Today's article is different from most of my other articles because there is no opening analogy, very little data, and a complete lack of humor. It's such a serious article I was ready to delete it before I clicked the publish button. If you don't like the subject, the content or the writing, it's OK.  This needed to be written.

I was watching a local newscast where the anchor did a story about salaries.  It began with a student in his broadcast journalism class asking how much he earned.  He was averse to sharing his salary with the public, but he conducted some research and learned that GenZ'ers share and compare salaries and tend to know how much everyone else is paid.  See this article from George Anders, a LinkedIn Senior Editor, where he shared statistics showing that 81% of Gen Z welcome full candor.  Compare that to just 28% of Boomers.

There are three phases to the salary unveiling process:

1. Asking how much others are paid. 
2. Corporate transparency by sharing how much everyone is paid.
3. The E in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) becomes the norm.  Proponents of Equity expect equal outcomes for all - like participation trophies in youth sports long ago replacing the performance awards that are part of professional sports.  This article does a good job of defining pay equity.  While traditional views of Pay Equity typically considered gender and race, that is not what I am addressing in this article. I am talking about what happens when corporate executives listen to voices - any voices - demanding equal pay. They may be whining because they aren't willing to work as hard, because they don't have equal skills, or because they aren't willing to put in the time.  But they want to be paid the same.

I've had this argument with CEOs before and it goes like this:  "What do you mean Bob is not money motivated?  He came to me last week and demanded more money!"  To which I responded, "He wanted you to GIVE him more money.  Money motivated salespeople ask, 'What do I need to do differently to earn more money?'"  Bob wanted welfare.  Money motivated salespeople will do the work if they know what the work entails.

How does a growing movement towards Equity apply to sales compensation?

There are four popular sales compensation plans in use by most companies today:

1. Weighted towards commission: A lower base salary, based on experience and/or territory, augmented by a generous percentage of either gross revenue or gross margin.  While all salespeople would be paid the same percentage, their salaries might be different and total earnings would be quite different based on overall sales performance.  
2. Weighted towards salary: A higher base salary, based on experience, territory, and/or size of accounts, augmented by either a small percentage of gross revenue or gross margin, or a pre-determined bonus for meeting and/or exceeding quota.
3. All salary.  The salary in the plan with the lowest financial risk might vary based on experience, territory or account sizes.
4. All commission.  There is no base salary in the plan with the highest financial risk, but the opportunity to earn more than other salespeople is considerable based on a "sky's the limit" compensation plan. 

In an effort to appeal to salespeople with varying preferences, some companies offer all four of these plans but most companies offer only one.

According to data from the assessment of more than 2.3 million salespeople by Objective Management Group (OMG), 5% of salespeople are very satisfied with their income and nearly 40% are very unsatisfied with their income. My anecdotal experience with this is my belief that the 5% group is satisfied with a salary that is larger than they expected and the top earners, being extrinsically motivated, always want to earn more!  All told, 27% of salespeople are extrinsically motivated, which could account for as much as half of the 40% who are unsatisfied with their current earnings. The largest percentage of extrinsically motivated salespeople are found in the top 5% of all salespeople.

When it comes to sales compensation, there is already some vague transparency in place as salespeople are keenly aware that the highest performers earn more than the lowest performers.  At some point, companies will be pressured to bring pay equity to sales teams too.  It will happen with publicly traded companies first, while private companies may resist for as long as they can.  The CEOs of privately held companies are more likely to understand the dynamics of rewarding sales performance as many of them served in sales at some point in their career. The CEOs at publicly traded companies, often coming from a financial, operational or a technical background, may be more susceptible to pressure from under-performing salespeople as well as HR and/or legal teams.

When pay equity comes to sales teams, top performers will be the group that is most affected.  While it is too early to know whether their incomes will be reduced, they will be compensated equally with the worst performers on the team. If you are a top performer, and you are no longer earning significantly more than the worst performers in the company, what would you do?  Here are some possibilities:

• Nothing changes.  As long as my total compensation isn't reduced, I don't care.
• Everything changes.  If I am not compensated fairly for my all-star performance, I'm not going to try as hard or work as hard.  Why bother?
• I'm leaving. If my performance isn't financially rewarded, I'll move to a company where my performance will be appreciated.
• I'm retiring.  F**k it.
• I'm starting my own company. I've thought about this for a long time and this creates the perfect conditions.

There is some anecdotal evidence for how pay equity might play out. 

I've trained sales teams who were paid only a salary but let's look at two different companies, each with different plans.  In one company, their performance in the base year determined their salary for the next year.  That's a plan where salaried salespeople are paid on performance.  Those salespeople responded to training, improved, sold more and were compensated for it.  In another company, performance did not influence future compensation and everyone received the identical 4% raise each year.  Those salespeople did not respond to training, did not increase their sales, and unlike most salespeople I have trained, saw their sales roles as jobs instead of potentially lucrative careers, and lacked the incentive to transition from transactional order takers to consultative sellers.  They said, "Why should I?  What's in it for me?"

I don't pretend to know the degree to which Pay Equity will come to sales teams or when it will begin to occur. I don't know the percentage of companies that will embrace Pay Equity.  I do know that this is a frightening concept. Sales is the economic engine for companies and effective salespeople determine to what degree that engine performs.  From cut-throat competition, to self-limiting beliefs, to dishonest prospects, to economic restrictions, to the inability to reach decision makers, selling is more difficult today than ever before. If it wasn't, then everyone would seek out a career in sales. 

If a transition to pay equity on sales teams becomes reality, it won't affect anyone except top-performing salespeople and the top and bottom lines of the companies they work for.

What do you think?  Share your comments below or in the LinkedIn discussion.

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I began debunking sales articles when the first ones predicting the death of selling appeared circa 2008.  Back then, new digital marketing companies were telling everyone that salespeople would be replaced by inbound marketing.  "Inbound is King," they said.

Later, articles predicting the end of selling became both more prolific and more specific including the certain death of:

1. Solution Selling
2. Cold Calling
3. Consultative Selling
4. Sales Process
5. SPIN Selling
6. and more.

If you looked closely and skeptically at who was writing the articles and who the writers worked for, you could recognize that the articles were simply a narrative to create a need for their brand new, and at the time, unproven products.  Fifteen years later, their products have a place at the very top of the sales funnel.  Ironically, instead of replacing salespeople they said would become obsolete, they created a need for a whole new breed of salespeople - BDRs - to follow up on all of the crappy leads generated by their inbound marketing platforms.  And the very same companies who were claiming that their SaaS marketing platforms would replace salespeople actually required salespeople - lots of them - to sell their applications.  Back when Hubspot was scaling its sales team, they used Objective Management Group's (OMG) sales candidate assessments to identify the right salespeople for their various selling roles.

There are two ironic byproducts of the inbound phenomenon:

1. Account executives who benefit from the appointment setting provided by BDRs not only don't prospect; they don't know how! 
2. Most BDRs are atrocious at making outbound calls, sending emails and LinkedIn reach outs, and following up on inbound leads. They average only 1.5 meetings booked per week!

Like Kale salad, Cauliflower pizza crusts, and charred broccolini, the Death of Selling is about to become an unwelcome (to me) menu item in the form of AI. 

We're seeing ChatGPT's ability to create human-like articles, essays, poems, notes and messages. 

I just asked ChatGPT to write a short poem on the death of selling.  Here's what it generated.

Selling, oh selling, how you've changed,
No longer can you be so deranged,
In the past, you used to deceive,
But now it's time for us to leave.

Customers now are more aware,
They're educated and they're prepared,
To be sold on anything they see,
No longer works in this industry.

The death of selling has now arrived,
And it's time for us to be revived,
We must shift our focus to serving,
Our customers' needs and preserving.

It's not about what we can sell,
But how we can help them excel,
Our job is now to listen and learn,
To provide insights that make them yearn.

For products and services that we provide,
Not because we pushed or we lied,
But because we helped them find,
Solutions that were one of a kind.

The death of selling is not the end,
But a new beginning we must contend,
To serve our customers with all our might,
And make our business soar to new heights.

Not bad.

Microsoft Bing has recently built AI into its search engine.  It is a work in progress with built-in bias, the sometimes horrible things it writes, and its propensity for error.  AI hasn't come close to living up to its potential in the sales world. Our proof is in the horrible daily bot-driven reach outs we get via email and LinkedIn messages.  Some of those are driven by AI.  Some are created with AI.  Some are claiming to use AI.  And look no further than the customer service chat boxes on virtually every website.  Who hasn't been frustrated having to deal with those?

But not to worry.

Just like the threats from 15 years ago, the soon-to-be written articles predicting the death of sales will have as much predictive accuracy as their predecessors.  But like vitamin D, you have built-in protection! There are many sales jobs that simply cannot be replaced.  If you work in a quota-carrying sales role for an underdog, you are always and forever safe.  

How do you know if you work for an underdog?

The characteristics of an underdog are:

• You don't have the lowest price. Only one company in each territory, vertical or space can claim that and since it probably isn't you, you'll have to sell value.  That is insurance against obsolescence.
• Your company isn't a household name. The brand names are your industry's equivalent of Apple, Dell, HP, Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft.  If that's not you, then you sell against one of them and that makes you an underdog.  More insurance.
• You work for a start up and/or are selling new technology. That means you have to do proof of concepts, taste tests, show your financial staying power, and point to things you do better than the well-known companies and technologies you compete against.  You know who you are and AI could never do what you do.
• You sell custom-engineered equipment or software.  Do you remember OJ Simpson's defense team's acquittal line about the glove?  "If it doesn't fit you must acquit."  Same with custom.  My quote for custom: "If it must be designed, you won't need to resign."

Don't worry about all of the coming-soon hype.  Instead, do the following:

• Get yourself evaluated by the #1 Sales assessment in the world so that you have an objective understanding of your current sales capabilities in all 21 Sales Core Competencies.  Your understanding should not be skewed based on your team, your company, your competition or your industry.  Click here and copy and paste I would like to have myself evaluated into the comment box.
• Based on your selling strengths, weaknesses and skills, ask the sales expert who reviews the evaluation with you to recommend the sales role for which you are most well suited.
• Get some sales training and coaching to fill the gaps in the sales competencies where you don't score as high.
• Get yourself a sales position with an underdog.  As long as you perform, you are safe from becoming obsolete!

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Four weeks ago, Marc Wayshak, Founder of Sales Insight Labs, an Allego company, emailed me a very insightful infographic. Returning from two weeks vacation, I was buried in work and filed the email until I had time to review it.  Today, a client was nice enough to postpone their training to next week and that provided me with two hours to dig into both the infographic and data from Objective Management Group (OMG) that might correlate to what he sent me.

You can view the infographic at its original size here.

Their statistics are from nearly 24,000 recorded sales conversations and focus on levels of engagement.  They found that top performers make 54% more switches - the back and forth in conversations - than everyone else and 78% more in their presentations.  The presentations made by top sales performers are not monologues!

OMG's statistics are derived from more than 2.3 million evaluations of salespeople.  OMG's doesn't measure switches - how could it - but it does measure whether salespeople emphasize listening over talking, the skill required for switches. The top 10% of salespeople are 200% stronger at emphasizing listening over talking.  But OMG's difference is 375% larger than Sales Insights Labs.  What could account for that difference?

The 200% represents the skill gap between top and bottom salespeople but skill alone does not translate into action.  Salespeople must also have strong Sales DNA. There are two Sales DNA competencies that are required here.  The sales competency that supports listening is "Stays in the Moment." Salespeople must be present - right here and right now - in order to effectively listen and determine what the next question should be.  The competency that supports asking questions is "Doesn't Need to be Liked." Salespeople who do need to be liked are afraid to ask questions, push back or challenge conventional thinking because they worry their prospects will become upset. When we integrate those two competencies into the mix - salespeople who have both the skill and strengths to support the skill, the modified finding is that top salespeople are 52% stronger, which is within 2 points of the finding from Sales Insights Lab.

Their second insight is that the discovery calls of top performers are 76% longer and sales presentations are 55% longer than everyone else. The Consultative Seller is an OMG sales core competency that measures capabilities in the Discovery Call.  Top Salespeople are 300% stronger at the Consultative Seller competency than bottom salespeople. There are two attributes in the competency which would suggest a better quality conversation that would last longer.  They are "asks enough questions" and "asks great questions".  Salespeople who ask enough questions and ask great questions are 54% more effective than salespeople who don't.  Sales Insights Lab measures the number of questions that are asked and not surprisingly, top performers ask and get asked 30%-43% more questions than everyone else.

The infographic also included an insight about words per minute.  Sales Insights Lab and OMG data agree that top salespeople speak more slowly than everyone else but there is a difference with regards to how much more slowly.  Sales Insights Lab found top salespeople speaking at a rate of around 170 words per minute - 10 words/minute slower than everyone else. OMG's data shows top salespeople speaking at closer to 120 words per minute - much slower than everyone else.  Sales Insights Lab also has data on Pace, where top salespeople get their prospects to speak more slowly than prospects for other salespeople.

So what does all of this powerful data mean?  

Salespeople who take a consultative approach, and take the time to ask lots of good, tough, timely questions, have the difficult conversation that others won't have, and uncover compelling reasons to buy from them, accomplish several things that other salespeople don't accomplish. They:

• More effectively differentiate themselves from other salespeople
• Create urgency - the key to shortening the sales cycle and getting prospects to take action
• Make it easier to fully qualify their prospects because prospects will self-qualify to move things along
• Get their prospects to respect their expertise
• Engage Decision Makers in the Conversation which differentiates and shortens the sales cycle
• Sell the value of them - they become the value.

Evaluate your sales team and then train and coach your salespeople to slow down, stop presenting and start selling like top performers. You will significantly increase revenue.

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If you watched Super Bowl 57, you observed two teams that simply refused to give up or give in.  Sometimes, that's the feeling I get when I'm writing articles and I have solid data on my side, while dozens of competing authors just won't stop their constant barrage of articles using junk science, anecdotal evidence, and alternate facts.

One such article caught my eye this week. 5 Capabilities Sellers Must Have to Be Top Performers had the potential to be a must read article but it quickly became obvious that the "5 capabilities" in the article are not capabilities at all - they're outcomes.  Maybe I'm getting old and have become ill-informed but it seems like a pretty important distinction, don't you think?  It's like saying that the one important capability that NFL players must have is scoring - which is an outcome, not a capability!  One pet peeve I have from when my son was playing Little League and Middle School baseball was the coach who would yell to the wild pitcher, "throw strikes!"  A strike is an outcome so that's not coaching and it's not instructive.  If the coach suggested a single adjustment to the young pitcher's mechanics, the adjustment would help the pitcher throw strikes.  Similarly, when sales managers tell their salespeople to "sell more" they are focused on outcomes instead of coaching on the capabilities that would help them sell more.

When someone does not know the difference between a capability and an outcome, is that person truly qualified to write about a topic and claim to be an expert?  Unfortunately, it seems like they are. 

Objective Management Group (OMG) has evaluated and assessed more than 2.3 million salespeople and measures Twenty-One Sales Core Competencies.  Five of the competencies are in the category of Will to Sell and are not actually capabilities.  Six of the competencies are in the category of Sales DNA and those are also not capabilities.  Ten of the competencies are Tactical Selling competencies and are very much capabilities so the top five capabilities should come from those ten competencies.

There are many specialized selling roles and the ten competencies do not apply equally to all roles.  For example, Hunting does not typically apply to the Account Management role.  Presentation Approach and Closing do not typically apply to the Hunting role.  That said, the five most important capabilities to be top performers, that apply across all selling roles, are:

• Ability to Reach Decision Makers. Only 28% of all salespeople reach decision makers (and only 11% are the final decision makers).  83% of the best salespeople and only 5% of the worst salespeople have this capability making the best salespeople 1800% better than the worst.
• Has and Follows a Milestone-Centric Sales Process.  Only 34% of all salespeople have this capability and the best salespeople are 2075% more capable than the worst salespeople.
• Ability to Build Strong Relationships.  Only 29% of salespeople are able to leverage their relationships to win business and the top salespeople are 1200% more capable than the worst salespeople.
• Ability to Get Prospects Beyond Nice to Have.  The best salespeople are 490% better at taking a consultative approach and creating urgency than the worst salespeople.  Only 7% of all salespeople get past "nice to have."
• Ability to Fully Qualify.  The best salespeople are 8600% better at qualifying than the worst salespeople.

A salesperson who consistently, efficiently, and effectively executes these 5 capabilities are as much as 2400% better than the worst salespeople.

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For those of you who are familiar with my series of articles about Bob - the worst salesperson ever - you can catch up by enjoying, laughing, and making fun of him here.  12 of the articles that show up on that page are about Bob!

Today, I reviewed the worst OMG evaluation of a sales manager that I have ever seen.  It was literally the worst because he was in the 1 percentile, meaning that 99% of all sales managers are stronger than he is.  

As I reviewed it, I said to myself, "If Bob were promoted to sales manager (I don't even want to put that thought out there), this is what it would look like."

There are so many reasons as to why he is so bad and I'll share the most important reasons below.

The first thing I noticed was his score of 19 on the Sales Coaching competency.  He lacks the skills and perhaps thankfully, he doesn't actually do any coaching but when his salespeople ask for help the only help they get is technical or pricing help.

Did you see the score of 15 for Pipeline Management?  Those 15 points are because he does pipeline reviews --- by himself!  Can you believe it? A sales manager that doesn't review the pipeline with his salespeople!

Even if he wanted to coach and hold his salespeople accountable, he wouldn't be able to because they don't even like him.  OMG's Sales Team evaluation showed that his salespeople don't trust his intentions, they don't respect him, and worst of all, he is focused on himself, instead of his team.  He takes credit for wins and points his finger at them for losses.  Trust, respect, relationships and team focus are prerequisites for coaching to have any chance of working - and that's assuming that there will actually be coaching .

His score for holding salespeople accountable was even worse, coming in at zero. All of his salespeople made excuses for their lack of performance and he does not challenge them on their excuses because he too is an excuse maker as evidenced by his Responsibility score of zero.

Then there is his Sales Management DNA.  For the simplest of sales management roles, a sales manager should have a minimum Sales Management DNA of at least 68 and much higher for more demanding roles, with minimums ranging from 72-82.  His Sales Management DNA is only 52 and it was skewed up because of his one strong DNA score of 83 for the Comfortable Discussing Money competency. 

Without that one strong score bringing up Sales Management DNA his DNA score would have been in the 40's!  I've never seen one that low before!

The two bright spots are that he scored 68 on the Sales Process competency, and 77 on Selling Value.

His Sales VP really likes him and she doesn't want to lose him. She is hoping and praying that he can be trained and coached up to be a more effective Sales Manager.  Unfortunately, his score for Commitment to Sales Management success is only 30.  With a Commitment score this low, there is very little chance that he will do the work, overcome his weaknesses or change.

Only 18% of all Sales Managers should be in a sales management role and only 7% are any good at coaching salespeople and this individual should not even be in sales.

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A sales consultant who knows that I geek out on sales data read that 84% of salespeople suck because they don't enjoy what they do.  A huge percentage of salespeople do actually suck but the actual number is closer to 75%.  Is it really because they don't enjoy selling?

Most of the data I write about comes from Objective Management Group which has assessed more than 2.3 million salespeople.  OMG has around 250 data points on each salesperson so there is a lot of data to work with.  My plan was to mine OMG's data to see what might support the claim that 84% don't enjoy selling and to conduct a Google search to find the source of that claim.

I began with Google and searched for "84% of salespeople."  While I couldn't find a reference to unfulfilled salespeople, I did observe that 84% must be the favorite made up statistic by all of the people (those who will benefit from selling you a service) who make up statistics!  

• 84% of B2B Buyers start the buying process with a referral (nope.  They start with who they usually buy from)
• 84% of salespeople are active on LinkedIn (not a chance in hell - it's more like 5%)
• 84% of top salespeople crush their sales goals because they are smarter (sorry - it's because they reach decision makers, thoroughly Qualify, have strong Sales DNA, and take a consultative approach to selling)
• 84% of salespeople have invested in CRM (nope - their companies are investing in CRM and based on OMG's data, only 42% of salespeople use it)
• 84% of salespeople at businesses that have adopted professional sales enablement strategies are reaching their goals (No company anywhere has 84% of their salespeople reaching their goals unless the goals were lowered so that everyone could receive a participation trophy)
• 84% of salespeople think their 3-month onboarding training was ineffective (not completely surprising but not nearly that high)
• 84% of salespeople will miss their performance targets for the year (Not. This varies from 47%-57% every year)
• 84% of sales teams are more productive selling from home (if it's from not driving around all day the number should be 100%)
• 84% of salespeople like being recognized for their performance (not even close.  OMG's data says it is 21%)
• 84% of top performers ask for commitments (This is so far off.  OMG's data shows this number to be 27% for the top 20% of all salespeople)
• 84% of top salespeople rank high in achievement orientation/goal setting (OMG's data has it as 72% for the top 20%)
• 84% of sales training is forgotten within 2 years (it's a made up number and probably closer to 50%)

The references to 84% continue but let's go back to the claim that 84% of all salespeople are not fulfilled in their sales roles.

OMG measures 21 Sales Core Competencies with an average of 10 attributes for each. Some directly and/or loosely correlate to fulfillment.  If 84% are not fulfilled we would convert that to a positive and say that 16% are fulfilled.  Here is the real data:

• 55% of all salespeople Enjoy Selling and this goes up to 78% for the top 10% and down to 23% for the bottom 10% but their number is supposed to represent all salespeople and that isn't close to 16%.
• 62% of all salespeople have a strong Outlook and feel good about themselves and what they do.  This goes up to 75% for the top 10% and down to 40% for the bottom 10%.
• 61% of all salespeople are highly Motivated.  This goes up to 89% for the top 10% and down to 12% for the bottom 10%
• 3.5% of all salespeople feel that selling isn't fun.  This goes down to .5% for the top 10% and up to 38% for the bottom 10%.

In conclusion, the majority of salespeople feel good about selling, enjoy it, and are motivated to do it. There is a direct correlation between fulfillment and the percentile in which a salespeople find themselves.  Better and more successful salespeople find more fulfillment in sales than weaker and less successful salespeople.  While that shouldn't surprise anyone, 84% of salespeople lacking fulfillment is not to be believed.

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It's been four months since the baseball season ended but college baseball begins in less than 4 weeks and it will be fun to watch our son play for his college team (while freezing our asses off!).  It's also been a while since the last time I shared a top/bottom analysis but I completed one this week that I had to share.

For new readers, a company's top three performers are compared to the bottom three under-performers in one or more selling roles.  Our analysis identifies the specific scores and findings that differentiate the tops from the bottoms and proves that Objective Management Group (OMG) can differentiate ideal sales candidates from undesirable candidates for a particular selling role at that company.  It can be used as a proof of concept or as a set of custom criteria to further improve predictive accuracy.

The following image is a screen shot of the analysis.

We identified 45 scores and findings that differentiated the tops from the bottoms. The biggest contrast was between the top salesperson and the worst salesperson where the top salesperson scored 2500% higher (100 and 4) than the worst salesperson.

Some differences are the result of not understanding which selling experiences are crucial to a salesperson's success.  For example, the salespeople who were failing had not previously called on management, had never asked for more than $250,000, had not worked on a commission-heavy compensation plan, and were not well-suited for working remotely.  Those four differences do not require training or coaching to fix, but do require a change in selection criteria.

Huge differences were seen in three of the five competencies included in Will to Sell including Desire for Sales Success, Takes Responsibility and Sales Motivation.  You can't measure those competencies in an interview and if you try you will be fooled every time because you'll mistake them for either enthusiasm or lack thereof.  There are more competencies you can't measure in an interview and their top performers easily outscored their bottoms in five of the six competencies found in Sales DNA, the combination of strengths required to support the execution of sales process, sales methodology, sales strategy, sales tactics.

The top performers outscored the bottom performers by a significant margin in seven of ten tactical selling competencies, with the biggest gaps found in Sales Process and Reaching Decision Makers.

What does the disparity look like at your company?

Would a complimentary proof of concept help to justify using OMG's Sales Candidate Assessments for sales selection at your company?  Would it help you to see how accurate our sales team evaluation would be?  We've been conducting top/bottom analyses for 14 of our 33 years and we can do one for you too.  

Use this link to our, "Ask a Sales Expert" request form.  Copy and past the next line into the "Question" field on that form:

I am requesting a complimentary top/bottom analysis

Someone will contact you to arrange for your complimentary top/bottom analysis.

You're not supposed to mix alcohol and medication, which isn't an issue for me because I don't drink and I avoid medication. But those aren't the only two things you're not supposed to mix.  You're not supposed to use mixed metaphors either so I am breaking the rule, incorporating 4 separate analogies, and then attempting to string them together at the end.  

When I'm driving, I usually fire up Spotify and listen to one of my playlists but for some reason, last week I chose to play songs by the 70's band, The Raspberries.  I like three of their songs a lot but lacked familiarity with the other songs on their four albums. I figured that there had to be some other good tracks to discover.  Wrong.  The Raspberries just do not compare to some of the great talents from their era.  The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Chicago, Earth, Wind and Fire, and solo artists like Elton John, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson or Lionel Richie routinely produced albums on which every song could have been or was a hit single. [Note: It seems like all you needed to be a star in the 70's and 80's were two first names and not just the four I named, but also consider Huey Lewis, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, George Harrison, and James Taylor!] The comparison of successful hit-makers to common musicians are analogous to sales pipelines where top salespeople have a never-ending flow of good, strong, qualified opportunities and weak salespeople have fewer opportunities and most of them aren't very well qualified. 

If we look into some of Objective Management Group's (OMG) data from the assessments of  2,296,264 salespeople, we see the following as it relates to the Qualifier competency and its 12 attributes:

As you can see from the table above right, the top 5% of all salespeople are 56% stronger at qualifying than strong salespeople, 452% stronger than serviceable salespeople, and 8600% stronger than the bottom 50%.  8600% Stronger!!!!  Who says qualifying isn't important?  See how your industry/salespeople compare.

We were first-time diners at Friendly Toast, an all-day brunch restaurant in the Boston area. Unfortunately, my inner 12-year-old ordered and because of my inability to control him, I was ecstatic over my hot chocolate peppermint waffles!  My reaction was consistent with a sales opportunity where the salesperson receives a very strong introduction from a happy customer, the large opportunity was completely teed up, the sales cycle was short, sweet, and easy, and the deal closed without competition.  How many salespeople EVER get to experience that kind of easy?  According to OMG's data, only 3% of all salespeople have a steady flow of quality introductions and referrals and for weak salespeople, it's half that.  

One of the dashboard displays in my car shows the pressure for all four tires.

When a tire begins to lose pressure the early warning system is incredibly helpful.  Membrain is the CRM application that we most frequently recommend to clients, and our clients LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Membrain compared to Salesforce dot com.  Membrain comes with a win/loss analysis consisting of more than a dozen criteria.  While they won't all have significance, most of them do.  The four analyses that I believe are most analogous to the tire pressure warning are:

Age, Time in Stage, Stalled and Time Spent.

The  taller green bars in the Time in Stage image shows that the largest percentage of deals won remain in each stage for only a day or two while the odds for closing deals that remain in stages for more than a week are not good.

Time Spent (not shown) shows that an average of 1 hour and 9 minutes is spent working in Membrain on deals that are won, but an average of only 9 minutes is spent on deals that are later archived.

The Stalled image above shows that the average time stalled on a won deal is 43 days compared with 110 days for an archived deal.

And finally, the Age finding (not shown) tells us that the average age of a won deal is 39 days, compared with 105 days for an archived deal.

Together, these four components of the win/loss analysis show that when deals are stalling, we don't spend time working on them, and the chances of closing them are in direct disproportion to how long they stall.  It's our version of the tire pressure display!

What do these four analyses have to do with qualifying?  The more thoroughly qualified the opportunity, the less likely it is to stall for long, and the more likely it is that you can either lose fast - a good outcome - or win fast - a better outcome!

So whether it's mixing drugs and alcohol, scoring a prolific number of hit songs, eating an awesome meal, or a dashboard warning indicator, they all tie back to the importance of thoroughly qualifying opportunities and winning deals.

If I created a list of the top sitcoms of all time, I could end up with a list that includes the following shows:

• Friends
• Seinfeld
• The Office
• Everybody Loves Raymond
• The Cosby Show
• How I Met Your Mother
• All in the Family
• I Love Lucy
• Cheers
• Family Guy

If I sent out a survey and asked you to vote on the top sitcoms of all time, the list would have 100 sitcoms to choose from and we might end up with a list that looks like this one.

The keys to these two questions and hypothetical lists are that the first list is my opinion and the second list would be the results of a survey, a popularity contest, or opinions of the masses.

While that's all fine and good when it represents people's opinions of pop culture, it's not fine and good when it comes to business best practices, assessments that could impact whether an individual is offered a job, or even business processes.

More specific to the topic of this Blog, Sales Core Competencies, Sales Candidate Assessments, and Sales Processes cannot be created from popular opinion, surveys or personal bias.  

Conduct a Google search for attributes of successful salespeople and you'll see a page with these results:

These articles include the opinions of college professors, writers and editors reporting on survey results, and people sharing their opinions.  For example, Hubspot, an inbound marketing company published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like customer service and data analysis.  Job site Indeed published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like leadership and change management.  I'm not suggesting that these capabilities aren't important, but in no way, shape or form should they be considered core sales competencies.  Why would people turn to any of these lists of opinions when there is a widely accepted, definitive list of 21 Sales Core Competencies backed by science and data on more than 2.3 million salespeople?  Perhaps it is a byproduct of Information overload and confusion.  People don't always find the accurate list on their first try.

The same thing happens when you search for sales candidate assessments.  Pages and pages of assessments all claiming to be the one that will prevent you from making a sales hiring mistake.  Most of them are not even sales assessments.  Instead they are personality assessments being marketed as sales assessments.  Again, why use an imposter when the real, accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment is right there, among the choices?  There are simply too many opinions and too much misinformation, as I wrote about earlier this week.   

When it comes to sales process the choices are even worse.  Consider this article about how most sales processes are so old. Yet there they are, being positioned as the solution for selling in the modern era.  More surprising, companies are using them but despite that, there are solid sales processes and useful CRM applications that work in perfect harmony, although you do need experts you can trust to point you in the right direction.

Once upon a time I would have been tempted to use a phrase like, "follow the science" but thanks to years of internet misinformation, it is difficult to know who to trust, who are the true experts and which science is real science. Unfortunately, we must default to skepticism, not trust, the subject of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers which I wrote about last week.

I'll tell you what I think but I'm biased too.  I believe in what I've developed over the past 37 years but maybe that's all you need to know.  37 years of time-tested, proven, reliable, accurate and predictive results backed by science.

There is no sales assessment more accurate and predictive than Objective Management Group's (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment. Period.. 

Not coincidentally, OMG measures all 21 Sales Core Competencies in detail, providing more than 200 data points on each sales candidate along with our recommendation as to whether the candidate will succeed in the role under consideration.  See the competencies, average scores, and sort by industry or company for free.  You can even see how your salespeople compare here.

When it comes to sales process, it's hard to top Baseline Selling, a staged, customizable, milestone-centric, customer focused sales process based on sales best practices.  Baseline Selling is at its best when integrated into Membrain's easily customized, intelligent, process-based CRM application.

Finding the truth is only difficult when you place too much importance on opinions, surveys and writers.

Image copyright CNN

My Chrome home page often displays articles that Google thinks I might be interested in. Red Sox, Patriots, politics, software applications, gadgets, and for the first time, sales assessments!  I thought, "Is this for real?"

The first article was the 7 Best Personality Assessments for Your Sales Team.  Regular readers already know that personality assessments are not predictive of sales success because they measure personality traits, not sales core competencies.  That said, they included and mis-categorized Objective Management Group (OMG) as a personality assessment.  Oh well.  At least they knew to include it.  Interestingly, I previously published articles about some of the assessments they listed comparing them to OMG:

Compared to DISC

Compared to Caliper

Compared to Myers-Briggs

The second article was How to Pass a Sales Personality Test.

Again, OMG is not a personality test so it's not surprising that it didn't appear on the list.

The first assessment they named was Caliper which they incorrectly stated shows how personality traits correlate to on-the-job performance.  That would be predictive validity - when findings correlate to on-the-job performance. It's worth noting that OMG is the only sales assessment that uses predictive validity.  Most assessments use construct validity which states that findings are consistent with what they say they are measuring.  Personality assessments have never been and are not now predictive of sales success.

Listing the OPQ as a sales assessment is pretty funny.  They don't even suggest that it is appropriate for sales use!

Hogan is a personality assessment that has been adapted for sales but as with all personality assessments you can be sure of one thing.  They are measuring personality traits, not sales core competencies and as such, they are making assumptions about selling.

Myers-Briggs and DISC round out this list.

To get a better sense of how assessment companies adapt (market) personality tests for sales, the best article that informs on this topic is Exposed - Personality Tests Disguised as Sales Assessments.