Ben Franklin was wrong. It's not just death and taxes that are certain. There is also spring cleaning! Here in New England, that means sweeping out the sand and salt from the garage, cleaning and installing the screens before the mosquitoes materialize and, if you're really motivated, tackling a few closets.

My closet cleaning, because it's not done every year (and I've liked in my home for 30 years!), feels like an archeological dig. And this past weekend, in the upstairs den closet, I hit the mother lode: I unearthed (drum roll, please) an actual Rolodex!

Yes, a genuine, plastic, round, 10" with sliding panel, circa 1972, Rolodex. The cards within are all hand- typed, with names, addresses and telex numbers from all over the world. On some cards, handwritten notes were made to indicate restaurant preferences, spouse's name, etc. Really quite charming when you think about it!

This relic belongs to my husband Don, who has spent much of his career doing business internationally. And while Don was chuckling as he flipped through the cards, I was left thinking how much the world has changed. I thought too that there are a lot of Rolodexes out there — now all digital — that while newer than Don's keepsake, are just as useless.


Downsizing Impacts Sales Revenue

Needless to say, the current economic "challenges" have forced many companies to let go employees — at all levels. Salespeople who sell into these companies are now finding that their contacts there may very well be gone. And, for most salespeople, that's like starting all over again, a process which can be time-consuming and challenging, and which will push out the timeline on your sales revenue.

This means that hiring managers have to identify salespeople who have good-to-great prospecting skills . Simply put, look for candidates who put the emphasis on HOW they know — not WHO they know!

So here are a few ways you'll know if you've got the right guy or gal:

• Activity: Get granular when interviewing about past prospecting activity. What was the level of phone prospecting activity? How many cold (or warm) calls did they have to make to get one qualified prospect? Good salespeople always have a handle on the numbers and you should be able to get some firm metrics here. If you can't, that's a clear sign you may not be talking to a proven prospector.

• Support: Does your candidate come from a company that had lead generation or heavy marketing support for prospects? Were they given super-qualified leads to start with, or was every potential prospect one they identified themselves? Get a clear understanding of their past situations and how leads were handled. Ask the candidate to describe the "lead flow" from unqualified "suspect" to prospect. If the candidate came from a low-support environment where they generated their own leads, ask them to describe in detail the process they used to get from suspect to prospect to customer.

• Detective Work: This is an extremely important quality and one that may be harder to get a good sense of. Simply put, great salespeople are usually pretty good detectives. They are ALWAYS looking for names of potential buyers with new companies and they relentlessly snoop all around their existing customers for opportunities to sell in other departments of the company. In other words, they literally "sniff" out opportunity! Ask how they work a trade show for leads and prospects; find out how they get deeper into existing accounts looking for new opportunities. Again, you should get firm, definitive answers and a few good stories too!

• Creativity: Here's a true story of prospecting creativity: Back "in the day," a friend of mine was selling for Prime Computer. He was covering the Southeast. He dialed a wrong number while prospecting and instead of calling the Atlanta office of HP, he accidentally reached the main office of Coca-Cola. Quick thinker that he is, instead of apologizing that he had dialed the wrong number, he probed the operator until he got the name of the head buyer for their IT hardware. That misdialed prospecting call ended up to be a $250,000 initial sale!
  
  To find out if you're talking to someone equally creative, here's a great question: "Tell me about the best, or most fun, sale you ever made — from start to finish."