Everyone knows the tried-and-true business axiom: Grade-A managers
hire Grade-A people while Grade-B managers hire Grade-C people. The
logic is simple; weaker managers hire less competent people because
they don’t want competition or conflict. Stronger managers look for
people who are competent and motivated people who are able to catapult
their organizations to higher levels.
But is there such a thing as hiring out of your league? Is it
impossible to hire talent that, for lack of a better description, are
simply too good for your organization? The manager of a AAA baseball
team may be the best skipper in any dugout, but he’ll never have the
buying power or the draw to attract Major League talents such as Dustin
Pedroia, Josh Beckett, Jason Bay (yes, I have a bias for the Red Sox.
Sue me.)
That was the mentality of Jay Kirby, an owner of Troubadour, a
Houston-based security and telephony integrator. While Kirby believes
his business is head and shoulders above his local competition, he
believed that he was relatively restricted to looking for talent from
his local pool and certainly not beyond his level. When it came time to
look for a sales leader, the notion of pulling in someone with national
experience and out of a vendor’s shop was simply out of the question.
But Kirby was giving advice by a mentor, “go out and get the person
you want” for the job that needed to be done. He reached out to Bob
Layton, the Midwest sales manager for Cisco Systems, the guy who managed
direct and partner relationships. What he wanted was leads for sales
pros that could help Troubadour grow. His criteria: He wanted someone
like just like Layton.
“That’s when he said, ‘why don’t you hire me?” Kirby says.
The idea came as a shock to Kirby. Never in his wildest dreams did
he think that a company such as Troubadour could attract and land a
significant talent. For Layton, though, the attractiveness of
Troubadour came down to one of lifestyle and career opportunity.
“I got to the point where I thought I had to make a change,” Layton
says. “It came to me that I was going to have a wonderful and rewarding
job [at Cisco] or I would have a chance to take control of my career.”
Conventional wisdom holds that those who work for vendors will
always work for vendors, with a few exceptions. There are numerous
examples of vendor sales executives that have either reached the top of
their ladders or retire into the channel. For example, Harvey Najim
started his company, Sirius Computer Solutions, in 1980 after a lengthy
and rewarding career at IBM. Many solution providers have graduated
into the vendor ranks, too, such as Tiffany Bova, who ran a VAR and
then went on to run channels at Gateway. But relatively few vendor
executives make what some consider the backwards trek.
The recession and a highly competitive vendor world is changing the
conventional hiring equation where a solution provider can, in many
cases, attract the talents of someone like Layton. Compensation is
often an issue, but the disparities between what a vendor such as Cisco
pays sales executives and what a solution provider can afford is not
too great. This is especially true for salespeople since they’re paid
largely on sales commissions and goals—the more they sell, the more
they make for themselves and the company.
But it’s more than just the recession that’s changing this equation.
It’s often a matter of lifestyle choices. Advancing through the vendor
ranks often requires extensive travel, frequent relocation and ferrous
competition for fewer higher level jobs. Going to work for a solution
provider comes with the pressure for performance, but not the same
pressure to constantly move and travel.
What Troubadour has discovered is that you really don’t know what
kind of talent you can get until you ask for it. Kirby echoes the
lesson of “go get the person you want” to his peers, because the world
is no longer divided between the Major Leagues and the AAA farm teams.
“My mindset has changed dramatically,” Kirby says. “Going forward,
we’re going to be looking for great people because we have the ability
to attract top talent.”
Lawrence M. Walsh is vice president and group publisher of Channel Insider. Read his research reports at [CI] Perspectives.
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