Over the past few years we’ve had a number of recruiters and staffing firms visit oPASS as sponsors, and we always give them a few minutes to make their pitch. I don’t envy them the task, they get 5-10 minutes to talk to a crowd that is mildly receptive, sitting through the presentation to get to the good stuff – pizza and tech talk. Few stay for the entire meeting because to a non-technical person (and most recruiters are) it’s just not very exciting – we’d be no more excited about sitting through a sales meeting!
Their first goal is a good one, put their name in the heads of the audience so the next time (maybe right then) they need a recruiter…bam! Easy enough to do, and supplement with some pens and business cards. Where I think they struggle is in two related areas; their sales pitch and their presentation skills.
Starting with the latter, talking to a crowd just isn’t easy. Talking to a crowd while sort of delivering a sales pitch is, I would say, harder. But it’s 10 minutes or less, and I’m usually not surprised to hear a rambling and not really compelling presentation. Not all their fault, they are doing what they’ve been asked to do, or what seems like is the right thing to do as far as marketing, but it’s not the most reassuring thing to a potential customer to see someone struggle through 10 minutes about their business. The lesson for them – and us, is that if we’re selling something, or giving any type of presentation, it’s worth practicing. I wish that was some brand new idea!
The sales pitch usually focuses on the idea that they are better than their competitors. Now I like someone that believes in their products and services and is proud of their company, anything less…well, that’s not going to drive me to them for business. But, the hard part is, they all say they are the best. Again, I get that, it’s pride of company, but to a somewhat cynical crowd (us), show us the money!
I’m not exactly the king of marketing myself, and really all companies have the same dilemma. It’s rare that one company is light years better than another, more often it’s the little things that drive sales and brand loyalty. But…it’s not bad to give your potential customers some real reasons to keep you in mind. I think if I were in the staffing business speaking to a SQL group, I’d want to tailor my pitch:
The hint: The first bullet point is the key, it shows specific market knowledge and competency. I think not all are those good points to tell potential candidates, I think they are all questions potential candidates should be asking their recruiter. Just because someone hasn’t placed any SQL Server positions doesn’t mean they (and their company) aren’t good, but it’s not what we’d hope to hear either.
It’s probably a key stereotype of our business that the sales team doesn’t really get along with those in operations/production. Sales teams seem to insist on selling features and timelines without asking if it’s even close to possible, and operations wants to solve problems elegantly without regard to the realities of paying the bills. Now I know it’s a generalization, that’s what stereotypes are after all, but I find it to be true more often than not, to varying degrees.
Sales people are not literal people. When they say “100%” they rarely mean 100%, it’s more like 95% from 8-5 pm. They live to make deals. Selling something and being well paid for it is what drives them. Much of their behavior is driven by a compensation plan that you don’t see, and you have to to think about that to make sense of their behavior. If you were paid solely on the number of lines of code you wrote, I wager not only would that become your predominant focus, you’d find creative ways to generate code. As much as we may not like their behavior at times, realize that most of it is quietly endorsed by the big boss, the one that built the compensation plan.
On the other side, operations people – us – are literal people. We try to do exactly what is asked, we like solving problems, and we really really fear failing to deliver, whether it be the 97th report of the year or a huge data migration. We tend to believe that if we fail bad thing will happen. When sales promises things that we don’t have, we end up volunteering (or being forced) to work a lot of extra hours to deliver the goods, and rarely get a bonus for that extra effort. We also tend to dislike product marketing that focuses on features that are just for show or don’t exist yet and we don’t like the idea of sales people much beyond the clerk at Wal-Mart. If we sold something, our pitch would be something like “I’m selling this product for x dollars, would you like to buy it?”. Some more thoughts:
I don’t know if it’s genetic or a result of how you were raised or how you spent your early adult years, but there is clearly a difference between the people that build and the people that sell.
I don’t have any magic answers either. I think it’s obvious that at times we’re going to have to push hard to deliver a feature to land a customer, and that at times sales is going to have to be told to back off because they are promising things that cannot be delivered. I think most of the tension happens due to poor leadership:
In general if it a bridge it to be built, it’s from operations to sales. Over time you learn that by building that relationship – something they understand – you have a chance to provide some insight and feedback about the sales cycle in an unofficial way. Sales people aren’t evil or dumb. If they can make money and make it easier for you, they will. But if it’s a choice of making money or making it easier for you, they go for the money. It’s human and real, they work to support family just like we do.
Too cynical? Tell me about your experiences with sales.
I saw this post by Neil Davidson about sales people being different that discusses how sales people are compensated and why he is moving to a salary model instead of commission. I’ve never been a sales person, but I’ve had the interesting time of working with them at a mid sized company as well as having a sales person of our own – yes, interesting is the word!
At the mid sized company the compensation plan for sales people changed each year. Basically they were able to “draw” against earnings to provide them with a reasonably stable revenue stream, and they would get x percent of sales. If they went long enough without selling they’d be let go and the company would be out whatever draw had not be recouped to date. It’s the percentage of things piece that was a pain. After you work with anyone that is paid commission only for about 15 minutes you’ll understand that they will only do things that lead to revenue. Anything else is either postponed or just not done, including customer service that doesn’t benefit them. That leads the company to tweak the plan to encourage various behaviors; finding new clients, growing existing clients, increasing the bill rate, etc. Where I worked it wasn’t just a one time sale, it was a relationship that could easily continue 10 years or more, so there was a phase out of commission. Sales person might get 5% of sales the first year, then 4%, then 3%, then it would be become a “house” account and a sales assistant would do all except the most important conversations with the client.
As you might imagine the formula was a little more complex than that, and I was lucky enough to have one developer who owned that process each year, it could easily take 45 days as they came up with a new formula, tested it, back tested it, and then the standard pain when payments changed to the sales people. You think you scrutinize your dinner bill? It’s their money, they really look over their commission statement!
As I look back I think it was just a little uglier and complex than it needed to be, but the overall process was healthy. Businesses change, rates change, what sells changes. Nothing wrong with revisiting the compensation plan once a year and adjusting to fit the needs of the company while still making it interesting for the sales team.
My more direct experience with a sales person was similar. Because he was paid a straight percentage, he tended to only work the big clients and the big deals. Profitable for both sides, but over times led to only a couple very large eggs in the basket. Not much interest in smaller clients because it was a lot of work for not early the same amount of money. That’s short term thinking, and the only way we started to fix it was tweaking the compensation plan. Of course it’s short term from my side of the fence, from the other side – well, I still think it is, if you’re planning to stay in one place for a while and want to keep things moving and growing.
Not all sales people are created equal, and you can’t pay them equal, whether it’s salary, commission, or both. A great sales person is probably 2-3x more effective than a good one – and they know it! They can bring in the money but only if you pay them. Otherwise, they move, because there are always jobs for sales people.
If you read Neil’s post – and you should – he’s got some good reasons for changing to a salary plan. Not clear if that includes a bonus plan and if it does, I’m not sure it’s really a true change, but fair enough to try. I’m not sure it will work, because for salespeople….it is ALL about the money. That’s how they keep score, how they feel validated. Different for geeks, for us it’s being paid a salary in the range that people with our skills, but it’s really about solving problems and shipping software.
Ran across The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life's Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential ($16 @ Amazon) at the the library, was feeling stressed so thought I’d read it. Was a mixed bag for me, some of it made sense, some of it I had a hard time with – just didn’t seem to fit my view of the world, you might find it a better match. But the interesting part…was interesting, and one part in particular stood out; a categorization of stress level that equated to having a fever. I won’t reprint the entire chart because it’s part of the book, but here’s my paraphrased section of it:
On the day I read this I felt like I was at 101. Not good, but not a trip to the doctor either. I think that’s a pretty useful way to view stress in terms of health. Are the mappings exactly right? I don’t know. Do most people live at a stress temperature of 98? Not sure either, but I still like the scale and think it’s good enough.
The part it doesn’t quite capture is that stress is variable. I can have a bad day and my stress goes up to 101, then back to normal over the weekend. On the other hand if I’m in the 102+ range, even if it goes back to normal (doubtful) it’s probably going to climb back up again more quickly and with provocation than it normally would.
Still, if you had a temp of 101, would you go to work or take the day off to recover?
The harder thing to learn is to handle things differently so your stress level doesn’t go up. I’m all for that, but in practice I’d rather start with a strategy for dealing with stress and then learn how to avoid or reduce it. The book covers some of that if you decide to give it a try.
My friend Kevin had sent this to me after I wrote The Boss Is Always Right but before it was released here on the blog, and it’s an interesting and deeper look at the IT specifics of some of what goes into the boss being right or wrong. Little different focus, but I think you’ll find it worth reading.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1
Bet you’re ready to disagree, right? I’ve had this on my list to write about for a while. One trend I see in business is a tendency for subordinates (often managers themselves) to ignore or actually try to undermine the agenda of a person higher up the corporate ladder.
In practice we all know that the boss isn’t always right. Not because we know better (sometimes we do, more often we think we do) but because the universe just isn’t that simple. If anyone could make the right call every time it would be a much simpler world!
There’s nothing wrong with arguing your case, making sure they see both your side of things and why you don’t like the other options. Good managers don’t want people that just say YES. So, once the discussion is done, the boss gets to decide. May not pick the right decision in hindsight, but it’s the one that needs to be executed with the best you have to offer. The only fair alternative (short of legal/ethical situations) is to leave.
As employees we’re not always going to be happy with decisions, that’s the nature of being human. But we can try hard(er) to support those tasked with making decisions, we can learn from their “mistakes”, and we can try to be a positive force rather than a negative one by supporting decisions that have been made.
Not sure I got my thoughts down well this time, but I’m looking forward to the discussion!
I read a nice article by Steve M List called Think Before You Speak in MSDN Magazine and it talks about the challenge of communicating well. One of his key points is that you can be active or passive, but either way you’re affecting discussions when you’re involved. Another is that typically everyone wants to be treated well, but not everyone wants to be treated the way you do.
The latter point resonated with me, as I’m fond of just saying what needs to be said clearly and directly, without sugar coating it. That can also be called being tactless I believe! Over time I’ve learned that how you deliver the message is every bit as important as the message itself. That doesn’t mean you have to be sly, or deceitful, or avoid confrontations, but it means for important stuff – which often includes criticizing someone – taking a moment or two to frame and phrase it well is time well spent.
None of us work in a vacuum. We have co-workers, employees, or customers, and with all of them communicating well pays dividends. I find that writing a lot has helped me communicate better, though I’ll admit that I have a ways to go some days. Communicating can be hard, especially when there is a disagreement involved, so it’s worthwhile to build the skills in advance, and the only way is to practice. How would you rate our communications skills at work? Would your co-workers agree? Or how would you rate my communication skills here on the blog? And for those that know me, do you agree that it’s improving my communication skills?
I think the hardest part about the job search is interviewing and not being selected. You keep saying “why” with rarely a good answer. It’s not fun to be rejected. I don’t think I can change that with any spin, but it helps if you understand that there are a lot of factors at work and your technical skills are just one small part of them. To show this, let’s imagine that you have decided to hire a lawn service. We start with a job description:
“cut the grass!”
You’d think that anyone could do that, but in truth what you want is probably a little more complex than that. For me, I want:
I’d like to think all of that is fairly reasonable! I also expect to pay somewhere in a range of x to y dollars. Above Y and I might give up something to keep the price where I wanted it.
Then I post the job to Craiglist or the local paper or bulletin board, and I get five applicants. I schedule interviews, and here are the results:
Now to be fair you might list different attributes about them, but the goal is to show you that the decision is pretty arbitrary. Who would you pick and why?
If you think about how you arrived at the decision, you could go back and amend the job description. Here’s mine:
Now imagine that I had posted that to start with. If you were the commercial companies, would you still apply? What about the teenager who can’t get/afford insurance? I might get one interview, or I might get all five, but odds are that I get less than five. As a consumer I want some choice, do I really want to just have one interview?
That’s how it works. Job descriptions rarely include everything, and sometimes they discover more as they go from the very people they interview. All you can do is show them that you have the ability and willingness to solve their problem, and how your skills would help them. Looking back at the above, what if:
Would those change your mind? For some of us they would, for others it wouldn’t. See how damned arbitrary it is? None of the 5 candidates lacked the core skill, and maybe they even interviewed equally well. One or two things tipped the balance, and it might have been something you would never see or guess. Now stack on how my might feel if you got follow up emails from some – but not all. Maybe one person offered a slightly different price, or a free pressure wash – would that alter your decision? Maybe?
None of them is going to win by telling you how great they cut the grass, or how long they’ve been cutting it – for our purposes they are all equal. We need to validate skills, but we assume that whoever we hire has the skills – it’s the other stuff that matters!
I’ll be curious what you think about my scenario. I can see places where I might improve it, and it might make a heck of a good training video! But hopefully what you see is that it’s skills + presentation + follow through + luck that lead to a job. You do the things you can do.
Getting a job is hard. If you’ve been lucky enough not to struggle for a job, don’t make the mistake of thinking it will always be easy. Equally, finding a good job is harder still. Some more tips for you to consider:
One more post on this tomorrow!
Part 1 discussed ways to find opportunities, Part 2 was about how to get more interviews, and today we’ll cover some tips from the employer perspective.
It’s important to understand that interviewing and hiring is painful for a manager. They have an obligation to try to hire well, they have budget constraints, it takes a lot of time to review resumes, do phone screens, and then first and often second interviews. Plus, if hiring from a staffing company there is usually a fee of 15-30% of your first year salary – they don’t get that back if you leave or don’t work out, just a promise that they will place someone else at no cost. On top of that, having tried any number of technical questions and interview techniques my own success rate at hiring “good” employees is about 50%. Knowing that just increases the pain and dread. Can you change that? No. But you can do all the things expected by the system and that keeps their time investment to a minimum.
As far as screening, HR often makes the first cut. Staffing companies have to walk the fine line, because they are only supposed to send qualified candidates. Sending someone who isn’t can cause them to lose that position and future ones too. Managers spend about 1 minute per resume doing their initial cut, throwing all out the ones they don’t like for whatever reason. Then a slightly longer second pass where they informally rate the remainder to reduce the pool size further and to prioritize who to interview first.
Yesterday I posted Part 1 containing five ideas for those looking for work. Today I’m going to focus on what to do when you’re struggling to get interviews. Your chances of getting hired for any given job once you interview are perhaps 1 in 10 (an unscientific estimate). If you’re not interviewing, you’re not in the game.
Remember, if you’re not interviewing, you have just about zero chance of getting hired. Interviewing and not getting a job doesn’t hurt you, no black mark on your resume!
Tomorrow some tips from the employer perspective.
I was recently asked for advice about seeking a job, a request we all get from time to time. In this case it was someone who had been very technical for most of their career, but then changed direction and was now seeking to return to technology. Nothing wrong with that, but it does present it’s challenges and a slow economy doesn’t help. I’ve got a few tips to share that maybe go beyond checking your resume for spelling errors.
Nothing very original there, but I rarely see candidates doing all five of them. Given the small amount of time required, are there any you would not do?
More tomorrow!
Yesterday I was commenting on how a big part of stress for me is getting that sudden burst of work that leaves me so far behind it seems the only answer is to just work harder - but that doesn't often work.
I think we should all manage our own careers, tasklists, and stress - but what role does the manager play?
One part is that if you take my advice and decide to just take a break, it's very common for the manager to want to deny the break 'because you've got so much on your plate'. You can show them my blog post, but I suspect that won't change their minds! The alternative is to take a couple sick days anyway, and that works.
Another part is that they aren't managing well, and I'm as guilty of this at times as anyone. Assigning tasks isn't simple, and has to take into account skills, recent projects, review and career goals, other team members...and ideally, the stress/rest level of the person being given the task. One of the evil paradoxes is that managers tend to give the hardest/most important projects to their best people - part compliment, part realism, but over time the best people get tired and cranky while the less talented ones are cruising along happily. It's not always easy to tell, as a manager you definitely wish for a gauge on their forehead that will tell you their mood and energy reserves, but you have to infer it and that doesn't always work.
It can also be a case of not managing well when you're not holding them to intermediate goals, letting the deadline (and the stress) build up to the last minute. Yet another instance is giving them multiple things to do and not setting real priorities - is it this one or that one?
Perhaps the toughest part on both sides is when someone tells you they are stressed. Sometimes that's a nice calm conversation, sometimes it's work not quite as good as usual, sometimes it's a screaming fit. Most of us don't recognize the magnitude of the stress, we don't like to admit that we are stressed, and we definitely don't want to tell our manager (who is just supposed to know). Once we know someone is stressed, are we in a calm place to hear and respond - or is more like "we're all working hard right now"? And if that isn't enough, managers also report to someone, and that someone may not be as enlightened, causing a mildly complex problem to be that much harder.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and my first thought was that there is only so much gas in the tank - but that's not a good match. I think maybe better is oil changes. You can put off an oil change for a while, but do it long enough and real damage can result, causing more downtime than if you just took the car out of service for the couple hours needed for the oil change. The question is 'how long is too long', and that's where being human we tend to stretch it right to the edge.
Don't expect your manager to manage your stress, or even to care. Don't get me wrong, it's great if they do, but you have to be set to survive bad managers, or at least managers that don't read minds.
I've always been in favor of investing in things that I think will benefit me long term, but all investments cost something - time or money usually, both hard to come by. I remember doing an fill-in presentation at a SQLSaturday where we talked about professional development, one of the attendees was pretty frustrated with me when I said that employers can't/won't provide you all the training you need. Body language screaming 'that's not fair!'. We could argue that, but I think better to just focus on what the world is....it is what it is.
So if you can make the leap to decide to invest time/money, the next part is how/when/where?
Dan Appleman had a article in Visual Studio Magazine titled Show Me the Money that talks about the importance of deciding which technology to learn. If you look at our own history in SQL Server, are you a happy investor if you spent a lot of time on English Query or Notification Services? Will learning Reporting Services help you get/keep a job, or is a distraction compared to learning more XML?
There are no easy answers. Early adopters sometimes get rich, sometimes get the hatchet when the technology fades away. Look at the current job ads, can you see many ads that match your skills? What could you add that might separate you from the pack? Would some MySQL/Oracle/Something Else experience help, or should it be something else within SQL Server?
Decide to invest first, then think hard about how much and where to make the investment. Don't look for immediate returns, and realize that not every investment will have a big payoff.
It's funny that many employees see moving into management as a way to stop actually doing work. In practice - if done well - it's just doing a different kind of work, but it's not always done well. Equally, many first line managers then yearn for the day when they move into middle management so that they no longer have to deal with worker bees on a daily basis. After all, managing managers should be walk in the park right?
For most of us the people in middle management are off in the distance, someone we see in the hall way or the occasional meeting. It's probably rare that we can see the value they bring to the organization, which often leads us to doubt that they bring any value to the organization. Is that a fair perception? Isn't it reinforced when during lay offs middle managers are among the first to be jettisoned?
My view is that just like first level managers, those that move into middle management often lacked a good role model prior to the move. Some do ok, most coast. Doesn't have to be that way though. I think a good middle manager might be described as:
Brian Kelley had a recent post about leadership where he makes that point that we all report to someone, that we all have obligations upward and downward. That's exactly right, and the understanding that is a core part of managing, but especially for middle managers. Becoming a middle manager means you can coast for a long time and get away with it precisely because you were given the job with the expectation that little supervision was required. So you can abuse the promotion, or do something interesting with it - which would you do?
It's also easy to feel like managing managers shouldn't take a lot of time. If you're managing five experienced and good managers that might be true. Replace one or two with newbies and you'll feel the strain quickly, they need a lot of care and feeding so they don't ruin the team they manage. You'll be spending a lot of time coordinating with other departments, meeting with clients, removing road blocks, and more.
Take a harder look at your managers manager. Are they really an empty shirt, or is it just hard to see what they do? One good way to infer their ability is to look at your own manager. If they are competent, disciplined, and held accountable (and thus hold you accountable) that's a good sign that they work for someone good. If they seem to screw up, miss things, and not really be very good at what they do (with no signs of improvement), well...then their manager either isn't very good, or is lost in the weeds.
