TalentMatch CEO Jay Martin provides a WIN-WIN for both Clients and Candidates
The Follow-Up Blog highlights industry trends, insights and keys to success from today’s top sales leaders and executives. Today we caught up with Jay Martin, CEO of TalentMatch, a recruiting partner that also offers sales consulting services.
Jay Martin had a long career in sales for large marketplaces before starting his own endeavor with TalentMatch. Jay has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, focusing on International Business. Jay’s unique combination of progressive-sales thinking coupled with his thirst for international expansion has made him an accomplished leader in the sales industry. I caught up with Jay via email this past week to learn more about his experience and approach to sales.
Originally posted on The Follow-Up Blog at: www.follow-up.io/single-post/2017/11/07/TalentMatch-CEO-Jay-Martin-provides-a-WIN-WIN-for-both-Clients-and-Candidates
MH: What’s the “elevator pitch” for your company?
JM: TalentMatch partners with clients to provide the recruiting of extraordinary sales and sales leadership talent, coaching, strategic planning, training, and process improvement consulting. We understand that hiring, managing, and motivating a high-performance sales team will result from acquiring, expanding, and retaining long-term profitable customers. We are dedicated to improving our client’s business processes through the identification and qualification of talented hires. In our sponsored candidates we assist in their preparation that promotes the confidence needed for the candidate to convey their skill sets for the position we recommend. Having a “play to win” attitude is a WIN-WIN for all parties involved as the TalentMatch interview experience allows for our clients to see the very best qualities in our sponsored candidates and see enough to know whether or not they are a fit for their respective organizations.
What is your role and how are you impacting the business at a high level?
While I am involved in some phase or component of every candidate’s placement cycle, my role is directed at either expanding the business with our current clients or engaging with potential new clients not only in the document management space but software sales, capital equipment sales, consulting, leadership development seminars, and sales and sales leadership training.
Why did you choose to do this?
As a former Vice President of Sales for one of the largest marketplaces in the country back in my time, this next business chapter is a natural progression of a long history of participation and engagement in sales evaluation and acquisition on many levels. Having the opportunity to create a WIN-WIN for both client and candidate is a HUGE blessing for me.
Of your past professional experiences, which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?
My time in senior sales leadership positions in the document management space, as well as other industries in sales and marketing and time as a private consultant in sales and sales leadership training seminars.
In Sales leadership positions, I learned intimately the challenges and nuances of talent acquisition at a high level. I had the privilege of identifying, hiring and training talent that grew into high octane six-figure achievers and multiple President’s Club Award winners.
In other sales/marketing positions, I expanded my business acumen and expertise beyond the document management space
In private consulting and recruiting, I remain in the center of what matters most for sales organizations, which is the effective instruction of sales and sales leadership on the fine art of upgrading their skill sets and sales effectiveness to increase their sales productivity.
Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?
On my very first day working with a major player in the document management space, the position I interviewed for was no longer available and my new assignment went from running a fully staffed and experienced sales team with a marque brand name and enormous market share to a position leading a sales team with minimal name recognition and zero sales people for a sales team. The first day on the job was finding out that my assignment, not what I expected, was a complete start up with minimal market share and zero salespeople for an authorized headcount of eight sales executives.
What I quickly learned was that if there was ever an opportunity to advance your career post promotion, it would be to start from a “smoking hole”.
As the saying goes, sometimes in life, you “can’t fall off the floor”.
Hard work and good fortune gave me the privilege of shaping a new sales team, generating solid sales in a selling environment that often pitted them against sales people working for the same company, but representing a different technology. We were the sales team that was the “little engine” that could and despite all odds, became an effective sales force in the marketplace with President’s Club award winners.
The lesson in this experience was truly reliving the adage, that nothing will ever happen in your life, personally or professionally unless the pursuit starts with a strong and unshakeable belief in yourself. This will always be the starting point of an effective “DO’ER” in any level and in any walk in life.
What is your team currently using for your sales stack? A major CRM platform? Anything else? What have you found good & bad about each?
Currently each Director on staff is using their personal talent/candidate tracking system that they have been comfortable with. A uniform CRM platform is in our strategic plan.
How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?
This is a DAY vs. NIGHT comparison. Back when I started, the document management space was referred to as the “speeds and feeds” business. A “technical” specialist or senior salesperson would be differentiated only by the fact that they could more effectively demonstrate or articulate the benefit of the two sided copying feature.
Today, given the confluence of shared new technologies, particularly in the software world, where it was once unheard of, but today front line sales people in the document management space are now being picked off on a regular basis by companies such as HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and others. Again, there was zero recognition of cross transferrable skills from each of these sectors and now there is a confluence and “crossing over” that is now more common than ever.
The future is now taking shape where many an organization in the document management space will divide the discipline between sales and software knowledge and application left to specialists to a single individual with both expertise. This is the “future state” that is now morphing throughout every sales team across the country in this space.
What do you wish you had learned before you were 30 that you didn’t, and had to learn later?
That becoming an “owner”, being the captain of your own company could have happened sooner, yet my focus and the corporate opportunities where I advanced my career made this decision difficult early in my career and yet more timely later in my life.
What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?
Research businesses or trends or possibilities based on your temperament. This is key. “Know thyself”. Are you still okay being in front of people dealing with people issues all of the time? What is important to you early in your career is based on a value/ambition quotient that changes over time. What is important to you today, may not be as important to you later in your life. You have to get up every morning not thinking that the day ahead is going to “work” and getting back on you “job”. If you are lucky enough to be doing what you want to be doing at the back end of your career, it will never feel like work, for the rest of your days. Again, “know thyself” and match your career work with your temperament.
Surround yourself with active, creative, high energy brain power. Often times your “brand” is truly the sum of all who you surround yourself with. I am blessed to be surrounded by some very special people in my work and personal life.
Lastly, take more risks. The time to take huge leaps into the deep end of the pool is when you are young and early in your career. “Fail your way” to success is a phrase that meant a lot to me throughout my career. “Playing the fool” along the way is for “none but the brave” and can bring about phenomenal personal growth.
Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for your company or you personally, or it could be your thoughts about how college/grad school or your first job impacted your journey to success!
With regard to sales talent and the corporate world’s need to have quality sales talent representing them in their GO-TO-MARKET strategy, there will always be a market for the sponsored candidate who is represented by quality, ethical placement agencies who are devoted to nothing other than the successful placement of the candidate and the WIN-WIN for the clients they represent.
Thanks for your insights and keys to success Jay! For anyone interested in a WIN-WIN proposition to either staff their sales team or advance your career, check out TalentMatch. And if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!
