Afraid of losing your telesales job? Then why aren’t you networking right now with your colleagues?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 @ 01:11 AM
When I'm not delivering telesales training courses to my clients, I'm spending a significant amount of time helping great telesales reps that have previously taken my classes to find great telesales jobs. I know their work because I trained and coached them, and I don't charge a fee for recruiting, so companies love talking to me. And I love helping out people that have taken my classes and excelled.
In our current economic situation, I've never seen so many exceptional telesales candidates looking for work. One rep got laid off because she was the last hired, and her company needed to lose headcount. Over the course of the year she had worked for the company, she had always been over quota. She was laid off when non-producing reps were kept. That's politics. Another rep got his territory changed to a distant state, and as a hybrid rep, had to travel a lot there. The problem? Two young kids at home, and this rep was a real active parent. Like the first rep, this rep had never been under quota as well. That's economics.
Whether its internal company politics or economics, I would guess that a significant number of you reading this blog post are concerned about your own jobs, or should be. Being always over quota won't save you, as the first rep mentioned above found out. Here's my recommendation: while you're employed and happy, start engaging in social networking right now so you can develop relationships with people you already know, through social networking sites like LinkedIn. I personally prefer LinkedIn to many of the other social sites because it's more about business, and not as much about where I like to bowl I don't own stock in the company, I'm just being objective). You may already have a profile, but if you don't, please do it. Start by adding sales executives with whom you've had a good relationship. Add your sales colleagues. And also, if you've got executive-level customers, you might want to add them, too (the first rep above did just that, and got a stellar recommendation from one of them that's on her LinkedIn page.) I recommend that you keep your contacts to people you really know, and don't send out invitations to people you'd like to know. If you feel that strongly about wanting to know someone, why not call and introduce yourself first?
There's a lot of buzz right now about Sales 2.0 concepts, which, for our purposes, essentially marry inside sales with web technologies. People spend a lot of time talking about how Sales 2.0 can help a rep sell better, but not so much time discussing how these concepts can strengthen one's career path. If you develop that social networking path right now, you may find it's your best friend later, if your company drops headcount or goes under completely. If you've got a good LinkedIn network, you can use it to find out who-knows-who. If you see a job requisition that appeals to you, you can use LinkedIn to determine if you know anyone that works there, or if anyone you know knows anyone who works there. In plain English, today's work world is volatile. Take steps to solidify your career right now, and add this technique to your Best Practices Playbook.