I am often asked how I can write so many articles. I have a few answers for that:
- Compared to the demands of writing my two books, Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling, writing a couple of paragraphs every day is a piece of cake;
- From my unique vantage point as a thought leader in two industries - the Sales Development Industry and the Assessment Industry, there is more article material than I will ever have time to write about;
- I usually choose topics that are bothering me at that particular moment in time.
This is my 600th article since the inception of the Understanding the Sales Force Blog 4 years ago. It seems that around every 66 articles or so I write an article to explain how inferior all of those other assessments are when it comes to the sales force. The last time I made an attempt like this was four months and 115 articles ago. So it basically comes down to a formula where I provide 65 articles with great content, and in return, you read about how our Sales Assessments blow the lid off of any other assessment you place along side them.
I have already written a series of articles on the subject of how assessments compare.
Let me begin with some questions.
If you sell high end business services and your salespeople earn in excess of $250,000 annually, would you want to use the same hiring and selection criteria that they use to hire salespeople that sell long-distance telephone services to anyone who will listen?
If you have a complex technical product with a long sales cycle, would you want to use the same hiring and selection criteria used to hire life insurance salespeople who call on married couples?
If you a hiring salespeople to call on C-Level executives, would you want to use the same hiring and selection criteria used to hire office supply salespeople who spend all day calling on administrators?
If you are hiring hunters, do you want to use the same hiring and selection criteria used to hire account managers?
And if you are hiring A players, do you want to use the same hiring and selection criteria used to hire office workers?
When I write this type of article, I don't usually get into everything that makes our assessment so much better. Today I made an exception and got a bit aggressive.
This is what is available when it comes to assessments:
Personality Assessments - personality traits - these are never role specific and the questions are asked in a social context therefore the findings are not necessarily applicable to a sales environment. As a result these are not predictive and are ineffective as a sales selection, development or coaching tool.
Behavioral Styles Assessments - behavioral tendencies, much like traits above. Questions are asked in a social context therefore the findings are not necessarily applicable to a sales environment. As a result these are not predictive and are ineffective as a sales selection, development or coaching tool.
Both of the above assessment types get marketed as sales assessments but the only thing that is sales specific is their marketing material. See the next category.
Sales Assessments - there are so many of these now that I can't keep up with them anymore but nearly everyone of them, despite the literature, web sites and white papers they produce, are based on either a personality or a behavioral styles instrument. They are not accurate within a sales context.
Sales Aptitude Assessments - Think knowledge, not ability.
Objective Management Group - We invented and pioneered the space. Before us, nobody ever talked about evaluating a sales force. Despite that, we are never content with our world-class, industry leading sales force assessments. Our accuracy is legendary. Our sales force evaluations go so wide and deep that we can answer any question that you can imagine about the performance - past, present or future - of a sales force. Our sales candidate assessments are so predictive that the statistics are nearly unbelievable. Check this out:
When clients hire candidates that we don't recommend (silly clients), 75% of those salespeople fail inside of six months.
When clients hire candidates that we do recommend (smart clients), 92% of those salespeople rise to the top half of their sales force within the first 12 months.
How do we do it? Our assessments are not based on somebody else's personality or behavioral styles instrument and modified to include sales lingo. We built ours from the ground up - for sales - and we continue to expand, evolve and refine it today - 20 years later. It's a work in progress and that's one of the reasons that it's so good. We are always working to make it even better. It wasn't designed using antiquated test publishing guidelines, and it wasn't intended for use in schools or the military. Instead, it was designed by a very successful sales expert who happened to be a great sales diagnostician and researcher. How do I know? I used to be that guy!
Our data on nearly 500,000 salespeople and the 8,500 sales forces that have used our assessments provides us with rich sources of information to identify trends, make comparisons, sort by industry, role or finding. Simply put, we know what it takes for a salesperson to succeed in sales. You know what it takes for a salesperson to succeed in your business (and if you don't we help you figure it out!). When we combine the two sets of criteria and adjust for difficulty (complexity x resistance), we will either not recommend a candidate, or provide one of four recommendations:
- Hirable - Less Than Ideal
- Hirable
- Hirable with Ideal Ramp Up Skills
- Hirable Perfect
Watch out for all of the assessments that pretend to provide sales findings but report only what they can actually measure. See examples here.
Questions?
Leave a comment and I'll answer it.
(c) Copyright 2010 Dave Kurlan
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My friend, Dan Caramanico, is one of the authors of The Optimal Salespersson, a book Selling Power said is one of the ten you should read in 2010. Dan read my article about the Difference Between Selling to Negotiators and Price Shoppers and sent me this question:
This is a great distinction. Any suggestion on how you can tell one from the other on a sales call? I know what the effect is if you hire a salesperson who is a price shopper. Any way to tease that information out of your data?
Dan, I believe they are fairly easy to distinguish. When salespeople have a discussion about money, price shoppers usually make it very clear what their intentions are. On the other hand, negotiators don't usually advertise their intentions in advance. Instead, they'll negotiate after they have received a proposal.
Now the second part of your question. 15% of the sales population shop for the best price and, as a result, understand completely when their prospects want the lowest price. What do they do? Give it to them if they're able! Of course, if you listen to this group of salespeople, they believe everyone buys the way they do - they expect this to happen. So do you think that only price shoppers get the big discount from this group of salespeople or is the group bigger than that? Also of interest here is the 15%. My research shows that the bottom 74% of salespeople, as customers, are no different than the population as a whole. If that's the case, then how come so many salespeople report that their prospects are looking for the lowest price?
I believe there are three answers:
- Some prospects, who don't have to find the lowest price, ask, just in case there is a better price available. It's not a requirement but they won't pass it up if it's offered.
- Company policies sometimes require procurement professionals to find the lowest price and that brings us to number 3.
- Many procurement professionals use the low price requirement as a bluff to see if they can coax a lower price from their vendors. Some of them are paid a bonus on what they can save their companies.
Dan, does that help?
(c) Copyright 2010 Dave Kurlan
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Clients who receive sales management coaching, training and development come to know what an effective sales coaching conversation sounds like. You may not be privy to that so you might find last week's episode of Meet the Sales Experts helpful.
Chris Mott was my guest and he coached a live caller for about 30 minutes. Listen to the show for a better sense of what every coaching conversation should sound like. The following email was received from the live caller the day after the scheduled sales call:
"I did as you and Chris suggested...In the end, he suggested his PL department start quoting [us] more broadly to see how we perform, that he would reach out to one of the VPs to coordinate a meeting where I would introduce [our] products to
his producers, and also that I profile a book of his business. It didn't
come easy, but it did come, at 'his suggestion'...Thanks so much for the
coaching."
I've written several articles on coaching salespeople and one includes an actual email thread. You can read them below:
5 Steps to Coaching Your Salespeople Beyond Happy Ears
When Coaching Salespeople Isn't Coaching
Coaching - 1st of the 10 Kurlan Sales Management Competencies
Sales Coaching - The Big Differeniator
How to Coach a Salesperson (contains real email thread)
Hierarchy of Sales Coaching - How to Change Behavior
Sales Coaching - Between the Lines
Click here to listen to the show. Click here to contact Chris.
If you listened to the show, what did you learn that will help you?
(c) Copyright 2010 Dave Kurlan
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Salespeople must evolve through six levels of development before they can consistently and successfully execute any process, concept, strategy or tactic they are trained and coached to perform. The six levels are:
- Listening
- Understanding
- Internalizing
- Embracing
- Attempting
- Mastering
If there are hiccups at any one of those levels, they may continue on to the next level, but with an improper balance. For example, if they weren't listening carefully, and didn't quite hear the entire message, they will inappropriately approach the next 5 levels. If they listened but understood the message differently from the way it was intended, the next 4 levels will be wrong. If they listened and understood, but selected a poor frame of reference for internalizing the message, they probably won't embrace it.
Let's assume that they have properly advanced through the level of embracing. The key level of evolving takes place at the level of attempting.
Some salespeople never evolve from level 4, embracing to level 5, attempting. This is where underlying weaknesses have the most affect. Those hidden, underlying weaknesses cause discomfort and hesitancy - preludes to lack of confidence - preventing them from taking what they believe to be a big risk. Objective Management Group's work in this area, and the deep and wide sales force evaluations they conduct, help shine light on these hidden weaknesses. I have written a series of articles on the science, data and research behind this work.
Others make the attempt, but they are uncomfortable and do it poorly. and their undesirable result may cause them to give up right then and there. Finally, after making several attempts, some fail to master the concepts and continue to practice them poorly without improvement.
Keep in mind that this process takes place for each and every concept, strategy, tactic and method that they learn. Many clients ask why it takes so long - so many months - to train and develop salespeople. The concepts can be taught in a day. But the other 5 steps to evolving take months, especially getting them over the weaknesses that prevent them from attempting and executing. There are two ways to convey these concepts and most companies, in a great hurry to fix things, choose the comfortable, rather than effective option!
- Feed them with a fire hose via a one or two day seminar and perhaps reinforce it quarterly, semi-annually or annually.
- Present the fire hose but don't spray it down their throats. Spoon feed and reinforce daily through coaching, bi-weekly or monthly via follow up training, and don't ever stop. Hold them accountable for the six levels each and every day.
How many of your salespeople have evolved to mastery?
Why not more of them? Whose fault is it?
(c) Copyright 2010 Dave Kurlan
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Yesterday, when meeting with a new client, he expressed his frustration over salespeople having difficulty with voice mail. That's the simple complaint. It's really much more. First the voice mail part: it's not getting calls returned, not getting through, not reaching decision makers. The bigger concern is that the issue is just now surfacing even though the salespeople have been with the company for months now. The biggest concern is that the VP/Sales Manager should have known about and solved this problem the first week it was an issue - months ago - right after the salespeople began with the company.
Wow you say?
This is more typical than you can imagine. Salespeople, struggling with sales 101 type issues, don't let anyone know for fear that they would be perceived as inept, which, it turns out they are. And sales managers, not effective enough at coaching and accountability to determine where the bottle necks are and not skilled enough on strategy or tactics to fix them.
This is the real world of 14 million US salespeople and sales managers.
What are some of the fundamental issues your salespeople are having?
As you begin making your list - actually giving it purposeful mental recognition - you will realize just how unacceptable these issues are. But what will you do about it?
(c) Copyright 2010 Dave Kurlan
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