How to attract graduates to sales positions

Recently, I came across two interesting articles: Does generation Y hate sales jobs? and Gen Y most likely to hold low-paying jobs in retail. Both written back in 2012 and related to the US. I simplify, but this is the conclusion: On the one hand college grads run away from a B2B sales job, on the other hand they end up as order-takers at a retailer.

Sounds familiar? In recent years, stories about college grads working as cashiers made headlines across Germany, and Poland as well. Neither German nor Polish colleges train students in sales. The colleges undervalue sales and overrate marketing. Sales requires soft skills and these are harder to convey in the classroom than best practices in marketing. Business studies are B2C driven requiring brand and marketing strategies. In addition, some college profs favor trainee programs over direct sales success, e.g. Peter Winkelmann, professor at the Department of Marketing and Sales at the University of Applied Sciences Landshut, believes the key to obtaining sales experience is a trainee programs. "By participating in a trainee program, graduates should develop a connection to the market and customers". In his opinion, graduates should not be salespersons with a degree. 

A majority of students would probably agree with this. It is rare that students/graduates have the desire to master duties such as cold-calling and customer service. They very often assume that strategic planning and marketing communication are the key to a successful career. Graduates of business schools primary want to analyse, analyse, analyse and subsequently devise strategies; be Key Account Managers on long-term accounts, and of course Sales Managers and Directors; be farmers, not hunters. 

But is this really just an obstacle of Generation Y? I believe that college graduates have never been heavily oriented towards sales. Actually, irrespective of time and educational background, "the selling profession isn't most folks’ first choice for a profession, many will fall into a sales career after college and just survive rather than thrive".

Graduates are not interested in sales for many reasons:

1. They have student loans to pay off and need a steady income.

2. As accidental salespersons, they have had bad experiences in sales. One of the Fines Department Stores used to hire students as hostesses for one or two days. As students turned up for work, they were asked to convince clients to sign up for a loyalty card.

3. They have had bad experiences with sales as customers.

4. They hold on to stereotypes about sales, incl. having to sell stuff that nobody needs, manipulation, etc.

5. They do not want to have to struggle at work, swallow rejections or keep up with performance expectations.

6. They want to be paid for their work, not just their success.  

Big companies know how to sweeten the deal. According to the Compensation Consulting Firm Personalmarkt, the highest starting salaries in Germany are paid in the construction, chemical and pharmaceutical industries with an average of around EUR 47K gross salary per year. Across the industries, sales people within the first 2 years of experience earn around EUR 38K. Professionals working in sales for more than 5 years earn more then 70K on average.

In Berlin, many businesses assume a EUR 21K basic salary for their sales professionals. Before Germany's first nationwide minimum wage was introduced in January 2015, there were also companies that had sales professionals in their books earning as little as EUR 14K base. Only after nobody wanted to be hired for that, a EUR 19K was offered. Although a top salesperson is able to double it through top performance, for the majority of sales consultants, it does remain a "so so" basic salary with "bonus potential". With 3-month chunk rates at 20-30%, the time one has to prove one’s abilities is short. This causes stress – a huge amount of stress – that prevents one from focusing on priorities.

So what can companies do to attract graduates to sales positions?

A few ideas:

- increase the average starting salaries;

- do not burn talent;

- support sales talent with really good marketing and communication campaigns, try new services, eg. vendisys.com;

- give them time to succeed, one or even two years;
 - provide them with training and know-how that colleges do not teach, e.g: the further south in Germany you are, the more time you will need to spend with the customer in order to seal the deal;

- inspire people to a career in sales through initiatives similar to Geek Girls Carrots, make use of gamification approaches;

- improve image of sales (emphasize partnering with the client, solving problems as integral components of the roles etc.);

- reassure that students understand that the most promising way to get to C-Suite is via sales department;

- outline benefits of a career in sales (crisis-resistant, universal across sectors, earning potential, performance satisfaction, working with people);

- let them be a co-owner of your business. A vast majority (99%) of the job-seeking public have zero interest in jobs without a base salary or with a very little pay, unless it is in their own company.

What students can do to develop interest in sales?

- practice "show and tell" exercises;

- polish communication, presentation, story-telling skills;

- join the closeby section of Toastmaster's Club; 

- organize a garage sale/jumble sale;

- join a flea market as a seller;
- work a part-time or holiday job in retail or telesales.

 Do you have any other ideas?

Top HR Topics in 2012

The first quarter of 2012 past. Three HR Topics facing HR professionals this year have all to do with Employer Branding.

The first one is recruitment related topic, candidate journeys/experience and concerns future and potential employees. Designing candidate experience in a way that it ensures recruiters’ responsiveness can help companies to differentiate themselves in a war for talent.

The second topic relates to performance management and concerns current employees. Key issues include employee conduct, performance improvement plans and strategies for dealing with a problem employee. Designing full-filling jobs with the right performance metrics can help companies to create meaningful customer relationships and outperform their competitors.

The third topic pertains to leaver journeys/experience which affects departing and ex-employees. Companies need to design outplacement processes in a way that emotions are well managed, feelings are compensated, and financial matters are taken care of. Other issues are strategies and tactics for dealing with any potential ex-employees negative feedback on employers’ review and ratings site.

Customers’ Feedback as a Component of Performance Appraisal

Feedback is an important component of performance appraisal. Involving customers in performance appraisals remains however a rarity in Germany. Generally, customers are also not involved into performance management.

Scouting China or Poland for that matter shows however a handful of examples how a feedback on customers representative performance can be an integral part of any interaction with the client. Banks clientele can assess tellers on a three point scale using a feedback devise right at the counter. Similar machines are placed next to immigration officers at Hong Kong borders. Next, some restaurants are fitted with communication devises with the staff including commands such as “We’d like to order”, “Please bring me some water”, “We’d like to pay” and “I enjoyed eating here today”. Furthermore, a feedback on a five point scale via text message is sought by travel sites after every call with the hotline representative. In Poland, the largest polish job board is bringing direct customer feedback into B2B world.



After posting an ad, one is asked to provide an assessment of cooperation with the sales representative.

The rating system has a high relevance to all client facing roles. As any other performance appraisal system, customer feedback must be linked to rewards. Otherwise, the process lacks impact. However, multiple advantages of customers’ ratings exist:
* Applying customers’ ratings at the point of contact produce reliable and consistent measurement of performance.
* The customers’ rating system is especially valuable to the employees’ development and satisfaction as it allows setting up objective goals more easily.
* It provides a simple format, it is brief (not time-consuming), easy to understand, and elicit useful information (customers’ satisfaction level with the service).
* It is designed to provide timely, impersonal and regular feedback, so that the employees can immediately know how their work is perceived by the customers.
* Employees can directly adjust their behavior to costumers’ expectations, thereby influencing the ratings.

As more and more, human resource professionals consider themselves in service to the internal clients, I wonder either they would welcome such feedback loop every time they deliver the service to company’s employees and managers.

Performance Conversations

One of the most important and original books of late regarding performance management is written by Christopher D. Lee, PhD, Performance Conversations: An Alternative to Appraisals (2006; published by Fenestra Books, Tucson, Arizona). The author thoroughly critiqued the performance appraisal tool and provided an alternative approach; Performance Conversations Model.

Having observed the book's core ideas implemented into a corporate setting in Mainland China, I would like to share some of the challenges that arose.

First, performance conversations created impractical employee expectations for receiving a raise or bonus after every performance conversation. But, since these conversations occurred on a quarterly basis, managers' obviously could not increase pay every 3 months for an employee even if they received positive feedback. So, employees invariably felt disappointed.

Second, performance conversations were too structured mainly because a form needed to be completed every time conversations occurred. In addition, many participants were not dedicated to maintaining a performance portfolio and performance log - a journal of duties, challenges, and solutions (the so called "evidence") on a daily/weekly basis. Indeed, this prerequisite was perceived as a burden by most and just additional paper work.

Third, performance conversation meetings did not seem to be the best platform for addressing inadequate performance. Inevitably, this model linked the quality of an employee’s output with the manager’s performance in accordance with the fundamental belief that an "Employee can only be as good as their supervision, support, and guidance". Therefore, the manager who assessed an employee's performance as poor would also need to acknowledge their own weaknesses and mistakes.

Fourth, performance conversations did not alleviate the need for an “evaluation” and consequently demand for 360 degree feedback in the organization intensified. Employees also wanted to be assessed against a set of performance criteria for their current position.

For the abovementioned difficulties, China as a whole is not ready for a performance management approach based on Theory Y of human motivation.

Focus on Strengths

In both Marketing and HR, the dilemma arises as to where one should allocate resources. Two choices exist; either focus on strengths or concentrate on compensating weaknesses.

For Marketing, these two approaches are discussed, for example, by Dru*:

“If a P&G product had a 12 percent market share in Normandy and only 6 percent in Alsace, P&G would spend twice as much in Normandy as in Alsace. P&G invests where it is strong. Colgate would have done the opposite, believing that the 6 percent in Alsace, lower than the national average, was clear evidence of underexploited potential requiring investment.”

For HR, alternative examples include:
• Guide and encourage high performers to deliver even greater results or help low performers reach average results.
• Motivate employees by focusing on their strengths or helping them identify and overcome some of their weaknesses.
• Reward, grow, and retain “A” players or concentrate on salvaging “C” players.

Without a doubt, performance-driven organizations will choose to focus on high-performers and allocate resources accordingly.


* Dru, Jean-Marie (2007). How Disruption Brought Order: The Story of Winning Strategy in the World of Advertising. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 177.

Employment Security

In China, many MNCs have been spoiled by the abundance of labor and view people, particularly in non-managerial positions, as a commodity. Until recently, those companies were not troubled by high attrition rates and poor work design leading to burnout, stress, work-life-imbalance.

Nevertheless, as the salary levels rise, companies are increasingly concerned with the effectiveness of their workforce. More and more companies have embraced the concept of employee retention and strive to increase the productivity, accountability and responsibility among their workforce. Employee engagement programs are frequently utilized solution to achieve such objectives.

Employers however remain not very effective at defining what is it that they want the workers engage in. They also remain unable to effectively operationalize organizational objectives and link them to performance expectations, essential for increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Corporate missions in such companies are reduced to creating a “fun” place to work, participating in CSR initiatives, and postulating empowerment. At the same time, profit targets and business objectives are tabooed, not shared with employees with overall financial literacy remaining low.
What do the companies try to hide, that they do not make money at all or have solid profit margins and are simply afraid to share it with the workforce.

I believe however, that demand for improved productivity requires that employees understand how the company, as a for-profit entity, is doing toward achieving their essential objective (profitability) and how everyone is contributing to this end. How else can one instill ownership?

Profits should not be hidden. Only profits can guarantee long-term employment security. If the company does not make profits, it goes bankrupt and lay-offs all employees.

In turn, employment security is one of the most valued elements of Employee Value Proposition and a critical piece of high performance work arrangement. Then, innovations in work practices and productivity improvements can be only sustainable when employee to do not fear that that by increasing productivity they will work themselves out of their jobs.

Teams: Easier Said Then Done

Teams have been all the “rage” for over a decade and it still remains a buzz word. But companies are realizing fewer gains in performance than anticipated from their attempts to acts as a team. Thus, a team often turns out to be a collection of professionals instead of people excelling at collaboration, symbiotic dependence, and synergy.

Per definition: "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable."

Most teams score poorly against this definition. In particular, the following points are cause for concern:

1. The skills of team members should complement each other. The recruitment division seldom compiles information on Executives’ profiles that could help in the formation of effective and productive teams. Yes, cross-functional teams distinguish themselves because of various skills and functional expertises; but even so, too often complementary soft skills are overlooked.
2. The essence of a team relies on a common commitment to a common goal. This point is difficult to ascertain given the different priorities of professionals in an organization. Specifically, a CEO’s priority is shareholder value and the price of the company’s shares. Finance professionals seek to get the most out of money allocated; comply with government regulations, and certify accuracy of financial results. On the contrary, marketing and sales professionals seek more sales resources and higher sales commissions to maintain strong morale for the sales force while seeking out low and easily achievable quotas. Regarding HR professionals, they tend to look at the individual who makes up the workforce; most frequently from the support function angle. However, HR staff is increasingly committed to improving workforce productivity. Thus, team members may frequently differ in terms of goals and agendas.
3. Transforming the common purpose into specific and measurable performance goals is the surest first step of a team. As shown above, an individual’s role in a venture/an organization dictates how they perceive various aspects of strategic execution. A lack of agreement on common goals corresponds to business leaders’ inability to communicate the business strategy and create an environment where all employees are united with certain shared performance goals. Watson Wyatt conducted research involving nearly 14,000 employees across Europe and discovered that clarity over a company’s strategic direction is the most important driver of employee engagement. However, only 13 percent of surveyed employees were classified as value creators, i.e. those who scored high for both commitment and line of sight. A lot of room exists for improvement in this area.
4. High-performing teams must also agree on a common approach with respect to the way they work together to accomplish their mission. At the departmental level, each team member has specific trigger points and their own worldview while they all may lack the big picture view. But, even within the department, professionals may work in isolation and thereby create conflicts within the system. One of the problems is that companies encourage team work while jobs remain designed around individual contributions (OD division), raises are based on individual achievements (C&B division), and training is conducted to strengthen more so individual skills (L&D division). So, team-based rhetoric fails when embedded in a HR management system designed around individual behaviors.
5. Productive teams must develop a sense of mutual accountability. However, if there is disagreement, “it’s usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experiences”.* Moreover, “teams break down under pressure. The team may function quite well with routine issues. But when they confront complex issues that may be embarrassing or threatening, the ‘teamness’ seems to go to pot”.**

The struggle with teamwork prevails among companies as in Universities. Indeed, students do not develop an appreciation for collaboration and acquire solid teamwork skills for the workplace. The reasons being include:

1. Student teams are constructed randomly and even when teams are formed among friends (although this is not a prerequisite for creating a team); students’ most likely lack an understanding and knowledge of each others’ skills.
2. Usually formed “to complete the assignment”, the “common purpose” is the only characteristic of the team that seems to be fulfilled by the student teams.
3. Members of student teams differ in terms of performance goals. In fact, only a small fraction of students would approach an assignment with the aim of earning an A. The majority leave the question of the grade to chance.
4. Student teams are rather quick in setting a schedule and assigning particular tasks among each other. However, team members rarely discuss authority, decision making processes, and rather hope that things will be taken care of indirectly. Most importantly, students also clash in terms of commitment and willingness to invest time and effort.
5. Students habitually avoid accountability and do not care that other team members work more and take on added responsibility for completing an assignment (since all group members receive one grade). Notably, students lack the means to evaluate themselves and other team members toward performance and to exclude underperformers.

When criteria for a successful team cannot be met, Executives should rely on individual leadership skills. As another alternative, companies could attempt to break the structural bias within teams’ through effective team building and HR programs.


* Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. London: Random House.
** Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses. Facilitating organizational learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.