitment strategy to focus more on employer branding and candidate experience to attract these sought-after workers. Even Walmart has started its first ever employer-branding campaign, in the form of tuition benefits for one of three colleges that offer supply chain management courses.

Other retailers may want to take notes, as Walmart’s course of action is not without reason. Sales associates are most likely to leave their career path for either admin or customer service roles, if not for more schooling. So a tuition benefit covers both, keeping employees in the fold, and hopefully equipping them with more useful skills for the future – all the while injecting them with a healthy dose of company loyalty. Subsidised education may the ace in the sleeve that retail needs in order to ensure it has the talent to survive. The demand is there, they just have to deliver.

As the global director of sales development for SmartRecruiters, Taft Love knew processes would have to transform to keep pace with the dynamic recruiting industry. Here’s how he did it.

(Article in partnership with outreach.io)

In the beginning of 2017, we at SmartRecruiters launched our first, organized, outbound prospecting SDR (sales development representative) program, and by the end of the year, we’d created over $2M in qualified outbound pipeline.

Our approach to prospecting was to focus on speed and volume. We went a mile wide and an inch deep. And while this proved a decent way start, it eventually proved inefficient.

As SmartRecruiters salespeople, we sell to enterprise companies, therefore our high-volume approach suffered twofold:

First, SDRs spent too much of their time cleaning data and researching contacts. Every hour spent doing this too away an hour of selling. Second, prospecting into so many companies meant we couldn’t nurture any one company in a meaningful way. If I’m honest, we owed most progress to luck rather than strategy.

The answer? Project Assembly Line: the goal of which was to limit all non-selling tasks for SDRs, who would then be able to focus on talking to prospects and nurturing accounts, the things they do best, the things that make money for the company.

After outsourcing non-selling tasks to faster and less costly teams, SDRs were left with three high-value activities: Choosing target accounts, talking to prospects, and nurturing high-value accounts.

Simple, right? Yet when I tell other sales leaders about this, their usual but surprising response is, “great, wonderful, it all sounds good. But how do I do it?”

Building your own assembly line to maximize your SDR program starts by choosing, and training researchers.These are the people that will handle all the manual tasks you want to outsource so you can focus on the three tasks above. While they take care of that, you also prepare your CRM so it automates, and scales the process of assigning research. Just by doing that, we’ve tripled the contacts we activate every day.

Let’s go into it in a bit more detail.

Step 1 – Find Researchers

Offloading research from your SDRs starts with designating tasks.I split them into two categories: basic and advanced research. Advanced is what requires business acumen, native-level English, or any other skills that can’t be taught quickly, such as finding and collating business insights about a certain account. Basic research is everything besides what I’ve just mentioned. Everything from finding correct email addresses to confirming a company’s location, phone number, etc.

Before you hire anyone, think through the research process they will undertake, the steps involved, and the tools they would need  to do it. Once you’re ready, these are the tools I’ve used:

1. Your Own Workplace – Are there fellow employees who want to break into sales? As a first step, a place on the assembly line team could be a pipeline into SDR for people in support, or even interns.
2. Universities – Our SDR team went to Gonzaga University to seek out our first crop of researchers. One of our original research interns now works in operations full time, managing all of our assembly-line research.
3. Upwork – Upwork (formerly Odesk) is still my number-one stop online for finding freelance researchers.
4. Overseas Managed Outsourcing – Our assembly line project is still growing, and we’re finding it difficult to scale basic research, while still maintaining quality and speed. We recently chose a firm in India to handle over half our needs for basic research.

Step 2 – Prepare Your CRM

So you found an intern and a couple of contractors on Upwork. Great. You created documentation, brought them on and they’re ready to start working. Next, you make sure tasks are assigned to researchers using a process that’s easy to both track and manage.

At SmartRecruiters, we call this step “Account Enrichment”. An SDR chooses an account, waits a few days, and when ready, is sent an alert letting them know that the account has all the information they need to start prospecting. By “enriched”, we mean at all data (location, current ATS, etc.) has been checked, appended, and fresh business insights have been provided.

Updating, adding or tweaking information to your CRM at scale is fraught if you’re not attentive. Making sure your assembly line runs smoothly requires leaning on your CRM. We used ours to track every account through all assembly line steps and prioritize certain accounts. This resulted in a streamlined process, and our researchers are now guided through a standardized process for such accounts.

Step 3 – Scale up with Outreach

All of what we’ve just discussed is worthless if you don’t use the saved time and resources wisely. This is where Outreach comes in, and we use for three things:

First, we want to multiply the output of each SDR, and we do that by automating several manual tasks and building sequences to help teams call and email prospects at predetermined intervals. Before adding Outreach to our Assembly Line, sending 100 personalized emails and making 100 calls a day was the stuff of pipe dreams. Now we don’t even think it’s much of a big deal.

Using Outreach has enabled us to double the accounts and tripled the contacts we “activate”, daily, and we’re still saving time compared to our old process. That time saved means hands-on engagements like social selling and nurturing opportunities.

Next, we need to understand the data coming back from all that email and phone automation. Outreach’s A/B testing features allow us to test every piece of an email. Native reporting lets us know which sequences lead to the most replies from a potential prospect. Outreach’s powerful Salesforce integration pulls all that data into Salesforce, where we can track the results of all our campaigns through the entire funnel.

Lots of teams talk about “response rates” on emails and campaigns. That’s not good enough for us. By combining Outreach and Salesforce we can answer questions like:

• Which activity type leads to the most meetings and pipeline?
• How many activities, on average, does it take to set a meeting?
• How many meetings set with Outreach does it take to reach $1M in the pipeline?
• How many days, on average, does it take to set a meeting with a cold account?

Here’s a view of how we’re reporting on our success metrics:

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you need to get creative to stand out. Scaling outbound prospecting efforts will involve some growing pains, but Outreach’s power and flexibility let us get creative with them.

Here’s my favorite example:

Have you ever received a great cold email from a sales rep, sent it on to a relevant colleague, only to learn they got the same one from six other people? We have, so we got creative with Outreach to get around this.

We created three versions of every outbound sequence, each with a slightly different first email, and on a delay. Using a Salesforce formula field and an Outreach trigger, we assign each prospect to one of the three sequences randomly. This, combined with an of-beat personalization means the chance a decision-maker will forward the same email more than once a day is nil.

Despite our success, there are always learnings. For us, there were three big ones:

1. Create Custom Profiles and Roles: Doing this for your research team is important to keep them focused on only what they need to see, and restrict external contractors’ access to only the objects needed to update.
2. Make it Your Own: It’s ok if the process outlined above don’t fit your sales process exactly. This is just a blueprint to be tweaked to what works for you. At SmartRecruiters, the process is always evolving. Just make sure you document the customized process so new stakeholders can easily get on board.

Ask for Help: If you have some experience in sales operations, this probably feels like a quick project. If you’re new to Salesforce, it may freak you out. But don’t worry, it’s not as complex as it sounds. Grab a pal who knows what they’re doing with ops – or your Outreach CSM – and get to work.

I recently made a decision and a career choice, which some considered to be bold. I made a decision to join SmartRecruiters as their Chief Sales Officer. So why did I join? There are really 3 primary reasons:

1. The People
2. The Product
3. The Market Opportunity

People: This is a very talented and incredible team from the top down, with a crystal clear vision and a well defined set of values that everyone in the company rallies behind. Each of the Leaders of SmartRecruiters previously built and scaled businesses into multi-million and multi-billion dollar valuations.  I’ve had the good fortune to be part of some amazing technology growth stories and they always start with great teams of people.  We have that here.

Product: We all know that recruiting is competitive and with any competition there are winners and losers.  With the current pace of technical disruption in the market you cannot afford to be unsuccessful in your hiring. The legacy applicant tracking system was never designed to make recruiting better or achieve any level of hiring success.  SmartRecruiters has taken a completely re-imagined view of recruiting in creating the Hiring Success Platform.  One look at it and you’re blown away by how simple it is to use yet so powerful as an enterprise class recruiting platform.

Market Opportunity: There is no doubt in my mind that the next $1B+ company in the Human Capital Management category will be in the recruiting space.  There’s a reason investors are chasing so many deals in the talent acquisition technology segment. SmartRecruiters President and COO Brett Queener spent the last 10 years growing salesforce.com.  When I met him and Jerome (CEO) we all agreed that there are so many similarities in the current ATS market and the CRM market that Salesforce so successfully disrupted during his tenure. There is absolutely no question that SmartRecruiters represents the next generation of recruiting application and that’s something every buyer in this space is looking for.

Let me close by saying the amount of disconnect between what a successful recruiter needs vs. what they are forced to use in an applicant tracking system couldn’t be bigger. And as talent acquisition’s profile in the enterprise has been elevated over the past 10 years a majority of companies have added bolt on solutions to their ATS in an attempt to meet critical business needs. Examples include solutions for sourcing (CRM), job distribution, mobile candidate interfaces, scheduling, social employee referrals, database search functionality, and the list goes on and on. While there are so many issues with this approach, the biggest fundamental challenge is that the ATS was never really engineered to deliver any amount of success in recruiting.

At SmartRecruiters, we’ve built a Hiring Success Platform that encompasses all of these things plus a lot more, on a single, unified talent acquisition platform that can scale to meet the demands of the largest of employers throughout the world.

If you are ready to stop tracking applicants and start collaborating enterprise-wide to hire great people, I invite you take a look at SmartRecruiters. It might be one of the best decisions you make this year.

Wishing you a successful 2015!

Just think about the typical sales person that you interact with, either during the course of your work day or at home. They seem to be very persistent in their approach and don’t take no for an answer. Off hand many say a sales person needs to be aggressive, a self-motivator, persistent, hard-working and experienced. But is that what makes a good sales person and how do you determine what does?

Big data allows the smart people of this world to assess candidate in all kinds of  new ways; assessments range from personality to psychometric to aptitude to industry specific skills, and much more. Wouldn’t you know it – I’ve found some surprising information about hiring sales people that you may find useful in your search.

Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte did some impressive work on what does and does not drive sales success. At a large service provider, Bersin helped increase sales by $4.5 million within six months after an analysis of turnover, sales performance and productivity. Interestingly, they found that the sales person’s type of degree earned, university grades and references “did not matter” to sales success.

How to Hire a Sales Person

Bersin found that these 6 most common criteria of high performing sales people were:

1. No typos or grammatical errors on their resume.

2. Obtained a college degree.  (The actual degree did not matter.)

3. Experience selling real-estate or autos.

4. Demonstrated success making quota and achieving success.

5. Able to perform under “vague instructions” (tested through assessment and interviews)

6. Excellent at multi-tasking and following up on tasks.

And, I’ve learned from Sue Barrett’s Barrett Sales Blog, who’s been using assessment tools for several years that in addition to the 6 key criteria above, she adds that a sales person should also have the following.

1. Ability to Build Relationships

2. Strong Reasoning Skills

Notice the sales person stereotypes that are missing from these lists: aggressive, a self- motivator, fast talker, persistent or even have a sales certification.

When hiring a sales person resist the urge to hire based on gut feelings, some sales people can be fast and slick talkers, they say things like, “I can sell snow to an eskimo.” Cute but means nothing.

Consider that new market trends and customer values have changed.  We don’t sell items the same way we sold them 15-20 years ago, we don’t even use currency the same way either. Thanks to technology we have bigger networks, bigger audiences, and a good sales person figures out ways to use websites, social media, apps and other technology to acquire and nuture more customers and increase sales.

While these market wide findings of what makes a great sales person are a bit surprising, always remember that you are hiring for your company. Make sure to take into consideration your product/s, target market, and geographical location because what you need is someone who can relate to your diverse customer base.

Chris Fields is an HR professional and leadership guy who blogs and dispenses great (not just good) advice at Cost of Work. Connect with Chris via email at chris@costofwork.com.

To find great sales people post job openings to SalesGravy, SalesHead, and LinkedIn through SmartRecruiters – everything you need to source talent, manage candidates, and make the right hires.

It’s in their DNA. It can’t be taught with a book or through a weekend seminar. It’s just there, or it’s not. It’s what separates a good salesperson, from a great one. If you’re looking to hire the best of the best, you have to know what to look for, and you have to know how to separate the hunter from the farmer.

There are a few tell tale signs to look for in your candidates. Now don’t get me wrong, your company won’t suffer with good salespeople – in fact you may hit targets and do just fine. But, you’ll start seeing the difference and hit levels you may have not thought possible if you hire GREAT salespeople.

When interviewing a salesperson, the most important thing to keep your eye out for is does this person genuinely like people; are they a people person? Do they smile honestly, do they ask questions, make eye contact, have open body language. Do they enjoy making friends from strangers – and are they likeable in return?

You can generally get a sense for that and if they have it, it’s a good sign. If they’re the quiet introverted type, they may be smart and capable – but they’ll be doing themselves and their customers a disservice by not covering this major base of a personality trait.

Now, let’s dig a bit deeper. This is where home run champs get separated from the bunters. Beyond the initial questions they ask to spark a conversation with a prospect like “What do you do, how’s business, how old is the company, etc…?”

A GREAT salesperson will know how to foray these questions into finding out what the prospect is passionate about, what drives them. Do they find out what prospects do on weekends, are they married, kids, what books do they read, favorite sports teams, etc…

When a salesperson gets that info, that’s something very powerful, it makes the prospect vulnerable. They prospective customer will have the impression that this person cares about me. If they’ve done a good job with that, (especially if it’s genuine on behalf of the salesperson) – then the sale is already done. If they can explain the product/service well, it’s just a bonus at that point.

So in a nutshell, this is what makes someone great vs. just good – now it’s up to you to ask them the right questions, get a good read on their personality and find out if they demonstrate these traits. What questions do they ask you during the interview? Do you feel like they really like YOU? Know YOU? Then you might just have a great sales candidate in front of you.

Ramy Assaf is the Digital Marketing Developer at Laimoon.com, the fresh way to find jobs in sales & marketing. Post a Job!

Photo Credit Glengarry Glen Ross / Vendere Partners.