Hiring the Best of the Best in Sales

I saw a question on linked that really resonated

” I have invested in an early stage start-up and they are struggling with sales. How do hire the best of the best”

You may have worked out this is very much on the money for what we do.And relates to much of the content of this blog.

So the first point I would make is that the best of the best is a rare and often apparently expensive purchase (they are only expensive if they don’t deliver) . This IMO should be treated as non trivial and consequently your hiring process needs to be serious.

The majority of hiring decisions fail 80% of the time. This is largely because the hiring process and the on boarding process are flawed.
Taking on boarding first, most companies’ actions indicate that all you need to do with a salesperson is have them turn up and give them their carkeys, cell phone, laptop and the yellow pages.

If you think you have someone good (more on that later) then make sure they turn up to a good marketing plan and at the very least a qualified target list that has been researched for them. Better still partner them with a good telemarketing set up so they can spend their days in front of prospects uncovering value and solving problems using you product.

On the hiring process their is strong evidence is that there are specifics that make for success in sales.Dave Kurlan for instance identifies 21 competences. Good pre hire screening will give you 90% plus certainty that your sales hire will work out and be successful for you. Even marginally appropriate screening lifts your chance of the perfect hire from 20% to 40%.

1 resume, 2 interviews and a presentation just don’t cut the mustard.

The Resume is written to be a selling document, it will plaster over cracks and include marginal claims. Even if the claims are more than marginal, to recreate the performance you need to totally replicate the environment.

The best of the best will recreate the results wherever they are. But you need to screen them to identify them.

Interviews are, by their nature subjective. Many sales people are charismatic, how do know if they are tough, if they, inter alia, have a high need for approval, if they will cold call, if they have money perception issues. How can
an hours conversation determine this?

And as for the presentation

To summarise. Source (adverts, Monster etc., best of all partner with a good recruiter), Screen, Interview with the screening results as your pathway, appoint, follow through for at least 90 days after they start. Count your profits
The first point I would make is that the best of the best is a rare and often apparently expensive purchase. This IMO should be treated as non trivial and consequently your hiring process needs to be serious.

Sales Hiring Mistakes cost

“I adopted the online recruiting tool after we had the reports done on the existing team…Our ability to ‘weed out’ the fakes with this tool saved us so much time in getting the initiall [interviews] wrong it was invaluable. We actually did a detailed study on the cost of getting a sales person wrong and it was around $4.5M in lost revenue.” Graham Eastwick, Dexion

Express Screens – the ultimate sales hiring tool Failed hiring is one of the highest costs that any sales operation incurs. * How much have hiring mistakes cost you.   ?

Few sales organisations use sales specific evaluation and screening tools to move from the only 20% effective CV 2 interview and a presentation.

http://www.huntersm.com/pre_hiring_assessments

10 Reasons for HR and Sales Management to Hire Winning Salespeople Using Assessments

With Thanks to Dave Kurlan

And the one big reason to get sales hiring right

Let’s begin with three management beliefs about assessments as they relate to hiring salespeople:

“If we use an assessment in our hiring process, we’ll be making a more informed decision than if we don’t.”  True!

“A personality assessment, behavioural styles assessment or aptitude test will do just fine.”  False!

“We should narrow the field down to our final candidates and then assess.”  False!

There are two variables that have a huge impact on your success using an assessment in the hiring process.

• The first is which assessment you use.
  
• The second is where in the process you use it.

If you don’t use an assessment that was conceptualized, built, developed, enhanced and perfected specifically for sales, you are using the wrong assessment for the application.  Technically, you can use any assessment in the process but assessments  that have been adapted for sales applications leave a lot to be desired.  The single most important conclusion that you must read – whether the candidate will succeed in a specific sales role, in your company and industry, selling to your specific market, with its decision makers, challenges, competition, margins, sell cycle and asking price – simply cannot be determined from a modified assessment.

Should an assessment use the same criteria for a company that sells high-ticket complex solutions to CEO’s as it does for a company selling office supplies to administrative assistants?  Rule #1 – You must choose the right assessment.

Variable number two is the step in the process where the assessment gets utilized.  While your comfort level may be in assessing your final candidates, there are several compelling reasons not to do it at that time.

Compelling Reason 1 -
If you’ve already fallen in love with the candidates, it doesn’t matter what the assessment says.
You’ll agree with the findings if they support your candidate and disagree with the findings if they describe your candidate in a less than favorable light.
For an objective intelligence that you can use in the interview, assess prior to the interview.  But just how far prior?

Compelling Reason 2 – Assessments help you conduct a more objective hiring process – that’s good.
But if you use an assessment it must be validated, consistent and reliable in its findings.
If you use an assessment, you must assess all of your candidates.
As soon as CVs arrive electronically and show relevant experience, they represent candidates.
In order to avoid compliant, you must assess in the first step of the process if you are to assess at all.  That’s very compelling!

Compelling Reason 3 – This could be the most compelling reason of all.
Our data indicates that the clients who assess immediately following receipt of a resume yield nearly 50% more hirable candidates.
Wow!  In an economy where it is becoming increasingly difficult to find candidates, a 50% increase is very compelling indeed.

Compelling Reason 4 – Companies suck at hiring salespeople so you’d better get it right
The fact that companies get 50% more hirable candidates points to the fact that companies are totally overlooking the right candidates and including too many of the wrong candidates.
This prevents you from making bad choices that impact your final pool of candidates.

Compelling Reason 5 – Time saving.
When you assess in the first step of the process, you can totally automate the process using, of all things, Microsoft Outlook!
You won’t have to look at a resume, talk to a candidate, do a thing, until you have your pool of hirable candidates!
What a time saver.

Compelling Reason 6 – You’ll save money.  It’s much less costly to buy a license to screen on an unlimited basis than it is to pay each time to use an assessment.

Compelling Reason 7 – Standardisation.
By moving the assessment to the first step of the sequence, you’ll create a formalized recruiting process that can be duplicated across your company by all managers.

Compelling Reason 8 – You will use the exact same hiring criteria on every candidate.  That’s not only very Equality compliant, it’s smart recruiting.

Compelling Reason 9 – You’ll actually develop the ability to see the difference between those who will succeed and those who pretend to be successful.

Compelling Reason 10 – Better information for interviews
Think of the information you’ll have available for the phone interview and the first face to face interview.
That information, along with a hirable/not hirable recommendation, will come in handy when you need to make a quick decision on a candidate.
Today, if you can’t pull the trigger on a candidate quickly, you will lose the candidate to a company that will.
If you need to pull the trigger quickly, you had better know whether it’s a candidate who will succeed!

Why your top salespeople fail

With thanks to Dave Kurlan
Every company, with or without a salesforce, has a selling model. I know of one company whose model is “we don’t believe in sales”. It works for them, but it won’t work for many others.
What happens when you force yourself into a model? My wife did that with her company. She is a very driven, gifted, caring, giving, talented, brilliant, effective, successful leader, entrepreneur, philanthropist and marketer. Because of that rare combination of attributes and talents, she is in demand as a speaker, board member, fund-raiser, volunteer, and champion. In addition to being the CEO of her company, she is also the chair of the non-profit she founded, the incoming chair of a non-profit on whose board she sits and the vice-chair of the local chamber of commerce board.
She is a terrific wife and mom to our son, who is frequently mentioned in this Blog. When you add up all of those important responsibilities and learn that she is also the only salesperson for her company, how much time do you suppose that leaves for selling? Exactly. So her selling model is a combination of self-imposed time limitations, along with a strong need to be selective and effective. When she meets with a potential client, there is business to be done!

What happens when you compare a model like Deborah’s – if you’re gonna go hunting you’d better come back with dinner – with a model that has its salespeople making 3 sales calls per day, or around 60 per month? Do you think those salespeople come back with 60 new customers or orders per month? No chance! They probably sell 10. That’s why they’re on so many calls.
What would happen if you told those salespeople that you only wanted them to go on 30 calls per month, but you want them to be a lot more selective, and you expected them to close 50% instead of 10%?
I’ll tell you what would happen, your A players would close 50% of them and your B’s would probably get 33% (the original 10 deals with half the work and half the resources). Your C’s? Same as today – they’d still fail to get the 10 you needed.
You need to develop your B’s and replace your C’s. The only problem is that you aren’t really able to identify who your A’s, B’s and C’s are. You think you can but you’re measuring them by the dollars they produce, the worst possible measurement of potential, because the dollars are not necessarily the result of their efforts today as much as the dollars may be the result of their previous efforts or the efforts of others over time.

For more www.huntersm.com

Do DiSC and Myers Briggs cut the Mustard

As part of the trend to reduce the costs of hiring many companies are turning to testing and assessment to validate their hiring decisions. Most prominent amongst these – maybe because they have been around so long – are DiSC and Myers Briggs (MBTI) based personality tests. Both are based on using paired adjective choices to determine personality traits. Neither of these are job specific, but they have been shoehorned into all sorts of versions to try and measure beliefs about what different jobs require.

It’s a bit like using a panel van to take the family to the movies and carry 20 tons of steel. Both tasks need a vehicle – the family need 4 seats and some comfort, a small turning circle and a heater. The steel needs an articulated truck. The only real similarity is they are vehicles Some Background DISC development began in the early 1900s when the US Army asked psychologist William Marston to investigate why different soldiers who received the same training behaved differently. He took 10 years to produce a report “Emotions of Normal People.”

Soon after publication an unknown psychologist used the theory of mental energy that Marston developed and produced an easy to administer pencil-and-paper test based on pairs of adjectives which were added together to produce scores for dominance, extraversion, need for security, and need for structure. Nothing about job behaviour anywhere and certainly nothing claimed as predictive of any behaviour – let alone job performance.

Still “When the only tool you know how to use is hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” That is, to many uninformed DISC users, every hiring problem looked like a DISC profile. And this hammer has been used on many nails – even one using devoutness as a measure !

MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s theories about psychological type preferences. Jung’s book “Psychological Types,” Myers and Briggs developed the tests and tested their work on friends and family during the 1940s in an attempt to resolve conflicts and help match people and work. MBTI classifies individuals along four dimensions according to how they seem to see the world

1. Energy; Extravert (likes to interact) / Introvert (prefers to concentrate)

2. Attention; Sensing – Focuses on Facts- Practical and methodical/Intuitive Focuses on possibilities, theoretical and leaps forward

3. Decision-Making; Thinking (T): Makes decisions believes in justice Feeling (F): Makes decisions based on desire for harmony. Believes in compassion.

4. Lifestyle; Judging (J): Proceeds towards goals in an organized way. plans and comes to decisions. Perceiving (P): Spontaneous. Likes to gather information and keep options open.

But, at the end of the day MBTI is a clinical tool that requires trained experts to interpret and make judgements. This is just too labour intensive, too clunky. It is also difficult to relate MBTI to a valid, predictive job performance

At the end of the day scores on personality tests are just not highly predictive of performance. As a simple example The drunk at the bar lurches from extraversion as his inhibitions disappear, but lurches into introverted concentration as he pours more booze into his system, probably past a little bit of dominance It’s all too fluffy …. It is bad science to pretend that either of these tests accurately predict managerial performance, or anything else especially sales performance

But hey quasi science is better than no science isn’t it?

As for us. We don’t pretend to know what works for Accountants, Architects or anything up to and including Zoologists. Except stopping at S we do know what works for Salespeople and Sales managers.

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Want to develop sales A performers Take the sales team challenge

The graph below (from CIPD I believe) indicates the relative accuracy of evaluation methods. I’m grateful to Sally Duff for challenging what I was saying about this. I imagine that we may continue to disagree about the sequence for pre hiring evaluation . She favours interview, evaluation, interview, I favour Evaluation interview, interview  as this removes the fact that the interviewer has and will deploy their own prejudices. There is a place for interview, of course, but I believe that much of this is to do with personal fit

The Base Four Selling system

Why BaseFour?
Quite simply in the good times selling can get to be a pretty simple pastime. Salespeople manage accounts or proceed from First meeting to close maybe via a presentation and proposal – prospects order and as long as you stuff enough suspects into the pipeline orders fall out the other end.
In downturns, unless you create value for the client, and do it every time, then you reach the stage when closings are delayed and whatever the amount of that goes in to the pipeline sales fall because clients cannot see sufficient reason to buy, and deals get shut off. This is because salespeople get in the habit of going from beginning to end without doing the right stuff in the middle.
And to compound the problem account managers are too busy topping the numbers tree by taking orders they fail to continually re-establish value with the senior decision makers So when non core costs are, inevitably, cut your services and products get cut too.

BaseFour seeks to re-establish the value equation with your prospects and clients and put you in a position to take your competitors established business from under their noses, not with better products but by better establishing the value of your proposition.

Do this one low cost, high impact thing and you will grow market share and come out of the recession better able to exceed the growth curve.

What is BaseFour?
Base Four is a simple to follow process that uses four steps from Prospect to Closable. It works for nearly all products and most sectors. It is about RoI and creating and realising the value of your product.
The Base Four system is an anglicised version of the successful Baseline Sellingtm system developed by Dave Kurlan of Dave Kurlan associates. We have taken out the references to baseball- which few Brits understand, but retained the principles and structure of the system. Baseline selling – the book can be bought from our web site www.huntersm.com.

The competencies your salespeople need

I’m finding that I’m having to tell people about these competencies so much lately that publishing them here will save a lot of typing. The sample size for this is over 400,000 salespeople and the validated accuracy is 95%. I believe that you cannot determine how some one will perform, based on these without a proper evaluation routine.

1. Has Written Goals

2. Follows Sales Plan

3. Has Positive Outlook

4. Takes Responsibility

5. Strong Self Confidence

6. Supportive Beliefs

7. Controls Emotions

8. Doesn’t Need Approval

9. Recovers From Rejection

10. Comfortable Talking About Money

11. Supportive Buy Cycle

12. Consistent, Effective Prospecting

13. Reaches Decision Maker

14. Effective Listening/Questioning

15. Early Bonding & Rapport

16. Uncovering Actual Budgets

17. Discovering Why Prospects Buy

18. Qualifies Proposals & Quotes

19. Gets Commitments and Decisions

20. Strong Desire for Success

21. Commitment – Doing What It Takes for Succes

After years of leading sales teams to success, recruiting sales people and being a head hunter for sales people I know that CV 2 interviews and a presentation don’t work. There are too many CVs/Resumes out there they show short time tenure maybe 1 or 2 years to be ignored.

If you want to subscribe to our free email newsletter on this just visit www.huntersm.com (there are links to the graders there too)

If you want to see how your sales people measure up try

http://www.objectivemanagement.com/free_salesforce_grader.asp?DistNum=242

If you want to keep your hiring costs down

http://www.objectivemanagement.com/free-sales-hiring-mistake-calculator.asp?DistNum=242

How do you evaluate your sales people Part 1

Is it all about the numbers? So how do you cope with change? what happens if the top salesperson leaves ? or your top accounts all stop spending at the same time – ask the builders suppliers and auto parts makers about that. What do you, can you do ? Is your top producer just the one with the biggest account ? Could they, can they get back on the phone. Who do you fire, who do you fire when your clients bail on you and you just have enough new business to cover it.?

With thanks to DaveKurlan

Dave Kurlan was telling me that he met with a long-time client who, in his previous company, used OMG’s Assessments to identify what needed to change in order to double revenue from $30 million to $60 million.  In his new company, which is already about 12x that size, he wants to double revenue again.  He said, “I just wasted two years with the _____ Assessment.  The assessment he referred to was a personality assessment marketed as a sales assessment.  It could have referred to any personality or behavioral styles assessment.

Many people are not going to like this article.  I am about to expose the findings in personality based and behavioral based assessments that companies have been marketing as sales assessments for the last dozen years.

First, you’ll need to read this piece from Dave Kurlan’s blog Personality Assessments for Sales – The Definitive Case Study.  Really, you need to read it first!

There isn’t a tremendous difference between personality assessments and behavioral styles assessments.  Popular behavioral styles assessments, like the various versions of DISC, produce findings along 4 dimensions (categories) while some personality assessments, like those using the PF16 as their underlying instrument, can measure traits in as many as 16 dimensions.

But Personality Assessments and Behavioural  Styles assessments do not predict sales performance.

These attempts don’t conduct Predictive Validity studies as we do with OMG because their assessments don’t predict.

What they conduct is something very different – Construct Validity studies.

These only show to what extent an assessment measures a specific trait. These are not even the traits you need to know about, but only the traits they can measure.

If you read their marketing material it usually says something like, “Salespeople must be able to Prospect, Question, Manage Objections and Close.  They must have Product Knowledge.  They must be accountable, have drive, be self starters and be coachable.”

Well that’s not rocket science You read those words and say, “yes, yes.  That is exactly what we need.”  And so the pretence is on.

In my next blog I’ll show you how the evaluations vary

Yes, we know who moved the cheese – now what are you going to do about it ?

Whether change can be a blessing or a curse, depends, largely on you.In his bestselling book Who Moved My Cheese? Dr Spencer Johnson shows that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives.
Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze.

Four beings live in that maze:
• Sniff and Scurry are mice–nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
• Hem and Haw are “littlepeople,” mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It’s not just sustenance to them; it’s their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they’ve found.
• The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.

Cheese in context
In 2009 this message is, for many companies, urgent and strong. The cheese has been moved. This shows itself in ways that effect our ability to do business.

• Existing accounts spending less or nothing
• Sales taking longer to close
• Spending freezes
• Prospecting is harder
• Clients not taking calls

The supply of cheese is drying up and the biggest challenge is to find the new cheese.
Are you ready ?
Try our free salesforce grader

What does this mean ?
In the real world it’s about how we deal with the changes that this recession bring. There are 2 simple messages

1. You have to have more revenue than costs – Sales is the answer
2. If you keep on doing what you’ve always done you aren’t going to get what you always got.

Change is vital. Woolworths didn’t go bust because of the credit crunch, they went bust because they kept a tired business model past it’s sell by date, they failed to embrace the changes needed to grow.

• What is the impact of what you depended on not being there ?
• What does it mean if last year’s numbers are just numbers – with little or no meaning in 2009?
• How will it affect you if last year’s sales performers can’t win new business ?
• How many of your top accounts will reduce business or just turn off the tap ?
Rate your salesforce

If the numbers don’t work what will ?
If any of the sales issues generated by this recession scare you how are you planning ?
• What if the changes mean the numbers don’t work ?
• How do you make meaningful decisions in an apparent vacuum ?
• Who is capable of finding new cheese ? – and how quickly
• What if you have no one who can find new cheese ?
• Can you trust new hires past performance any more than your current salespeople ?
Is it worth 5 minutes of your time ?
Can your salesforce take your into uncharted territory