I'm alive, but man -- what an insane last couple of weeks, both personally and professionally.  I'll be blogging about the executive search-related issues after they get resolved, but not now.

On the personal front, my wife gave birth to our new baby daughter, Vivian Marie, on June 18.  Mom and baby were doing fine until Monday, June 25.  Beautiful baby.  Just beautiful.  Our fifth, btw.

Let me say how impressed I am with Northside Hospital in Atlanta.  Locally, the place is known as a "baby mill" -- and ladies, if you get a chance to deliver there, do it.  They have the whole thing down to a nit.  Every tiny corner of Northside's sprawling complex is filled with little signs and reminders for staff members on how to treat patients with the utmost care.

Get Good People

But just because you show a line-level employee a sign doesn't mean that they will treat their customers with real empathy.  That starts with hiring the right people.  Northside has this function dialed in, I assure you.  They anticipated my wife's every need -- and when things got "exceptional" they were able to use their common sense and deeply specialized knowledge of pediatric care to put out the fires.

So we delivered baby Vivian a week ago Monday, and continued to rave about Northside to anyone who would listen.

But this past Monday morning, my wife became very ill and had to be whisked away in an ambulance to Northside's ER.  I won't get into the details, but it was pretty intense.  My father-in-law used to tell me that "When you are healthy, you have a million problems.  When you're not healthy, you have one problem."

My wife (and I) spent Monday and most of Tuesday in Intensive Care. She's fine, and we're home.  She's on bed rest, and the prognosis is excellent.

But again:  When we were in the ICU, Northside's staff was un-be-liev-able.  I'm talking about real empathy here, which is amazing considering that hospitals are temples of controlled chaos. There's no point in managing by exception in an environment whose very existence is predicated on round-the-clock crisis.  As a nurse, there's no use pretending to care.  You either do or you don't.  Nobody can fake it all the time.

The Miserable Majority

Two years ago I heard an HR statistic that 66% of all workers hate their jobs.  Hate.  Sixty-six percent.  I don't know if that's true -- but even if the number is only 26%, then one in four people who are paid to serve you throughout your day (grocery clerks, postal workers, cab drivers, etc.) are doing so while transmitting the vibe that "my job sucks and my company sucks and I wish I were someplace else." Friends, you're never going to win the hearts and minds of your clients like that, I assure you.  Technology and branding are irrelevant if you're hiring "well poisoners."

Good service is devine.

I won't get religious here, but I'll share something religious with you just to make a point:

There's an old Christian sermon about treating everyone around you AS IF they were Christ (or God) Himself.  Get it?  God is occupying the body of some random person that you meet -- just to see how you will treat them.  Sort of like a Mystery Shopper.  The story ends with the Bible verse "As you did it for the least of your brethren, you did it for Me." There's probably a similar parable in the Qur'an, the Torah, and the sacred scriptures of other faiths.  Pretty universal concept.

I imagine that if you simply used this verse as your company's mission statement, you'd make a ton of money.  I'm not even sure the industry matters.

Certainly, the line-level staff members at Northside embrace this principle.  And now I'm blogging about it.  Tell your friends.  Send them a link to this post.  And for God's sake, hire those rare individuals who are genetically coded to care for others.  In a pinch, they'll make all the difference to your customer experience.

Now have a nice day.  And see to it that everyone around you does, too.  The money will take care of itself.

As a marketing recruiter, this week I had the pleasure of coaching a candidate on an up coming Director of Ecommerce job interview in Dallas.  When it comes to interviewing, I am a firm believer in two things:

1. Every candidacy needs a "central selling theme" and
2. Attitude is everything.

When I say every candidacy needs a central selling theme, I mean that there should be one simple, relevant theme surrounding WHY a candidate is the best fit for the organization.  Seriously.

Abraham Zaleznik of the Harvard Business School said nearly 35 years ago that all too often, it is not the most qualified candidate who gets hired -- but the one whom the hiring committee believes can contribute something lasting and meaningful to the company's existing management mix.  Not much has changed.

Indeed, I have seen incredibly qualified C-level candidates come out of interviews in a body bag because the "chemistry" just wasn't there.  And one key element of chemistry is being able to convey your selling story to a hiring committee in a way that is short, punchy, and memorable.  Like Johnny Cochran's "If it doesn't fit -- you must acquit."  Just like in jury trials (See Pg. 5).

My client is relatively new to ecommerce, and some of their VP's are nervous that a top-flight Director of Ecommerce will bring about revolutionary change (as opposed to evolutionary change).  So I told my candidate that his drumbeat should be "With ecommerce behind it, _____'s best days are ahead of it."

Granted, this tagline didn't trumpet my candidate's name all over the place.  But humility is a key element of my client's culture, and any attempt by my candidate to sell himself so brazenly would have killed his chances.  So it was best for him to elevate the client's existing management team through his tagline.  By making himself the Best Supporting Actor, he gets himself hired.  At least that's the theory.  I'll let you know next week if he got the job ...

The other aspect of chemistry is attitude.  And as my father-in-law would say, "Stay loose and you can win."  Somehow, with job interviews, the harder you try, the worse they turn out.  Not sure why that is.  But if you try too hard, you come across as trying too hard.  And companies can smell a disingenuous candidate -- unless the company is so dysfunctional that you'd be crazy to work there.

So how does one stay loose?  Well, you simply have to keep things in perspective.

Which brings me to Robert De Niro.  Several years ago I read an article in Esquire about celebrities and their Big Breaks -- when they got them, how they recognized them, and how they handled them.

The writer asked Mr. De Niro about his Big Break -- which Mr. De Niro said was the audition for the role of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (strange, I know, since Mr. De Niro had previously won an Oscar for his role in Godfather II.).

I'm not a movie buff, but the story goes that every talented young actor in Hollywood was dying for the part.  And a ton of great actors auditioned.  But Mr. De Niro strolled in for his audition, read the part, and nailed it.

So the article's writer asks Mr. De Niro "Were you nervous?"

"Nope," replies the star.  "I never got nervous before auditions.  Ever."

"Why's that?" asks the interviewer.

"Because I didn't have the part when I arrived.  What's the worst that could happen?  I'd leave without the part.  The way I saw it, every audition was pure upside.  All opportunity and no risk."

As my long-time blog readers know, before becoming a marketing recruiter I owned a B2B inside sales consultancy called "Reliable Growth."  Essentially, I taught companies like NCR and Aflac how to research, identify, and develop new business with a phone, an internet connection and a fax machine.

Telemarketing was the lynch-pin of my campaigns.

My campaigns always involved tightly choreographed, sequential steps and sought to establish permission-based relationships with highly targeted prospects over a 6-8 week time frame.  Each interaction was like a chess move.  You can see the gist of the method in this page from my old manual.  This small portion of my process is based on the un-improvable work of Jim Cecil -- the father of nurture marketing.

Needless to say, I know a thing or two about cold calling.  Indeed, I have made many thousands of ice-cold calls in my life -- and if the telephone were a slot-machine, I would be waaaay up in my winnings.

But there's rejection -- and lots of it.

After all, a cold call interrupts the prospect's day.  It's an intrusion, and most folks don't like to be intruded on.  The cold call loser focuses on this element and takes the rejection personally.  The cold call winner simply "moves through the target" (as they say in the Navy SEALS) by regarding cold calling as a numbers game.

Here are five basic truths about cold calling:

1. You cannot wait for the phone to ring.  You simply MUST reach and touch your prospect.  After all, no one is waiting for your call.
2. What gets measured gets done. "How was your day?"  Good question!  There's nothing as devastating to an opinion as a number.  Get yourself a contact database and track your outbound dials.  If you don't count your dials, your production will lag.
3. The best campaigns involve multiple steps, such as 1.) calling the prospect to verify that s/he is in fact the decision maker, 2.) asking them three closed-ended questions about their current  situation -- thereby disqualifying most prospects as potential new customers, 3.) getting the qualified prospects' permission to send them a HIGHLY PERSONALIZED sales letter, 4.) FAXING the letter, then snail-mailing it the same day, and then 5.) following up no more than 72 hours later to verify their receipt of the letter, answer any questions they may have, and mutually agree on the next steps in the relationship.  To position yourself as a potential resource for institutional buyers, you must be "unintrusively persistent" in your approach:  Our society is famously over-communicated, and B2B prospects are very good at tuning out marketing messages -- especially if they "already have a supplier of what you're selling."  You must have a reliable process in place to address this reality.
4. The most successful reps are "light on their feet" and can talk outside of the script.  Patter works better than droning.
5. The best reps know their product inside-and-out and can put their product "solution" into the context of how the prospect thinks, how they buy (logical vs. emotional), what they fear, what makes them mad, what are their top three daily frustrations, etc.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post:

Today on iMedia, Sean Cheyney, VP of Marketing for AccuQuote, has a nice piece called 5 Ways to Screw up a Cold Call.   His tips include ...

1. Make your own calls:  Using appointment setters can be dilutive to the brand and to the initiative.
2. Don't insult your prospect:  Patience is a virtue.  Listen to the prospect and don't try to shoehorn your product or service into every prospect's business on the very first call.  Or as my dad used to say, "Take things a step at a time: You can't get from first base to third by running across the pitcher's mound."
3. Be prepared and speak clearly: Practice what you're going to say and keep your message to 45 seconds or less.  While I might take issue with the 45 second time frame, I would say that your first call should have an "arc" with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- and the end should always be an open ended, "what's your opinion" type question.
4. Know your customer: The most common way to screw up a cold call is to not know anything about your prospect's business.  Amen.  This should actually be # 1 ...
5. It's a two-way conversation:  According to Mr. Cheyney, "If you talk at me, you'll annoy me. Talk with me and you have a shot."  Yup.

Sales reps get hung up on cold-calling (no pun intended), but an old sales manager at Aflac had it right when he told his reps "I don't care if your own mother refers you to a prospect:   If you have never spoken to the prospect before, then your first call is always a cold call."  Truer words have never been spoken.

So given the above, here's my question: "Is cold calling an effective part of your company's marketing mix?"  Why or why not??

If you're a regular reader of blogs but haven't taken the time to dive in and start writing, consider the career paths of several people who have taken that plunge.  Each of these individuals is involved in the recruiting space, and that industry has done well with recruiting blogs, but marketing, small business, PR, finance, product marketing, legal, and technology also have good stories.

This sample is not going to focus on companies that have done well with blogs, but rather the career paths of individual bloggers.  You want to know the ROI?  Here are some figures. 

Recruiting:

Joel Cheesman:  Joel, who writes the popular Cheezhead blog, runs his own business as a SEO consultant for recruitment marketing.  Joel has been blogging just two years, but now says most of his new business leads come from his blog (not his website).  Joel speaks at conferences, starts contests, and just recently signed a sponsorship deal with JobCentral to pay him $100,000 over the next two years.

Harry Joiner: You'll recognize Harry because he's one of the authors of this blog, but he also writes for MarketingHeadhunter, his blog on his business as a, you guessed it, Marketing Headhunter.  Harry is a friend of mine, and we talk about the impact of his blog on his business - I'll leave it up to him to quantify the amount - but he counts on his blog to bring in qualified candidates for him to place with his clients.   At $20,000-$30,000 (and up) a placement, any candidate that finds Harry through his blog is someone he didn't have to proactively solicit.

I’ve recently been contacted by Derek Karchner of Rosenberg Communications about an initiative to find and train manufacturing workers in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The effort was spearheaded by the Manufacturing Institute of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Precision Metalforming Association and supported by The Hitachi Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation The initiative yielded several valuable lessons on the best ways that employers can work together and with local colleges to improve the skills base for local economies. Mark Popovich, a Senior Program Officer at The Hitachi Foundation, has agreed to answer some questions on the project.

1.    What exactly is the Hitachi Foundation, and what is your relationship to them?

The Hitachi Foundation is an independent, nonprofit, philanthropic organization established in 1985 by Hitachi, Ltd. From our inception, the Foundation’s broad purpose has been to enhance the wellbeing of economically- and socially-isolated people. We are one of a very few foundations focusing on corporate social responsibility and the role of businesses in our communities. Towards this end, the Foundation operates three distinct programs.   Each has its own mission and guidelines:

•    The “Business and Communities Grants Program” – which funded the M-Powered Project – allows the Foundation to target grants at business-community partnerships and corporate citizenship efforts to enhance opportunity and quality of life for economically-isolated people.
•    The “Hitachi Community Action Partnership” provides a way for Hitachi employees to participate in community service and provide grant support to address pressing community needs. This effort is jointly funded by the Foundation and the participating company.   
•    The “Yoshiyama Award for Exemplary Service to the Community” is presented each year to ten high school seniors from around the United States on the basis of their community service activities.

My connection to this project and to the Foundation… I’ve worked at the Foundation since 2001.  I was born, raised, educated, and started my career in Wisconsin. I have worked in a senior staff capacity for a state senator, governor, and congressman as well as the National Governors’ Association and the National Academy of Public Administration. While I’ve long been involved in economic, community development, and workforce issues, joining the Foundation intrigued me in part because of the opportunity to get closer to the employer community.

I also have strong personal connection to this project. I’m a Midwesterner at heart and am from a manufacturing family. In fact, a scholarship from the manufacturing company where my father and brother worked made it possible for me to go to college. Today, my brother is a Quality Control guy at a plastics company and my sister works third shift in a plant that used to be owned by Briggs and Stratton. After spending a number of years as a punch press operator, my brother completed the course work to go in to QC.  And I am proud to say that my sister has just completed her Associates Degree.  I know from direct experience about people realizing they needed to skill up and then managing work/training to get it done.

As a marketing recruiter, not a week goes by that I don't get a call from a VP of HR looking for a VP of Marketing who is a "servant leader."  Servant leadership seems to be all the rage these days.  Every company wants servant leaders, but few seem to know much about servant leadership.  They talk the talk, but walking the walk is much harder.  That's because ...

Servant leadership is based on humility.

Most people, if they really knew anything about humility, wouldn't like it.  That's why so few people are humble.  Humility involves dying to oneself -- sacrificing oneself to a higher good or legitimate authority.  Quite often it means doing what you don't want to do.  Sometimes it means going down with the ship so that others may live.  And always, it means killing the egotistical, self-centered person inside all of us who wants to be comforted, petted and admired.

Humility is a Godly thing.

For truly authentic servant leaders, everyone has dignity.  Everyone is a child of God.  Everyone is the best in the world at something.  Everyone deserves respect.  Everyone deserves to be elevated and  invested in.  Everyone deserves to be perfected, and servant leaders perfect those around them by nurturing everyone and and setting a benchmark example.  They walk the talk -- and inspire others to raise their game.

But here's the paradox of humility:  If you think you have it, you don't.  Imagine someone bragging about how humble they are.  That's an oxymoron, isn't it?  You can never be too humble.

I'm not talking about the "awe-shucks" false modesty that most of us have.  I'm talking about putting others first always.  That is antithetical to our secular, me first, zero-sum, he who dies with the most toys wins society.  True humility is counter-cultural, which is why it's so rare.  In fact, if you want to be a truly counter-cultural rebel, then rebel against your own vanity.  Master yourself.

Now, I can't tell you how to gain humility.  Usually one has to fail (and fail spectacularly) before one discovers how much one needs others.  But barring that, here are some signs that you lack humility:

• Thinking that what you do or say is better than what others do or say.
• Always wanting to get your own way.
• Arguing when you are not right (or when you are right, insisting stubbornly or with bad manners).
• Giving your opinion without being asked for it (when charity does not demand you to do so).
• Despising the point of view of others.
• Not being aware that all of the gifts that you have are on loan from God.
• Mentioning yourself as an example in conversation.
• Speaking badly about yourself so that others may form a good opinion of you or contradict you.
• Making excuses when rebuked.
• Hiding your faults from others so that they may not lose a good opinion of you.
• Being hurt that others are held in greater esteem than you.
• Refusing to carry out menial tasks.
• Being ashamed of not having certain possessions.

I could go on but I won't.  You get the idea.  Zig Zigler has long said that you can have anything you want in life as long as you make sure that others get what they want first.  That's a hard truth to recognize -- and an even harder truth to live.

The Recruiting Blogosphere is a small and concentrated group of recruiter, HR experts, and online employment companies that use blogs and social media to communicate their marketing and personal branding messages to the wider online world.

At last count, there are about 300 recruiting blogs that are regularly updated, and you can track them at several places in the recruiting blogosphere.

John Sumser has a large blogroll, as does Recruiting.com.  RecruitingFly is a search engine that allows you to search topics, and The Day In Recruiting is an RSS page of the latest updates for the most popular blogs.  Michael Specht runs an HR dominated community page, and ERE has its own list of online talents.

What did this mean for recruiting in 2006?  It meant that companies that sell their products to recruiters had a large sounding board of content-hungry bloggers looking to do amateur journalism on new products and new ideas.

DuctTapeMarketing Channels are an excellent way to expand the reach of the small business community (It's clear that John Jantsch has achieved that simply because you are reading this blog).  I wonder what new communities will form in 2007?

300 recruiting blogs, but 10,000 knitting blogs.  If you're a business blogger, is it better to be a purveyor of Applicant Tracking Software, or a online seller of yarn?

Hello and Greetings from the heart of the country. My name is Jim Durbin, and I'm new around here, just taking Harry's People Management blog for a spin to get a feel for it.

My bio is over there on the side, but just so you know, I've got 10 years of marketing and sales under my belt, six years as a technical recruiter, and a little under five years now as a blogger.  My role on this blog will be to talk to you about social networks, new media, blogging, and the recruiting process, in hopes that  hard-earned lessons in the trenches can help you with your job search.  So on with the show...

The Worker's Mantra:  Your Job Search is Your Job.

Stop for a second and repeat that.  Your Job Search is Your Job.  Your Job Search is Your Job.  It's one of those key statements we take for granted, but is true at all levels of the job search.

Level #1:  You're Unemployed.

If you're no currently working, your job search truly is your job.  The best way to approach your status is to look at your day like a 8 or 9 hour work-day where everything needs to be done.  You have deadlines, you need to be at work by a certain time, and you have to be in early the night since you have to get up for work in the morning.

The problem with unemployed time is you're paying twice for your time.  In addition to actual expenses going out the door, you're lacking incoming revenue, which should make you twice as eager to get money coming in.  Unemployment is not an extended vacation (those are known as sabbaticals), and yet many people treat the lack of a boss and a paycheck as an excuse to get all those unpaid vacation hours caught up on. 

It's a mistake.  The longer you are out of the workforce, the harder it is to find employment at or above the position you just left.  Don't get caught goofing off for two months and then finding yourself squeezed for cash and hoping for an offer.  Discipline yourself to treat a job search as a full-time job, and you'll be in a position to make the best decision when the offers do come.

Are you a Sales Manager?  Do you know a Sales Manager?  Good!  Send them this post.  They'll be glad you did.

Now then:  If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you might know that I was a frozen food trader throughout the 1990s.  A "trader" is basically a sales rep who does much of his own buying.

I learned more about the nature of negotiation, price competition, manufacturing, intermodal logistics, and international trade while working at AJC International than at any other time in my life.  It was awesome.

In 1997, I bought more than $14 million worth of frozen beef and pork for my own account -- and I sold almost $32 million in frozen food to more than 17 countries throughout the pacific rim.  Have you ever haggled with a beef packer in a falling shortrib market?  Me too!

None of this makes me a hotshot.  It simply means that AJC forced each trader to think like a small business owner, and it paid its traders based on two metrics:  Booked revenue and invoiced revenue -- which was "booked revenue adjusted for actual storage, handling, inspection, shipping, insurance, interest accrued on inventoried product, bank surcharges, customer credit, and quality claims."  Whew!

One of the great things AJC required its traders to do was "cost out" every trade on a spreadsheet.  For example, a trader couldn't simply buy a truckload of frozen chicken legquarters for USD 0.135/lb FOB from a packer in Fort Smith, AR and sell them to a Chinese distributor for USD 0.2425/lb CIF Qingdao without accruing (and sometimes negotiating) the costs listed above.

Once the costs were known, the trader would write up the sale on a 3-ply form resembling the spreadsheet -- with one ply going to Accounting (who would tie back to the trade any ensuing bills), one ply going to Logistics (who would manage the movement of the load), and one ply being kept by the trader (who would constantly review his portfolio of deals with Logistics to make sure that they shipped in accordance with the terms of the contract).

As each load moved through the international supply chain (the transit time was usually 40-50 days), each trader had to actually approve the vendor invoices that got tied back to their individual trades.

Just like in real life.

It was not uncommon to get hit with a "lumping" or "box stamping" bill on an odd pallet of product taken from inventory to make weight in a container.  If mis-accrued, those charges came out of my paycheck as they were tied back to my trades.  Ouch.  Loads that arrived late were deemed "out of contract" by customers and short-paid (or "marked to market").  Those costs were also deducted from my trading P&L.

There was even a political and currency "risk premium" that each trader had to accrue, depending on the product's destination.  Products sold to Iraq carried a higher premium than the same ones to Singapore.

From 1993-1999, I wrote up more than a thousand trades, and I knew my costs cold.  It just wasn't kosher to wing it.

A Temple of Self-Interest

There was very little random motion in AJC's organization.  Everyone from the traders to the shipping clerks showed up to make money.  To this day, AJC remains a temple of self-interest.  So effective was the AJC costing system that one of my first engagements as a self-employed marketing consultant was to introduce the system to a local importer of vitamin raw materials.

AJC's training is so good that its competitors call it "Atlanta Junior College" because so many of its traders have left to start their own niche trading companies.  Very successfully, I might add.

Reality Check for the Sales Staff

So it was with great interest that I read Jaclyne Badal's article "A Reality Check for the Sales Staff" in today's WSJ.  The article states that "squeezed by global price pressure and customer demands, companies often strike deals that generate revenue but not profit."

But companies are getting a clue:  Dow Chemical just implemented software to analyze the profitability of deals.  One tactic Dow uses to cut transportation costs is to consolidate shipments (AJC did that eons ago).

From Revenue to Profit

Many companies are trying to boost the bottom line by weeding out products and customers that generate revenue but little profit.  According to Ms. Badal's article, sales managers and sales consultants suggest:

1. Calculate the true cost of each sale -- including actual storage, handling, inspection, shipping, insurance, interest accrued on inventoried product, bank surcharges, customer credit, and quality claims.  If you can tie back your marketing expenses, so much the better.
2. Examine individual customers -- especially if they are high maintenance.  At AJC, we used to call bitchy, low-profit customers Ankle-biters.
3. Share information with customers to justify price increases -- or to jointly control trading costs.
4. Consider using software that will block (or require approval of) unprofitable deals.
5. Keep the sales team in the loop and consider adjusting commission formulas.

Sales Manager Job Search Tip:

If you are a sales manager who is looking for new career opportunities, please take a look at your accomplishments in light of these suggestions.

• To what extent have you improved your employer's profitability by helping it get its arms around its costs?
• Have you developed and implemented any systems to track revenues, costs per sale, and net profits?
• Have you partnered with your customers to lean-up the value chain?

What are you waiting for?  Do these things NOW -- and by all means make sure they are accurately reflected on your resume.  You'll make more money and enjoy a shorter, more effective job search for your efforts.

DID YOU KNOW ... that only 12% of the Internet's content is reachable by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN?  The other 88% of what's on the web is behind log-ins and registration fields -- so the major search engines cannot "spider" it.  Simply put, Google only gives you the tip of the iceberg.

As an executive recruiter, I use special software that gives me access to much of what's on the "Deep Web."  Very often, my candidates are the most thoroughly prepared candidates in any given executive search.  World-class company research gives them a serious advantage.

However, sometimes I use these software tools just for fun.  For example, today I used one of my tools to dredge up 16 freely accessible articles from the Harvard Business Review -- including the HBR classic "Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance."  See for yourself ...

1. Growth as a Process
2. How to Play to Your Strengths
3. Leadership in Your Midst - Tapping the Hidden Strength of Minority Executives
4. They're Not Employees, They're People
5. The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment
6. Schizophrenia at GM (by Jack Trout)
7. Competing on Analytics
8. Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance
9. How Strategists Really Think
10. Outsourcing Marketing
11. Why Satisfied Customers Defect
12. Managing for Creativity
13. Your Company's Secret Change Agents
14. The One Number You Need to Grow
15. All Strategy Is Local
16. It's Time to Retire Retirement

If you're pressed for time, marketers MUST check out articles # 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, and 15.  If you are in HR, be sure to read articles # 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, and 16.  Notice # 8 is on both lists.  I have bolded in red my personal favorites.

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