Monday, 17 November 2008

Online job search

Web 2.0 has been refreshing. Everything is more precise and defined on the internet. Gone are the days when the internet was limited to a few million people around the world. Today it has literally invaded our lives. So if you are looking for jobs, then you know the best place to look for it. Yes, you got it right. The internet has several sales job sites that can find you the right job within minutes. The best part about it is that it’s easy and free.
Here are 5 reasons why you need an online sales job site in your career.
It will project your resume for sales jobs to hundreds of employers. Yes, everyday hundreds of employers browse through online job sites and the opportunities that await you are boundless.
It will tell you how many times your resume has been viewed and by whom. This gives you an idea about which employers are interested in hiring you.
It has millions of online sales jobs listed. All that you need to do is search. You can customize your search according to your preferences. If you prefer sales jobs in a particular geographical location or you have salary preferences, it can all be streamlined in the search.
Most websites will give you free tips on improving your CV. Using these tips, you will not only be able to improve your CV but also be able to update it any time you wish to.
Lastly, there are no charges involved. It’s all free of cost. So you have nothing to lose. But a whole new life to gain. So stop procrastinating and log on to an online sales job site now.
Visit www.salesrecruitmentjobsite.com for a sales career

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Are You Suited For Sales Manager Jobs?

Have you ever considered starting a career in sales?
Does a sales job entice you? Well, then you need to know what is expected off you in jobs like these so that you can decide whether you are right for the job.
You will be starting off in the lower level or as a field sales person. Depending on your performance in these levels, you will then be ascending to middle and higher management positions.
As a sales manager, you will be the sole point of contact for several sales personnel who will work in the field under you. Your job will include motivating them to meet their daily, quarterly as well as monthly bottom line.
Besides this, your day will comprise of numerous phone calls, meetings and sessions on new company policies and procedures.
Specialized jobs
If you are looking to enter the ever so lucrative world of sales, then you can very choose a specialized field best suited for your vocation or field of expertise.
If you are a graduate with technical experience or expertise in information technology, then you can choose either telecommunication or IT related sales jobs.
If fine arts are your chosen field, then you can get into media related or publishing firms as sales managers.
If you are a strong sales manager then you can work wonders with these jobs as profit margins are tight in companies like these.
Finding the right jobs
Now that you know what is expected of you and what you can expect of these jobs, the next part is to find the best sales manager job. This is the easiest part of the lot.
All that you need to do is put up your resume in online job portals and you will be contacted by potential employers within no time at all. You will also get loads of resume enhancing tips on these websites.

Winning Sales Person

Sales Persons with a positive winning attitude sales more that a sales persons with a loosing attitude. It has been seen sales people who are not that technically sound or technology savvy can sell technology product if they are confident about themselves. A positive and a winning attitude are more important than to be very technical.
Sales persons with winning attitude will always have presence of mind to win the sales; it's like playing a game with the prospect. He is there with the prospect not only to play but also to win the game, to sale his product. In my practical days of selling I have seen that, there are sales guys who really have tremendous energy by which they can energies and convince a customer to buy his product or services. Any sales persons job is to motivate his customers to buy his product or services. Sales Mangers and Supervisors must make sure that his sales personnel are energized.
Even in the case of follow ups a positive energized sales person can close deals from his follow up accounts by constantly harping on the benefits of his product or services to his prospect. Sales personnel's with winning attitude can easily overcome sales objection, they always highlight the positive side of the products and services, without fearing of loosing the sale. He himself is a problem solver in his own territories and can take decisions. Some times he advocates for his prospects to his internal management. Their body language are positive, wining attitude helps them to go for a trial close and make a final close without nervousness.
The winning attitude can help him to generate confidence in the mind of his prospects and the trust he creates like a friend philosopher and guide to his prospects that enables him to close the deal. Last but not the least the winning attitude can only happen if he is confident about the product and about the product he sales. The trust he generates to himself and also to his prospects, which in turn, he wins more sales game.

Technical Staff: Protect Your Business

If you're not really careful with how you hire the expert technical staff on your payroll, you could end up training and nurturing a future competitor. In this article, you'll learn how to minimize your risk.
Consider this example:
Your firm (ABC Consulting) hires a technical person and pays for their Microsoft, Cisco, or Citrix training. This person gets really skilled and get lots of great field experience.
Now, one day the employee wakes up says, “You know what? I don't think I want to work for ABC Consulting anymore. I'm going to start my own consulting company out of my spare bedroom. And take 'my' clients with me.”
Be Prepared for Potential Disasters
That's one reason you shouldn't rely on just one salesperson or just one technical person to carry the entire weight of your company. Figure out a way to be more actively involved in the sales process and service delivery process. Even if you're not the main person who does the work all the time and even if you don't have the strongest skills, having some finger in the pie will be very important for keeping your prized client accounts loyal and healthy.
Don't Forget To Have Technical Staff Sign Contracts
Make sure that you've covered your bases by having technical staff sign documents such as non-compete clauses and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) when you hire people (talk with your attorney about these). Keep your eyes open and have a plan so that you can deal with these issues before they become business crises.

Sales Management

Do your salespeople have unlimited access to your company's technical resources? Do they take technical experts with them to first meetings with prospects? Does your management team make CONSCIOUS DECISIONS to allocate technical resources to opportunities, or do salespeople make those decisions on their own?
How often does this happen?
An excited salesperson contacts his or her sales manager and alerts them to a new opportunity. The sales manager assigns a technical expert to visit the prospect with the salesperson. The salesperson and the technical expert drive (or fly) to the prospect's location and spend days or weeks analyzing the prospect's situation. They perform product demonstrations and evaluations. Eventually they prepare a detailed proposal and deliver it to the prospect.
Unfortunately, the deal never closes...
The opportunity languishes in the salesperson's pipeline for many months and is eventually deleted. Even more unfortunate, all of the time and money your company invested to pursue the opportunity (salesperson and technical expert salaries, travel and entertainment expenses, product demonstration and evaluation costs, proposal preparation costs, etc.) was COMPLETELY WASTED.If your want to minimize wasted technical resources, hold your salespeople accountable for collecting specific information PRIOR to allocating expensive technical experts to assist them with their opportunities. At minimum this should include requiring your salespeople to provide reasonably detailed answers to the following questions:
What BUSINESS PROBLEMS does the prospect have?
What is the IMPACT of these business problems on the prospect's business?
Can the impact of the business problems be QUANTIFIED?
How does the quantified impact COMPARE to the (estimated) cost of solving the business problems?
Is this quantified impact substantial enough to justify the PROSPECT investing time and resources to pursue a sales cycle?
Is the prospect WORTHY of time and resource investments by your company to pursue a sales cycle? For example:
Are they CREDIT WORTHY?
Do they have a BUDGET they can allocate to solving the business problems?
Have all key DECISION MAKERS and INFLUENCERS been identified?
Has the INFORMATION the decision makers need to have to enable them to make a buying decision been identified?
Does the prospect TAKE PROPOSALS OUT TO BID? If they do, what benefit will your company receive for designing a solution?
Armed with this information, you will be prepared to make CONSCIOUS resource allocation decisions.
This will enable you to focus your expensive technical resources on QUALIFIED opportunities, maximizing your company's return on time and resources invested. Plus, rather than acting as a crutch to help your salespeople perform initial opportunity qualification, your technical experts will be able to focus on working with prospect companies' technical experts to troubleshoot business problems, determine root causes, and identify potential solutions.
Other benefits can include reduced product and service training costs and increased size and quality of your company's sales opportunity pipeline
How? If your salespeople become experts in FINDING and QUALIFYING opportunities, as well as LEVERAGING EXPERT RESOURCES to help them convert opportunities into sales, it will take less time for them to learn what they need to know to prospect effectively. Plus, if they focus the bulk of their time on finding and qualifying opportunities, they will source more qualified opportunities!
In summary, if your want to maximize your company's return on technical resource investments, hold your salespeople ACCOUNTABLE for collecting specific information PRIOR to allocating expensive technical experts to assist them with opportunities. Then, make CONSCIOUS technical resource allocation decisions. You should see immediate and significant improvements in your sales expense and sales opportunity close rates!

Technical Writing

Technical writing calls for an understanding of certain technical tools and effective written communication. Its main purpose is to convey technical information in the simplest form to a target audience. You do not require any special training or experience to start a career as a technical writer.
To become a technical writer, you need to have the desire to work in a challenging technical field. You do not need to be a technical person to succeed in this field - you just need to understand the importance of documenting technical work in a user-friendly manner.
Areas of Work
Work is available in a number of fields. They are in demand in almost every field of work, especially the software and hardware industries. They are also required in the field of chemistry, robotics, consumer electronics, biotechnology industry and aerospace industries.
The main task of a technical writer is to translate technical information into an accurate, readable, understandable and accessible form. Some of the major areas of work include proposals, sales promotions, catalogs and instruction and assembly manuals. Technical writing also involves rewriting various design specifications, managing chart preparation, diagrams and illustrations and planning, preparing and editing technical material.
It is more about explaining complicated technical subjects and not developing creative literature. Though it is a very rewarding field, you need you need to understand the technology thoroughly. In a world of rapid technological advancements, technical writers need to work independently, as engineers and programmers may not be available every time to explain each step. The ability to understand technology on your own is considered an advantage.
Technical writers need to determine the target audience for a particular project to write in a simple, non-technical manner. It calls for a fair familiarity with the project at hand. As a technical writer needs to handle different types of audience, it is essential to be able to write difficult technical matter in simple English. For example, if a technical writer writes about a how-to play a DVD player, it needs to be able to be understood by a user as well as a DVD technician, who has advanced knowledge about the device.
Technical Writing Courses
Technical writing courses mainly focus on documenting specifications and user manuals for computer software. They also provide instruction on writing manuals on technology like kitchen appliances, vacuum systems, medical device manuals, construction equipment and more. Therefore, it is important for you to decide on the area that you are interested in and evaluate technical writing courses. It will help you understand the prerequisites of working as a technical writer in a particular field.
A technical writing course enables you to understand, organize and present technical aspects in a polished form of documentation. There are a number of online technical writing courses. There are also many universities that offer technical writing courses through accredited online programs.

Hiring a technical salesperson

A question that has caused difficulty for many companies which need to recruit a technical sales representative is knowing which is the better choice, a candidate with technical qualifications but little sales experience or an experienced sales person without knowledge of your technical or scientific product.
There is not one answer, although if there’s doubt, I’d take a guy who can prove to you that he has produced good sales results elsewhere.
Some environments do require sophisticated knowledge of a specialised area of science. For example, one of my clients is a supplier of lasers to university research departments. The technical sales staff there have to interface with Heads of Department - professors. Such academics tend to be allergic to sales people, they always screen what you say for flaws. If they spot one, it’s game over. So for such a position, you need someone with the right degree or doctorate who has no trouble with that level of techie-talk
But for more normal situations, the experienced sales person is a better choice even if he or she lacks knowledge of your special field. With the motivation that a good salesperson brings to the job, it doesn’t take long to pick up the relevant specialized knowledge. The questions customers ask are often the same, so after a while you learn good answers.
The reason that the scientific/analytical mind is not much good at sales is because this type of person is not particularly interested in other people, is not commercially minded or a self-starter and may lack the confidence to ask for an order or deal effectively with objections.
Many companies select people for their professional qualifications and then put them into selling even if they lack good interpersonal ability. Although technical understanding is valuable, in selling it is far more important to have good people skills and commercial acumen. Since this and the other key attributes can only be taught slowly, if at all, choosing the right personality type is more important.
To see a unique source of information on how to hire a good technical salesperson click here.
Robert Seviour helps engineering and technical organizations develop greater sales skills. He is a consultant and speaker who has presented 600 training events across 9 countries.