Some of my long-term problems had such simple solutions. If only I had thought of the obvious solutions first.  For example:

For decades, I could not drive for much longer than two to two and a half hours before my eyes would get so heavy that I risked falling asleep at the wheel.  Day or night, year after year, all of our trips were based on how far I might have to drive.  And then I discovered the solution.  Sunglasses.  Yup, with prescription sunglasses, my driving fatigue became a thing of the past and I can drive for hours and hours without getting sleepy.

For months, I had a bright red rash that would continue to reappear under my arms.  While a prescription ointment would help it disappear after about a week, it would continue to reappear.  And then I discovered the solution.  Anti-perspirant.  Yup, all I had to do was to switch from a deodorant to an anti-perspirant and voila, no more rash, ever.

For the last six months I had an acute eczema breakout in, on and behind my ears.  It was really bad, and included burning and itching and flaking.   I used 2 different prescriptions, Neosporin, Eczema creams, honey, balms, coconut oil and anything I could find.  Nothing worked.  Then I tried Aquaphor Advanced Healing Ointment and in three days it was cleared.

Are you getting the picture.  Nothing worked and then sunglasses, anti-perspirant and Aquaphor.  Simple, easy, fast, and powerful.

There are simple, easy, fast and powerful solutions for sales problems too.  See my examples below.

Not enough new meetings?  There four possible reasons and fairly obvious solutions:

1. Salespeople aren't prospecting as required because they have call reluctance.  Hire hunters.  Hoping for change isn't a viable strategy.
2. Salespeople aren't prospecting as required because sales managers are not holding them accountable.  Hold your Sales Managers accountable for holding their salespeople accountable to agreed upon KPIs.  Make it a condition of continued employment.
3. Salespeople are prospecting but their messaging is awful. Have an expert change or tweak the messaging for prospecting calls.
4. Salespeople are prospecting, have good call messaging, but they sound awful or are not being well received.  They won't improve unless you have them trained on cold-call delivery.

Opportunities getting stuck in the pipeline?  There are five possible reasons and some obvious solutions:

1. Salespeople are not reaching decision makers.  Opportunities are 341% more likely to get stuck if your salespeople aren't talking with decision makers.  Get them trained on how to reach decision makers.
2. Lack of urgency.  Salespeople are not uncovering compelling reasons to buy, preventing them from reaching decision makers, getting money approved, and moving the opportunity forward.  Get your salespeople trained on how to take a consultative approach and get your sales managers trained on how to coach up your salespeople.
3. Not being the value.  If prospects don't perceive they are receiving value from a salesperson, they have no reason to move forward with the salesperson.  This isn't talking about value, explaining the value proposition or adding value to your solutions, this is the salesperson being the value.  Get your salespeople trained on how to be the value.  
4. Salespeople are not following an optimized, staged, milestone-centric, customer-focused sales process.  Have this process created and get the sales team trained on how to execute it.
5. Not thoroughly qualifying their opportunities, causing inappropriate quotes, proposals and presentations.  Get your salespeople trained on how to thoroughly qualify and hold your sales managers accountable for holding salespeople accountable to justify every proposal or quote. 

Salespeople are under-performing and not hitting quota. There are an unlimited number of possible reasons, from poor selection, to ineffective or non-existent on boarding, to low Sales DNA, to skill gaps, to lack of motivation, lack of direction, lack of support, lack of training, lack of or ineffective coaching, and on and on and on.  Here are a couple of obvious solutions:

1. Have the sales team evaluated and get the data so that you know for sure if your under-performers can be trained and/or coached up or if what you see is what you will continue to get.  If they are part of your past but not part of your future, replace them today.  If they are part of your future, get them sales training.  You'll also need to learn whether their performance or lack thereof, is self-inflicted or enabled by ineffective sales management.  Learn more here.
2. Give them an ultimatum but consider the length of the sales cycle.  So many companies give salespeople 30 - 60 days to turn things around but if you have an 8 month sales cycle then you either need to give them 8-12 months, or tie the improvement to KPIs that are within reach of 30-60 days.
   
   

There isn't a single scenario going on with your sales team that we haven't seen, addressed, and solved in the past 37 years.  It doesn't matter how small or large your team is, what industry you are in, which markets you sell to, what your price points are, how long you've been in business, how well-known you are, or what your challenges are.  Some companies make the mistake of accepting and being resigned to these challenges, preventing them from getting solutions.  These are the steps you must take to solve your problems:

1. Acknowledge the problems 
2. Choose to take action
3. Get outside expertise
4. Pull the trigger

Image created by AI from 123RF

Our son's college baseball season is winding down and we think they'll make the playoffs for the second straight year.  As I think back to high-school baseball, a couple of things came to mind that have a lot to do with sales development.

Mike attended two high schools.  His first high school baseball coach saw his potential, calling him up to play on the varsity team when he was still in the 8th grade. He was a starter that year, as well as his freshman and sophomore years.  Coach Mark was a good judge of talent, he was able to develop the limited talent he had, and his players loved him.  RIP Mark.

Mike transferred to a bigger, more sports-oriented high school for his junior and senior years where he had only 8 at-bats as a junior and lost his senior year to Covid. Coach Charlie was a poor judge of talent, as evidenced by his reputation for cutting guys who would later be drafted by MLB teams. He was unable to develop the talent he had and his players disliked playing for him.

Those two examples are not unique to baseball as I'm sure you could share similar stories from football, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, volleyball, tennis, swimming and basketball coaches.  More important for today's topic, the two baseball coaches are analogous to most of the Sales Managers I have worked with over the past 3 decades. 

There are a small percentage of sales managers who are good judges of talent, make smart hiring decisions, their salespeople love working WITH them, and as a result, these sales managers are able to coach the ever-living daylights out of their salespeople and get them to over-achieve.

A very large percentage of sales managers are poor judges of talent, make poor hiring decisions, and are unable to coach up the very salespeople who shouldn't have been hired.  They have underperforming teams and often close the gap by focusing on their personal sales instead of their salespeople.

Sports teams hold tryouts.  They're not perfect, but they do serve as auditions and while some athletes perform better in games than in tryouts, most good coaches know what to look for.  

Sales Managers don't hold tryouts.  They use resumes and interviews, neither of which are predictive of success, and hire based on gut instinct.  For example, take Joe, a top salesperson at his previous company in industrial manufacturing. Joe managed the three largest accounts there and his revenue dwarfed the other salespeople in the company.  Joe is applying for a similar role at with a competitor and Larry, the sales manager there, is very excited about Joe.  What Larry doesn't realize, is that those three large accounts are staying with Joe's previous company because Joe doesn't build great relationships, and will fail to bring in new accounts because he is not a hunter.  Oblivious to Joe's weaknesses in these two competencies, Larry will hire Joe and then never understand why Joe is failing.  If only there was a way for Larry to know about those two challenges in advance!

Of course, there is.  Larry can't hold tryouts, but he could do the second best thing and use Objective Management Group's (OMG's) Sales Candidate Assessments.  They are customizable for each selling role, extremely accurate and have legendary predictive validity.  It's the closest thing to a crystal ball or a tryout.  Check them out here.  OMG measures all 21 Sales Core Competencies and you can see the statistics and average scores for your industry here.

Sales Managers don't have to be victims of their own gut instinct when they can apply science to their sales selection!

Perhaps you've heard the advertisement while listening to a SiriusXM radio station.  It's for Home Title Lock.  They scare you by mentioning that some bad people can commit fraud by going online, claiming your home's title, taking ownership of your home, and borrowing against your home's equity without you knowing it.  Home Title Lock prevents this from happening.  Maybe.  I don't know enough to say whether this fraud actually happens and whether their service works.  But I do know this.  I've been trying to cancel my business internet with Verizon for two months and I can't prove to them that it's my account.  If the legitimate account holder, with credentials (account numbers, invoices, names and address), is unable to cancel my own business internet account, how can someone casually take over your title and suddenly own your home?  It doesn't make sense to me!

Here's another thing that doesn't make sense. 

If you have used Indeed to hire salespeople, they will offer to have your candidates take a free sales assessment.  Doesn't that sound great?  It is great if the assessment is helpful but it happens to be a useless piece of crap.  Why would anyone think, for even a moment, that there is any value in their lame, assessment-in-name-only test?

In this article we'll explore how Indeed's sales assessment compares to the gold standard in sales candidate assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG).

Indeed offers several conclusions about each candidate:

• Expert
• Highly Proficient
• Proficient
• Familiar
• Completed

By comparison, OMG offers three recommendations:

• Recommended
• Worthy of Consideration
• Not Recommended

Indeed measures what candidates know about selling but doesn't tell us what it is that they actually know!  Indeed measures their general knowledge of selling.  

This statement by Indeed is very telling:  "Indeed makes no statement as to the skill level of a candidate."

So they administer a sales skills assessment, provide one of five scoring ranges, but don't back it up:  

OMG measures a candidate's capabilities in 21 Sales Core Competencies, each consisting of 6-12 attributes, and then calculates whether they have the necessary attributes and competencies required to succeed in the selling role for which they are being considered, in that company's marketplace(s), against their competition, at their price point and with the challenges which their company and salespeople face. OMG factors in the difficulty of the sales role and measures how closely the candidate's capabilities fit that sales role. This is OMG's dashboard, which is followed by around twenty pages of scoring and details about the attributes from each competency.  You might notice that under the recommendation, this company used OMG's multi-role assessment where candidates are  evaluated for fit to multiple selling roles at the company.  This candidate was recommended for an Account Executive role and a Specialty role, but only worthy of consideration for a Senior Account Executive role which is more difficult than the other two roles:

Do you see the subtle difference between the two assessments?  You get what you pay for which, in Indeed's case, is nothing.

If you aren't using the Gold Standard in sales candidate assessments, why are you attempting to outsmart the world's most accurate and predictive sales selection tool? 

Image copyright 123RF

We use remote deposit, a terrific convenience for depositing checks from the desktop without going to the bank.  The only problem is that the software that runs the check scanner isn't compatible with the Mac OS.  It only runs on Windows so we have to remotely connect to an old Dell that takes up unnecessary space. Oh, if only the software for the check scanner was compatible with the Mac.

My wife and I were friends with a couple that argued ALL the time. They argued when they were alone, they argued when they were with us, they argued when they were with their kids and they were just brutal to each other.  If only they were more compatible.

Compatibility is not only important, it could be one of the most overlooked criteria in hiring sales candidates.  Let's do a deep dive! 

Most sales leaders think that industry experience is the most important criteria for evaluating the fit of a potential sales hire but they couldn't be more wrong.  Compatibility with the selling environment is far more important.  For example, if you sell payroll services, is it more important that the sales candidate came from the payroll industry or is it more important that they have great selling skills and called on the same HR professionals that a payroll salesperson would need to call on?  In other words, is it more important that they know stuff, or is it more important that they have a built-in network of customers to sell to? 

There's more to compatibility than who they sell to.  Factors like the length of the sales cycle, how many calls/meetings that entails, your price point relative to the competition, the amount of money they'll be asking for, the quality of the competitor's offering, the effectiveness of the competition's marketing and sales, whether they've worked for a sales manager with a similar management style, how much pressure they'll be under, whether they'll get the coaching and training they require, if they've worked under a similar compensation plan, and more should be considered.  There are nearly 30 variables that help to determine whether a salesperson is compatible for the role. 

At my weekly meeting with Objective Management Group's (OMG) COO, John Pattison, we discussed compatibility in the context of another finding we call FIOF or "Figure it Out Factor."  Candidates that have a FIOF score of 75 or better ramp up more quickly than other candidates.  Compatibility is weighted pretty heavily in the FIOF finding because of how it influences the ramp-up time of new salespeople.  The more compatible a salesperson is with your selling environment, the more quickly they should ramp up because they've "done this before."

OMG measures 21 Sales Core Competencies as well as 9 other competencies that are important but not core.  An additional finding is a score for compatibility.  

Out of curiosity, we wondered what the average score for compatibility was because we haven't looked at that before.  He asked me to guess and I said "somewhere between 60 and 80."  It turns out that the average compatibility score for all sales candidates is 70.  Not bad!  For kicks, we ran the analysis for the four levels of Sales Percentile which include Elite (top 5%), Strong (the next 15%), Serviceable (the next 30%), and Weak (everyone else - the bottom 50%).  This is what the analysis showed:

Who knew that compatibility would correlate to Sales Percentile? I certainly didn't think that the distribution of scores would show this kind of correlation.  After all, when we score compatibility, we aren't measuring any of the sales competencies that make up Sales Percentile; only prior selling environments. The top 5% of all salespeople are 41% more compatible with their selling roles than the bottom 50% and it left me wondering, "Why?"

Three theories came to mind and perhaps you can add some additional theories!

Theory 1: The best salespeople naturally identify good fits for themselves so that they can thrive.  We could guess that elite salespeople seek out the greatest selling challenges - something beyond their comfort zone - but perhaps they are simply too smart to sabotage themselves.

Theory 2: The worst salespeople don't pay any attention to fit because to them, selling is just spouting off features and benefits, doing demos, generating quotes and proposals, and taking orders.  Maybe they simply gravitate to wherever they are wanted?

Theory 3: The best sales leaders, in hiring only the best salespeople, are rewarded with salespeople that can handle their selling environment. It's worth noting that the best sales leaders hire salespeople who are more talented than they are while average and weak sales leaders hire salespeople who are weaker than they are.

I haven't written about compatibility before but it's worth spending a few minutes to understand the role it plays in sales success.

What plays an even more important role in sales success than compatibility?  It's the 21 Sales Core Competencies and configuring OMG's accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment to recommend those candidates that score well in the competencies that are crucial to success in the role you are hiring for.  Learn more about the 21 Sales Core Competencies.

Image copyright 123RF

I'm not usually late but I'm really late on this topic!

Back in September The New York Times, which is often accused of publishing fake news, published an interesting article comparing personality tests to astrology.  The story included specific assessments like The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, The Hartman Personality Profile (Color Code), Plum, and DiSC.  Myers-Briggs reports on sixteen dimensions of personality, the Hartman Profile has four dimensions of personality, Plum uses AI to predict cultural awareness, teamwork and communications, and DiSC has four dimensions of behavioral styles.

I had so many reactions to this article and I have attempted to collect and assemble them into a coherent article that I believe will be worth your while.

THE EXAMPLES: To base an entire article on four assessments is like writing about the automobile industry and using a GMC pick-up truck, a Ford Focus, a Dodge Challenger and a Jeep SUV as examples without mentioning that there are 60 brands which include foreign and domestic, high-end cars, muscle cars, limos, low-end cars, electric cars, three sizes of SUV's, coupes and sedans, exotic cars, trucks and more. Four examples do not come close to helping you understand the choices or capabilities of assessments.

THE COMPARISON: To suggest that assessments are like astrology is like saying that small businesses are hobbies for those who own them.  Some of them are, but most are full-time, profitable ventures that provide their owners with a nice lifestyle.  Some of the 100 assessments are probably like astrology but not the mainstream assessments.

THE USE CASES: The article provides both good and bad examples of use cases but the theme of this article seems to be that assessments will help to maintain good cultural fit and matching up skills to jobs.  The problem is that personality and behavioral styles assessments don't identify skills - they identify traits and tendencies!  You can't match traits and tendency to specific jobs as they are job agnostic.

CULTURAL FIT: Cultural fit is important and some assessments can certainly help to achieve and maintain that but surely you want more than cultural fit for your salespeople.  When it comes to hiring salespeople, you want to know, before you hire them, that they will succeed in the intended role.  But those four assessments, and most of the 100 assessments on the market, cannot possibly make that prediction because they don't measure sales competencies.  Personality and behavioral styles assessments measure traits and tendencies and while some attempt to adapt those findings for sales, the conclusions are leaps of faith at best, and like playing pin the tail on the donkey at worst.

PSYCHOMETRIC TESTS: The author used the term "psychometric" tests" 8 times without explaining what a psychometric test is.  According to Job Test Prep, a psychometric test, "is any activity or assessment that is conducted in order to evaluate a candidate's performance and includes, but is not limited to, skills, knowledge, abilities, personality traits, attitudes and job/academic potential.  There are many psychometric test styles and formats with 3 main areas....aptitude tests, behavioral tests and assessment centers."  In others words, all pre-employment assessments fall under the category of psychometric tests!  Eric Shapiro, who is quoted throughout the article, said, "If I was the United States czar of psychometric tests, there’d need to be some evidence base."

WHAT THEY WROTE ABOUT VERSUS REALITY: There is only one assessment that:

• Was built for sales
• Was created by a sales expert
• Measures all 21 Sales Core Competencies each with approximately 10 attributes
• Is backed by Science
• Has been externally validated three times in the last eight years
• Has been internally validated 210 times in the last five years
• Uses predictive validity (findings correlate to on-the-job performance)
• Has been used to assess and/or evaluate salespeople
• Will accurately predict how a salesperson will perform in the specific role
• Has a sliding scale where the criteria for a recommendation becomes more difficult to achieve as the difficulty of the role increases
• Is customizable for the industry/business/selling role
• Has an optional second layer of customization based on a top/bottom comparison/analysis of your existing salespeople
• Has 88% of recommended/hired sales candidates attain quota
• Has an attrition rate of only 8% from recommended/hired candidates

I am describing Objective Management Group's (OMG) accurate and predictive Sales Candidate Assessment. 

It is not a horoscope.

It does not measure cultural fit.

It is not a personality assessment.

It is not a behavioral styles assessment.

It does not use colors.

It does not measure cognitive ability.

It does not measure anything other than sales capabilities.

Below is a sample dashboard from page 2 of a 21 page sales candidate assessment.

Using OMG is a no brainer!  Watch this 2-minute video to see how easy it is to get started assessing your sales candidates!

Comments?  Type them on the LinkedIn discussion thread for this article.

Image Copyright  iStock Photos

Do you like movies and TV Shows?  I love them!

How do you go about selecting the next movie or show you will watch?  Do you look for a specific show, watch the trailer and if you like the trailer, watch it?  Or, do you look at all of the new releases, or everything in a particular genre, narrow down the selections, watch several trailers, and finally choose one?

Most people use the second scenario which, by the way, is a very good approach for selecting and hiring salespeople.  Unfortunately, that's not how most companies go about it.

You need to cast the net as far and wide as you can to generate a large candidate pool.  Then you need to assess all of the candidates in the pool.  Most companies either don't use assessments, don't use the right ones, or wait until the final interview to ask candidates to take the assessment.  Improper use affects quota attainment and attrition.  See the stats below:

As you can see from the slide, companies that don't use assessments have a 49% quota attainment rate, compared to 61% for companies using assessments and 88% for companies using Objective Management Group's (OMG) accurate and predictive sales-specific assessment.  Isn't that compelling?

Consider these actual use results from an OMG user below:

This global company, which hires around 30 salespeople per year, is not only the picture of consistency with the number of assessments used, but recommendation rates are within the normal range for roles considered to have significant difficulty.  More importantly, look at the number of candidates they had to assess in order to hire the 29 who had the sales capabilities to succeed in the company's various sales roles!  That's why you need to cast the net far and wide.  910 might seem like a large number but it's only 18 candidates per week spread among their many global locations.

If your typical candidate pool has many fewer candidates and you don't use an accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment, it's no surprise as to why your sales recruiting efforts are hit or miss with an emphasis on miss.  When you hire salespeople, they are all supposed to meet or exceed expectations for pipeline building and revenue generation.  It shouldn't be cause for celebration when they do!

Assessing all of your candidates up front allows you to focus on only those candidates who are recommended for the role, saving time and money that would be wasted calling and interviewing candidates who don't have what it takes or wouldn't be a good fit for the role.

You can retool your sales recruiting process and the adoption of a sales-specific, accurate and predictive assessment is one of those changes you can quickly and easily make.

Share your comments in the LinkedIn discussion of this article.

This week I've been sick with my annual bout of asthmatic bronchitis - fun stuff - and the question I've been asking myself is, "how long will it last this year?"  Historically, it's takes 2-4 weeks for this to subside and it sucks big time during that 2-4 weeks.  But thinking about time frames got me thinking about one of the universal timelines and challenges facing companies everywhere.

How long should it take for a new salesperson to become successful and why do so many of them fail?

There are six factors in total but let's begin with those on the client-side:

1. The length of your sales cycle
2. The length of your learning curve
3. A Transition period

If you have a six-month sales cycle, a three-month learning curve and it takes 3 months to transition from their old world to your business, that translates to 12 months of pipeline building before you can reasonably expect your new salesperson to start closing business.

On the salesperson side, there are also three factors:

1. Length of their runway (cash or safety net to survive a transition that doesn't guarantee as much money)
2. Degree of urgency (how much urgency they feel to get off to a great start)
3. The theory of relativity  (the more difficult your business is compared with their old business, the shorter the runway becomes)

If your new salesperson has a six-month runway, medium urgency, and selling in your world is more difficult than the world from which they came, there is a negative six-month gap and it's pretty clear that the salesperson will fail.

These factors are but a handful of the factors that go into successful sales selection strategies.  If you select the right salespeople up front, you'll experience much less turnover, fewer delays to growing your revenue, and build stronger sales teams.

Objective Management Group offers the most predictive, accurate and customizable sales-specific candidate assessment on planet earth. You can check it out here.

Image Copyright iStock Photos

I always enjoy reading articles that expose things I don't know about topics I enjoy, like 7 Unsung Built-in Gems in Mac OS X. I had the opportunity to provide that kind of training to a dozen or so sales leaders on some of the less obvious findings and relationships in Objective Management Group's (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments and how to use them. We also discussed which of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that we measure were pertinent to their different sales roles and why.  One of the regional sales managers asked, "What are the 5 Biggest Mistakes that Sales Managers Make When Recruiting Salespeople?"

While that question is quite easy to answer, most companies, including their recruiters, HR professionals, sales leaders and executives are guilty of some or all of the following 5 mistakes:

1. Their job posting fails.  Most sales job postings all read the same.  Great job, great company, great opportunity, great benefits, blah, blah, blah.  And even if you are using the most accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment on the planet, it won't help at all if your job posting lures the wrong candidates into the pool.  Describe the candidate along with the experiences you hope they had and the capabilities they must have to succeed in your role.
2. They wait too long to assess their candidates.  If you wait to assess until after you have interviewed, you won't embrace the findings and recommendation on the assessment unless they support how you feel about the candidate.  If you already fell in love with the candidate and the assessment says "Not Recommended" and you ignore the recommendation it will lead to a hiring mistake.  Assess every candidate immediately after you receive their online application or resume and then you won't  accidentally ignore a candidate whose resume suggests a bad fit but whose assessment scores suggest a very capable salesperson for the role.
3. They don't properly on board.  They say, "We're using the best assessment and the salesperson was recommended so she should know what to do."  Wrong.  Every new salesperson deserves proper on boarding so that you can prepare them for success instead of setting them up for failure.
4. They don't thoroughly interview the candidate.  It doesn't have to be a long interview but it needs to be thorough.  You need to dig deep behind every resume claim to separate fact from fiction.  Here are the top 5 examples of claims that sound great but actually turn out to be bogus when you learn about the all important context (in parentheses) for the claim:
   1. Top salesperson  (out of 2)
   2. President's Club (for all salespeople who hit 75% of quota)
   3. Grew annual sales in territory by 200% (from $40,000 to $120,000)
   4. Doubled size of the territory in the first year (closed one big deal that was in the pipeline when he arrived)
   5. Uses words like developed, initiated, led, created, or built in reference to sales programs (did not actually sell anything).
5. They don't set expectations, coach to those expectations and hold the salesperson accountable for achieving those expectations in the first 90 days.

These five mistakes are easy to correct and then companies will experience far greater success and consistency with their new sales hires.  In most cases, the only thing preventing companies from making these changes is the self-limiting belief that "we've always done it this way."

I was reviewing this page which shows the market share for most of the known applicant tracking systems.  I was impressed with the analysis and with how much of the market share is held by Taleo.  I was also disappointed that there isn't a comprarable study available on sales candidate assessments.  But that's a rant for another day.  Back to the Applicant Tracking analysis.  My first takeaway is that it validated what I knew only anecdotally -that just about every mid-market and large company are using cloud-based applicant tracking systems and smaller companies are quickly moving in that direction too.  It makes sense. If companies are using cloud-based job sites to source candidates, then it only makes sense that they would be integrating applicant tracking as well.

My second takeaway is that with all of these companies sourcing from the cloud and tracking from the cloud, why aren't more of them using the best sales candidate assessment in the cloud?  I have 4 possible answers to that question:

(1) Legal groups in some companies warn against using an assessment for selection puproses.  In an effort to protect their company and its CEO from legal action, they fail to recognize that role-specific assessments do not present any vulnerabilities.  While personality assessments present a legal risk when used for selection, role-specific assessments, like Objective Management Group's (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments, do not present a risk because they assess to determine whether the candidate has the necessary skills for that specific role.  You can't say that about personality assessmenta.

(2) Some Sales Leaders don't utilize sales candidate assessments because they believe their own instincts and experience will outperform an assessment.  And Sales Leaders do get selection right - about half of the time.  Unfortunately, getting it right doesn't mean that they didn't have turnover. Getting it right should mean that the new salespeople met or exceeded quota.  Using that criteria, 50% right would be a generous number. Ironically, sales leaders could get selection right close to 90% of the time if they used OMG's accurate and predictive Sales Candidate Assessments.

(3) Some HR Leaders won't use sales candidate assessments because they have a sense of familiarity with some of the popular personality and behavioral styles assessments.  Ironically, they don't need to stop using those assessments as they do provide some nice information about candidates.  However, those assessments weren't built for or intended for sales and they aren't predictive of sales performance.  Using a predictive sales candidate assessment along side of a familiar personality or behavioral styles assessment will vastly improve sales selection accuracy.

(4) Some CEO's don't use any assessments because they don't belive in them!  I can understand that.  If their only experience with assessments was with a "lighter" assessment - like one of the many versions of the popular DISC behavioral styles assessment, it makes sense that they don't believe that one of those will help improve selection.  But they need to look beyond what they themselves are comfortable with and have experience with and trust their HR and Sales Leaders and do what's best for their company, not what's best for themselves.

Why should a company use applicant tracking and sales candidate assessments to improve their sales selection consistency?  To avoid the cost of a hiring mistake.  For sales hiring mistakes, estimates run from between $100,000 to over $1,000,000. Of course it depends on the role, salary, length of the sales cycle, recruiting, training and development costs, and whether or not a company includes lost opportunities in its calculations.  If you don't know how much a sales hiring mistake costs at your company, you can use this free sales hiring mistake calculatorto figure it out.

Our statistics show that just one hiring mistake will cost between 20 and 50 times the investment you made in a predictive sales assessment.  

For example, let's say that you were going to hire one salesperson.  If you get selection right half of the time, you'll actually hire 2 salespeople to get the 1 that performs.  Your cost to use the assessment was no more than $2,500 and your cost to recruit, hire, train, develop and compensate the salesperson who failed was $65,000 for six months - 26 times the cost of the assessment.

Let's try it with 10 salespeople.  Let's say that you are better than average and only 3 of the 10 didn't make it.  You paid no more than $10,000 to use the assessment and your hard costs for the 3 salespeople who failed totaled $195,000 - 20 times the cost of the assessment.

There really aren't any good reasons to avoid using a proven, accurate, customizable, predictive sales candidate assessment.  What's holding you back?

Image Copyright: kchung / 123RF Stock Photo

Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don't like working traditional hours, and don't enjoy working in traditional ways.  That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?

I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned.  This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.

To get a sense for the actual comparison, I looked at four data sets:

1. All Millennials
2. The Top 10% of Millennials
3. The Top 10% of Salespeople with 10+ years in sales and in their industry
4. All Salespeople with 10+ years in sales and in their industry

So how do Millennials compare?  

Chris Mott, my trusted colleague and friend, specified the first dashboard - how all millennials scored. Sales Quotient, the overall score, is shown in the top right corner.  108 is weak.  Sales DNA, the combination of strengths, is shown in the middle.  61 represents a salesperson that will not be able to execute sales process, strategies, skills and tactics because the strengths are actually weaknesses.  Commitment, the willingness to do what it takes to achieve greater success in sales is shown in the upper left hand section.  53% represents a lack of commitment.  You'll notice that Handling Rejection and Relationship Building are the only two areas where millennials scored well in the areas of Sales DNA and Selling Competencies.  Scroll down for more.

After Chris showed me the first dashboard, I populated the next dashboard with veteran salespeople with 10 or more years in sales.  You can see that as a group, they have higher scores in all of the areas we discussed relative to the previous dashboard, except - and this is a head turner - Relationship Building!  Who could have seen that coming?  Interestingly, they score 39% on Responsibility which means they are twice more likely to make excuses than their younger colleagues.  In this comparison, based on their Sales Quotients, the older salespeople are at least serviceable while the Millennials are simply weak.  Scroll down for more.

The third dashboard represents veteran salespeople again, but this time only the top 10%.  As you can see, the top 10% are elite, with Sales Quotients averaging 142 and Sales DNA averaging 83.  Nearly every score is in the green and all of the scores are higher than either of the two prior groups.  These are the salespeople you want to hire!  And wherever possible, you want to coach up your existing salespeople to be like the top 10%.  Scroll down for more.

The fourth dashboard represents the Top 10% of Millennials.  It isn't very different from the top 10% of Veteran Salespeople with the notable exception of their respective scores for Figure-it-Out-Factor, or how quickly they will ramp up.  Notice the low score on Relationship Building!  This group scores the highest on Desire, Responsibility, Outlook, Sales DNA and Coachable!!  Scroll down for more.

It should be clear from this comparison that overall, Millennials are not a great choice for sales.  However, the Top 10% of Millennials are an excellent choice for sales!  So the million dollar question is, when you are hiring salespeople, and millennials are in the mix, how do you determine whether they are millennials of the 108 Sales Quotient or of the 143 Sales Quotient?

I apologize.  That was a trick question. As you can see from the dashboard of all Veteran salespeople, that group only averages a 121 on Sales Quotient. It shouldn't matter whether millennials are in the mix or not. You need the ability to differentiate between the 140's, 120's and 100's with every candidate, and do it as early in the sales recruiting process as possible.  Weed out the undesirable sales candidates in the very first step!  So how can you tell whether you have a 140 or a 108?  Use Objective Management Group's accurate and predictive sales candidate assessments. They're built on science and customizable for your business and selling role.