Olly Watson: sales, marketing and retail.

Today, Olly Watson is regional managing director of recruitment specialists Michael Page International, a consultancy which recruits across the management spectrum; its sales division tends to operate in the mid-to-upper echelons of the career path, at the £30-90k, account-manager-to-sales-director level.

His responsibilities stretch across the sales, marketing and retail divisions as well as the Middle-East region. With 280 people reporting to him, Watson’s current role is largely people management with a broad business-development brief.

Worst recession since the war

However, back in 1991 with the UK facing the worst recession since the war, things were very different: it wasn’t an auspicious time for a young graduate from Bristol and Toulouse Universities to emerge, fresh back from France – broke, onto the jobs market looking to make his mark in the UK. Such was the prospect facing a 21-year-old Watson.

He admits that he arrived at his current destination ‘through accident’ much as many people get into his line of work. ‘Very few people, particularly in 1994, woke up and wanted to be recruitment consultants. It was a pretty young and immature business in those days even then.’

Watson: onetime ad sales executive.

In a story that will chime with some of our previous Profile interviewees, Watson was living at home and presented with an ultimatum to find a paying job, one day when his father brought home the Guardian with the media sales jobs in it. ‘I applied; by Thursday I had a job,’ he recalls.

VNU ad sales

First stop was trade publishers VNU, selling space and earning £9,500 with OTE (on-target earnings) of £13,000. ‘I was hopeless at it for the first three months.’ Nevertheless, life at VNU’s Broadwick Street offices in Soho had its compensations; it was a bit of a party with 300 people of a similar age – ‘an extension of university really’. But, by month four the penny dropped, when Watson was read the riot act – about getting up in the morning and coming in without a hangover and ‘all the usual stuff that 21-year-olds struggle with’.

By month seven, when many of his colleagues had left to find the jobs they really wanted to do, Watson found himself assistant advertising manager for the now defunct monthly Financial Director magazine. Operating as part of a team with what he describes as a ‘siege mentality’ he is, however, grateful for learning about selling in a difficult environment with a difficult proposition: he admits to enjoying the responsibility and the job, selling in the middle of a recession.

His growing confidence was reinforced by his father, who told him his new-found skill would stand him in good stead. By contrast, his university colleagues were largely unemployed, with the promised high-flying roles as international bankers never materialising. In advertising agencies, too, where Watson had experienced a placement, they were ‘chucking people out the windows’ just to balance the books – ‘it was carnage!’.

Watson: from Tarmac to Michael Page.

Gravel

Week four, in the middle of his secondments, Watson was called into his manager’s office to be told that the company was a bit short of salespeople: ‘There’s a Rover 214 in the car park. You need to head up to head office in Wolverhampton and you’re going out on the road for a few months, selling… gravel!’

Watson continues wryly: ‘Sure enough, a year later I was still doing that and, clearly, there was no management training scheme. It was good experience because all these things are good experience, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.’

Difficult presentation

However, everything was to change when a deal went sour. In Huddersfield (Olly obviously gets to all the glamorous places – Ed) with his boss to sell to the University of Huddersfield as part of the construction of a whole new campus, there were recriminations in the hotel afterwards following a difficult presentation and a call from the vice-chancellor that Tarmac was off the deal. Leafing through the paper in the hotel bar, Watson came across an advertisement for Michael Page.

‘It was all the things that you wanted to hear at that point in your life – dynamic, forward-thinking, progressive, growing. It said phone this number any time between seven and ten in the evening. I thought it was unusual but very acceptable and I phoned up and that’s how I ended up in recruitment.’

The environment proved just right – ‘dynamic, young, goal-oriented and interesting’, according to Watson.

Recruiting salespeople

Turning to a question that must be uppermost in the minds of most sales managers and recruiters – how difficult is it to recruit a good salesperson? – Watson acknowledges that this is one of the areas or the area fraught with the most difficulty. ‘When you interview a salesperson with some track record in selling, if they’ve not learnt to sell themselves, by the time you interview them, what on earth can they do? So, as a result, a lot of very average salespeople perform pretty well in interview.

‘A lot of sales hiring is still done the old way, on a personality basis, line managers recruiting in their own image; it’s based on team-fit; it’s these type of criteria that are forming the basis of people’s decision-making and, as a result, a lot of it’s wrong because it’s very, very subjective.’ A combination of poor hiring processes and salespeople’s ability to create plausible interview stories makes it a very difficult hiring environment.

Not many good salespeople around

Additionally, says Watson: ‘There are not many very good salespeople around anyway.’ Why’s that? Because up until 10-15 years ago sales was often the part of the company where people were shoved if they were not technical or professional. ‘It was always the poor relation in any organisation.’ The general pool of talent, therefore, was very limited in a sales environment, according to Watson, though he is quick to stress that the situation has now improved. ‘It is still an issue for a lot of companies; they have remarkably under-qualified people in sales (from a technical, commercial and business-awareness perspective).’

Watson: 13 years of growth.

Fragmented market

At the same time, the sales recruitment market is massively fragmented. ‘There are literally hundreds and hundreds of competitors out there.’ These are not just small regional operators; the large high-street operators like Manpower and Adecco also do sales recruitment as do the top-end search firms. ‘Sales is a bit of a ‘have-a-go area’ for an awful lot of recruitment businesses,’ he explains.

‘We are the largest sales recruiter, but in the context of a very fragmented market.’ That means Watson estimates Michael Page’s market share as significantly under 5%. ‘So the opportunity for us to continue to grow is absolutely there every single year.’ It’s definitely the one to crack, Watson admits, while also acknowledging the difficulties inherent in market with such fragmented and regional characteristics.

Although he has little time for recruiting himself, Watson was pretty much hands-on when his remit was limited to the sales division. Then, he dealt with sales directors whenever possible as well as sales managers and HR (human resources) departments.

‘Our preferred port of call in every company was the sales director. They’re ultimately the decision-maker; they’re also people who tend to be prepared to make their own decisions. So, if you can sell to them and build good relationships with them, it tends to be a very lucrative environment in terms of conversion rates. You sell at the top as much as possible but, if you have a choice between the sales director and HR director, you sell to the sales director as you’re likely to have more common ground.’

Watson: consultancies here to stay.

Rapid online growth

For the future, Watson sees online recruitment as growing rapidly but only in so far as it’s a replacement of traditional forms of media advertising. ‘Everybody has seen declines – the trade press, the national press; nobody has escaped the move from ‘off-line’ to online.’

However, Watson doesn’t see recruitment consultancies being squeezed out in the rush to online. ‘I believe fundamentally online recruiting will never replace recruitment consultancies because I don’t think anyone is ever likely to recruit their next sales manager without meeting them and interviewing them. That’s the nature of sales: it’s not an area that’s a tick-box hiring exercise.’

Online is the shop window so far as sales recruitment is concerned. With a nod towards ModernSelling.com, Watson foresees a move towards industry-specific sites that incorporate a job-search capability and away from the large job aggregator and pure job-search sites.

See Olly Watson’s Top Three Sales Recruitment Tips here.

My Question / Comment Is...