Matt Stephens

In the current job market, both job seekers and companies are facing significant challenges. Drawing from recent interactions with job seekers and businesses struggling to hire top talent, this blog post delves into the realities of today's job market.

As a sales professional, you know that prospecting is a necessity in order to maintain a book of business/pipeline. However, you also know that it is typically one of the most dreaded sales activities. If you are struggling to create and maintain a prospecting plan, you may want to pause and take a close look at your “BAT-ing average”. What are your behaviors, attitudes, and techniques that could currently be helping or hurting your success in prospecting?

You hired someone, who by everyone involved signed off on their dossier, motivation and culture fit. You believe with some minimum onboarding, he should be able to get up to speed quickly, and start producing.

Over the years, we’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for Business level positions. The percentage of candidates that stand out is depressingly a low percentage, and getting lower by the day.

Last Sunday I participated in and witnessed over 20 thousand runners achieve their goals of completing either a marathon, half marathon or 5k run/walk at the Detroit Free Press International Festival of Races. We ran to set personal bests, to see where our bodies and minds could take us, or to honor a loved one. We set goals to complete a distance or time never completed before, and followed a training program to guide us day by day, and week by week for months leading up to the competition. The drive, determination and desire to achieve were prevalent on runners of all ages.