It's no secret that the economy continues to hum along and is growing at a very nice pace. Barring any catastrophe in the Middle East or any oil shock, we expect this to continue for the next few years at least. What does this mean for companies that are trying to grow their businesses? It means it's a tough sell out there to get top sales and marketing employees to make a job change. Why? All of the good talent is already working elsewhere, and making great money!
If your company is constrained in its ability to grow its revenue because of a deficit in its employee ranks, you've got to find new ways to think about how to attract and retain employees. Retention may be tough as well. If you're a sales and marketing employer, you're going to find more turnover happening amongst your sales ranks, particularly among employees that have waited out several years at your company while the economy has been slow. They're going to start looking for and finding great opportunities for increased pay, so there's going to be more churn in your employee ranks, meaning you're going to have to focus more of your time and attention on employee retention programs.
Bad managers and bad leaders will no longer get away with driving their employees at overly aggressive levels for too few rewards. Companies need to continuously attract their current employees to stay with them by offering a combination of strong leadership, great vision, outstanding go-to-market strategy, wonderful products and services that outsell the competition and a culture and environment that fosters employee growth. If your company is trying to hire more sales and marketing talent in order to grow its business, make sure that you're doing everything you can to retain the talent that you have, because you're more vulnerable in this economy to losing key employees.
Because the job market is so tight right now and so many firms are out trying to recruit and hire sales and marketing management and frontline producers, you are competing actively against those other employers for a limited pool of talent. This means that you need to have a very aggressive recruiting process...one that will allow you to outshine your competition. Outshining your competition is not just dependent upon the wages, benefits and incentives that you're paying, but also how strong your company's growth strategy is.
Also, it's crucial to create stakeholdership amongst potential employees so that they can buy into the vision and are passionate about what they do and love where they work. This is the job senior management in sales and marketing is tasked with: retaining top talent and in order to do so, you've got to have great strategy and great vision.