We caught a presentation at this month’s Niche Leadership Summit in Dallas, featuring Robert Hawthorne, head of an eponymous search firm based in Wilmington, North Carolina. Hawthorne has national and international search experience and has worked in a variety of core markets.
Among Hawthorne Search’s specialties are local search, and overall, his firm has operated extensively in sales, business development, marketing, e-commerce, and on high-level company leadership assignments, according to his website.
Hawthorne’s Niche Leadership Summit presentation was titled “Talent Trends in Media: Devising Strategies to Hire and Retain Top Talent.” We thought a followup interview, focused on the unique challenges of hiring media salespeople, was timely and relevant. Here’s our conversation.
Fox Tales: It’s a period of great change in media advertising sales. Once it was just the print magazine. Salespeople got the insertion order, and production handled the rest. Now it’s multichannel, requiring a great deal of creativity. How does a media company find sellers who thrive in this environment?
Robert Hawthorne.
Robert Hawthorne: Finding great talent that is capable of selling a complex multi-media product set is not easy. That being said, it has gotten easier in the sense that most advertising, publishing and media companies now expect their frontline sellers to sell both traditional and digital product sets. The days of segmented reps, only selling one side or the other, appear to be behind us.
The number-one suggestion I would make is to be a LinkedIn and local-event warrior. Get connected to local market sellers in all of the markets you serve, so when you post an opening on your LinkedIn feed it gets noticed by impact players in your market. Additionally, meeting as many local sellers at as possible at business mixers or trade shows is a great way to forge a personal connection with potential future candidates.
Fox Tales: And once you find great salespeople, how does a company train them?
Hawthorne: Training them is an entirely different set of challenges. Ideally you won’t need to train them on digital products but merely on your processes, software, and capabilities. There are some great companies in our space that do digital-sales training. Ryan Dohrn [owner of the Niche Media Conference] comes to mind immediately.
Fox Tales: What forms of comp and other benefits (career path, incentives, continuous learning, and so on) do these kinds of sellers want?
Hawthorne: Media sellers are ideally looking for a role where they develop new business, but also walk into some existing accounts. Many candidates won’t jump at a role where the expectation is 100% to hunt up a new book of business. Additionally, sellers love inbound leads and referrals. If you have a program where your sales people can win business from any sort of inbound lead or program, it will be a compelling feature for interested candidates. Compensation is important, as is the ability to work from home or be in a hybrid situation.
Fox Tales: Back to the premise of your session: What are the tips and techniques you’d recommend to media operators who hire you? In short, tell us a bit about your session.
Hawthorne: We typically fill about 50-75 sales or sales-leadership jobs over the course of a calendar year. The clients we have the best success rate with are those that partner with us, share feedback on what works and doesn’t in a candidate, and those that have a defined interview process. If you find a great sales candidate, there is a good chance that another company is also interviewing that person. Make sure to tell the candidate how many interviews there are going to be and get them through the process in about two weeks. If you don’t move, someone else likely will offer them a role first.
Fox Tales: What have I missed in our discussion? There is a ton of stuff to cover in this fascinating topic.
Hawthorne: it is a very fragmented job market. Some skills and backgrounds are in high demand, with most revenue-producing roles topping the list. Companies are hiring, but an equal number of firms are reducing headcount. In my opinion, it is neither an employer nor an employee driven market. It really depends on the role and the location right now.