Benchmark the Job, Not the People

Whether you are hiring new sales reps or trying to gauge the potential performance of existing ones the key lies in benchmarking the position.

But are you using the right benchmark?

Some managers might benchmark top performers in the position, hoping to hire a “clone” or coach everyone to that level. But when you benchmark the top performers of a C team, you get a C benchmark. Other managers benchmark the ideal candidate, looking to hire the perfect salesperson. Like the goal of finding the perfect spouse, the goal of finding the perfect salesperson is an unrealistic dream.To get a true benchmark, you must know what skills, talents, behaviors, motivations and attitudes the job requires. You must let the job talk and determine the Key Accountabilities of the job.

• Why does the job exist?
• What knowledge is needed?
• What couldn’t be done without it?

With a job benchmarking process, you can determine what behaviors, motivators and personal skills are required by the job’s key accountabilities. The job benchmark then allows you to accurately match talent to the position and assess current performers. When sales reps match the behavioral requirements of the job, have the motivation for success and can provide the right soft skills superior sales performance is greatly increased.

A study by IHRIM and Knowledge Infusion found that over 82% of organizations cite Succession Planning as a growing concern of the future. Now they are looking at middle management and key talent in addition to top level executives.

Call Us Today

For more information on how your sales organization can benefit from New School Selling’s Job Benchmarking Process, call us at 800-250-3146.

The first 3 newsletter subscribers that call us will receive a FREE benchmark ($1,500.00 value). Call us at 800-250-3146 and we will be happy to help you develop your benchmark.

Call 1-800-250-3146 Today to Connect with a New School Expert Research-Based Assessment Solutions!

In a recent study conducted by Target Training International, an international assessment firm, 7 Subject Matter Experts for sales were asked to identify which 7 Personal Talents and Skills were most critical for sales success. Look over the list and see if you can pick which 7 they identified. If you would like to know which 7 they identified email me sclark@newschoolselling.com your answers and I will send you the results.

Pick the 7 top Personal Talents and Skills you think are necessary for sales success.

• Accountability for Others
• Conceptual Thinking
• Conflict Management
• Continuous Learning
• Customer Focus
• Decision Making
• Developing Others
• Diplomacy and Tact
• Empathetic Outlook
• Flexibility
• Goal Achievement
• Influencing Others
• Interpersonal Skills
• Leading Others
• Objective Listening
• Personal Accountability
• Planning and Organizing
• Problem Solving
• Resiliency
• Results Orientation
• Self Management
• Self Starting
• Teamwork

Before you hire your next sales person you may want to consider using the TriMetix™ Sales Assessment System to determine if your sales candidate has the Magnificent Seven Personal Talents and Skills for sales success at your company. If you are a hiring manager and are looking for an instrument that will help you improve the results of your hiring and recruiting Contact Us and we will provide a complimentary TriMetix™ Sales Assessment for your next sales candidate.

Good Selling

Steve Clark, MAT, CPBA, CPVA

“Do or do not. There is no try.” 

              -Yoda, Jedi Master

How do you react when you are unsuccessful in your attempt to make a sale? Do you blame external factors or do you accept personal responsibility for your lack of success?  In selling you can either make sales or you can make excuses but you can’t make both. Here are the top 25 excuses sales people make for poor performance. How many of them are you guilty of?

1.  My quota is too high.
2.  My territory is too small.
3.  My company doesn’t advertise enough.
4.  Our marketing material is out of date.
5.  Our price is too high.
6.  We don’t get enough leads.
7.  I got undercut on price..
8.  The gatekeeper won’t let me through.
9.  Money is tight.
10.  The economy is slow.
11.  Businesses are not spending money.
12.  My prospects lie to me.
13.  We have a long sales cycle.
14.  Prospects need time to think about it.
15.  I don’t like making cold calls.
16.  They are happy with their current supplier.
17.  Rejection wipes me out.
18.  We’re not competitive.
19.  They’re comparing us to the competition.
20.  They just signed a new contract.
21.  I can’t get through voice mail.
22.  They won’t return my call.
23.  They have to take it to the committee.
24.  They were just shopping price.
25.  They used my proposal to get competitive pricing.

 In this modern era of increased competitive pressure, globalization and technology old school selling methods and processes are not good enough. If you want to join the ranks of the sales elite quit making excuses for poor performance and accept the fact that your sales skills are not good enough; not nearly good enough. When you accept this truth you can begin to make real progress.

Want to know how to get started?

Like the optimistic goal of finding the perfect husband or wife, the hunt for the perfect sales person goes unfulfilled.

For as long as sales people have roamed the earth there have been “winners” and “losers.” For just as long, sales managers have been searching for the elusive “perfect sales person.”

Sales managers perspectives must change. Instead of looking for the perfect person, they must learn to identify and hire sales candidates that have the basic skills and talents to become successful, and then apply superior sales management practices to compensate for the shortcomings new hires have. The ability to recognize, communicate, coach and motivate each of the four types of sales personalities will ultimately determine a manager’s success.

Let’s take a look at the four types of Account Executives and how to manage each:

Hunters

These types are resilient when it comes to rejection. They have a sense of urgency and close hard and fast. They push for the sale, collect the check and move on to the next kill. They’re competitive, positive, high energy, dynamic, fast passed, results oriented and they have very high egos.

They are not good relationship builders or team players and they are demanding.

They have a psychological need to convince others to their way of thinking and their greatest strength in selling is closing new business. They can be your biggest advocate or your worst nightmare.

Management Key: Have them stay out of the office and work on their own where they won’t have to interact and upset the rest of the staff.

Farmers

Farmers have a retail sales mentality and would rather respond to customer requests than initiate contact. When they do respond it is in a low key-key friendly manner. They do not really consider themselves to be sales people. They take rejection very personally and spend a lot of their time trying to work through their feelings of rejection. Farmers will not cold call because they cannot psychologically tolerate rejection. They view cross selling or up selling as imposing on the customer. Their belief is that if someone wants to buy something they will initiate the contact. They value their customers and take wonderful care of existing clients. They are reliable order takers and make great customer service representatives.

Management Key: Give them accounts that require a lot of customer service and relationship building.

Account Penetrators

These sales people are superb long term relationship builders because they possess great patience. They are able to balance the sense of urgency to get new business with the patience to develop new relationships. Their emphasis is on creative problem solving and they excel in consultative selling environments.

They create customer loyalty because of their relationship skills. They are wonderful cross sellers and up sellers and will pursue those opportunities once they have penetrated an account.

Penetrators are political animals who can read who the players are and successfully navigate the political bureaucracy within organizations. They have boundless energy for socializing and networking and see themselves as consultants not sales people.

Their shortcomings are that they are not prospectors and will resist cold calling unless made to do so.

Management Key: Give them prospects and accounts that typically have long sales cycles and multiple layers of decision making.

Charismatics

These folks seem to be living on the edge and almost out of control. They have limitless energy and are in a constant state of movement. They are great initiators of contact or action. They are excessive in every thing they do. They start lots of things but never seem to finish any of them. They are well liked, friendly, social, and outgoing. These folks are master prospectors and will burn up the phone lines and fill up the pipeline. They appear a lot like a Hunter except they are lacking in the ability to close.

They lack focus, are impulsive and overextend themselves to the point of exhaustion. They have a tendency to over promise what you can deliver because they think any thing is possible. They continually shoot themselves in the foot by being totally disorganized and are terrible time managers.

Their sales forecasts are often not worth the paper they are written on. They are the company leaders in pending files and deadwood and they are the mortal enemy of the accounting and traffic departments.

Management Key: Provide strict accountability for their activity and provide plenty of structure and processes for them.

Each of these types of sales people need to be managed differently. A sales manager must not only be able to recognize who she has working for her but she must know how to manage each style and temperament for maximum performance. The management style that works well for one of these types will not work for the others. In order to become more effective, sales managers need to spend time upgrading their knowledge and skills of psychological typing, human relations, coaching and communication. Sadly, most of them are unwilling to do so.

If you ask the average person to describe salespeople, you’ll hear words like pushy, manipulative, slick, self-serving, phony, and a list of other things no mother wants her child to be. For as long as most of us can remember, the sales profession has been the butt of jokes. That’s a shame when you consider that a sales career offers high income, personal freedom, and limitless opportunities.

The reason those uncomplimentary images of salespeople persist is simple: Four out of five people currently employed in the sales profession should be doing something else because they are not hardwired for sales success. To compensate for their lack of natural talent, they try to fake it. They become the classic fast-talking salespeople, and perpetuate the image, the stereotypes, and the jokes.

Inept salespeople cause most companies to experience high turnover, complacency, mediocre production, and poor attitudes among their sales teams. These problems can all be traced back to ineffective recruiting practices and processes.

Fifty-five percent of the people now selling have neither the emotional nor the psychological talent to succeed in selling, says Herb Greenberg, CEO of Caliper and author of How To Hire Your Next Top Performer. They should leave the profession. Another 25 percent are miscast. They are selling the wrong product or service, or trying to sell a product for which they aren’t suited — selling an intangible when they would be better suited to sell a tangible product, etc.

With all that the sales profession offers, it should easy to attract, recruit, build, and maintain highly productive sales teams of the best and brightest talent.

So whom should we be recruiting? What does it take to succeed in selling?

The single biggest key to success is desire. Unless the candidate has an internal burning desire to succeed, nothing else matters. But in addition to craving success, there are five qualities that great salespeople have in common.

While these qualities can be subjectively observable by an astute student of human behavior, they are not easily quantifiable or measurable by interviewers. In order to objectively quantify and measure these characteristics, interviewers should have applicants complete a psychometric behavioral assessment prior to the interview.

Sales Managers and interviewers who follow this process will eliminate many false hires and save themselves and their company precious time and money.

Empathy

According to Herb Greenberg, “Empathy is the ability to sense the reactions of other people. It is the ability to pick up the subtle clues and cues provided by others in order to accurately assess what they are thinking and feeling. Empathy does not necessarily involve agreeing with the feelings of others, but it does involve knowing what their feelings are.”

The salesperson that is able to sift through and find the true meaning of what is being communicated is able to more accurately uncover problems and present customized solutions.

Ego Drive

Don’t confuse ego drive with desire or motivation to succeed. Ego drive is an emotional need to gain self-acceptance. Persuading others to our point of view fulfills that need. Top salespeople get their “fix” or “high” when they successfully persuade a prospect. When someone buys their product or service, it becomes a validation of self.

Salespeople with high Ego Drive are motivated and driven to achieve tangible results from their sales efforts. They will work long and hard to close sales and produce positive results.

Service Need

Salespeople who rate high in service need have a psychological need to serve and please others. Because of their need to be liked they develop relationships easily and are able to create trust quickly. This need makes them a natural fit for sales positions that require them to service and maintain ongoing relationships with buyers that they sell.

Self-Image

This individual possesses the ability to accept rejection and failure as part of life without internalizing or without emotional damage. Someone with a low self-image is paralyzed by failure and avoids any experiences that may produce failure. Salespeople with a strong self-image, however, are emotionally resilient. Rather than being crushed by failure, they are motivated by it. They can’t wait for the next opportunity.

Sales is a profession of constant rejection. The ability to experience rejection and not internalize it and take it personally is perhaps the most critical factor in sales success. Sales people who have a low Self Image are unable to tolerate rejection and will avoid making sales calls on prospects that may reject them.

Utilitarian Attitude

A person with a high utilitarian attitude is likely to have a great need to surpass others in wealth. He or she understands that wealth brings security for the salesperson, but also for present and future family.

A salesperson with this talent has a need to obtain a significant return on their investment of time and energy. Consequently, they will very jealously guard their time and energy and they will avoid sales situations that have low payoff or marginal profit.

Sales organizations that are ready to eliminate the high turnover, mediocre selling, complacency, and bad attitudes need to move away from both the traditional approach and the warm body approach to recruitment. These efforts have produced mediocre sales teams and incompetent salespeople. They reinforce the stereotypes of badly trained, high-pressure, unprofessional, fast-talking con artists.

Instead, companies need to learn how to effectively identify, attract, recruit, and retain winners. Perhaps then, the public will stop making salespeople the butt of jokes.

Good Selling

Steve Clark
PS Want to learn how to become a Master Prospector?

Hiring superstar sales talent is a lot easier than your managers will tell you. Their problem: they think hiring salespeople is the same as hiring for other positions. Wrong. Sales selection requires a completely different process.

Here are the ten most common sales force-hiring mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1: Not making recruiting and retaining great sales talent your #1 business priority. Solution: Make this a significant goal for all your managers, and tie a good chunk of their performance bonus to the goal.

Mistake #2: Lacking a system for recruiting top talent from outside your industry. Solution: Create a hiring process for identifying top talent from industries with similar sales environments, and include an on-boarding program to cut ramp time. Example: Sellers who’ve sold conceptual financial services by calling on CEOs and presidents can ramp up to sell other conceptual services, like advertising or consulting.

Mistake #3: Hiring salespeople who can sell instead of those who will sell. The ONLY criterion for selecting superior sales talent is: Will they sell? Not “can they sell?” Sales teams are full of imposters who know how to sell, but won’t.

Mistake #4: Not knowing how to IDENTIFY superstar sales candidates. How do you? Pick the best sales people in your industry, or your company and perform a benchmark evaluation of the behaviors, attitudes, skills and environmental fit to make them champions.

Mistake#5: Hiring managers conduct traditional interviews, and fail to ask the right questions to unmask the “real” candidate. Solution: Conduct audition interviews, which simulate the tough environment to which a real prospect would subject them.

Mistake #6: Hiring to availability instead of to excellence. Solution: Hold your hiring managers accountable to hiring only “A” players.

Mistake #7: Hiring people based on “impressions” instead of hiring those they know will sell. Solution: Change your hiring criteria.

Mistake #8: Failing to learn the five hidden weaknesses that neutralize selling skills. Solution: Learn all five and how to spot them.

They are:

1. Need for Approval: An emotional need to be liked (common in 85 % of sales people in the United States.)
2. Emotional Involvement: They lose objectivity and forget what to do in the heat of battle.
3. Money Weaknesses: Are uncomfortable talking about money, or have a low money tolerance.
4. Buy Cycle: They are indecisive when buying, or shop around on price. As a result, they’re vulnerable to prospects that want to do the same.
5. Self-Limiting Beliefs: If you cannot believe it, you cannot achieve it. These missing beliefs about themselves and selling predetermine their outcomes.

Mistake #9: Failing to measure and reward your employees for referring great candidate employees. Solution: Make it a priority. Set goals for candidate referrals. Pay handsomely, half on hire, half six months later.

Mistake #10: Advertising for positions, instead of for people. The magic is to write ads to describe your superstar. How? Write ads that cause superstars to remark upon reading: “That’s me.”

Many of the world’s best sales forces are the best because they have developed and use a systematic sales process. Having a map of the things we as salespeople have to do to make a sale provides a framework for sales planning and activity that reduces mistakes and shortens new hire ramp-up time.

However, what is conspicuously absent from most of these process maps are the things that our prospective customers have to do each step of the way in order to buy. The truth is that the things we do at any particular step or stage in the process could be a complete waste of time if the client doesn’t do what they must do to move forward to the next step or stage in their buying process.

As sales professionals, you and I don’t retire quota or earn commissions for anything that we do. We get paid on what our prospects do. When they sign a contract or issue a purchase order, then we make some money. This is the root of one of the major challenges of selling. We have to accept that we cannot control our prospects.

As sales people or managers we often ask, “What do we have to do to close this deal?” That, in fact, is the wrong question. What we should be asking is, “What does the prospect have to do in order to buy?” and then the follow-on question is, “What do we have to do to get them to do those things?”

Whether or not we have or follow a systematic sales process, we should endeavor to understand and document our client’s buying process. We must understand not only the things that have to happen throughout the selection and approval process, but who will be involved along the way.

Armed with a thorough understanding of the steps and stages of our prospects buying process, we can plan our work accordingly. Then every single move we make can be made with the specific intent of enabling or empowering our prospect to take the next step they need to take in order to buy.

If you think about it a minute, before we speak to a prospective prospect on the phone we should know and understand exactly what has to happen next in their buying process, and what we’re going to do on this call to make that happen. And if we spend the time and money to go visit a prospect without a plan of what we intend to say and do to help them take the next step in their buying process, then we are little more than a professional visitor.

Defining and documenting a useful map of our prospects buying process will take time, it will take effort, and it will require that we reach, qualify, and sell to all of the people who will play a part in the selection and approval process. We will need a lot of input and perspective because simply accepting any one person’s opinion of their process leaves too many variables to chance and ultimately leaves us with too much exposure and opportunity for failure. Taking the time to thoroughly understand all of the things that the prospect needs to do in order to buy often makes the difference between the very successful and those who simply get by.

The job of a sales manager is not to grow sales but to recruit, grow and develop salespeople. The sales manager’s job is to set the course and direction of the sales team by developing and implementing the most efficient system of selling the company’s products and services. By his/her statements and actions, the successful sales manager inspires and motivates the sales team to act in ways that promotes everyone’s best interest.

The sales manager’s role is to cultivate and refine the talents of the salespeople and he/she should make sure that the sales people are aware of this. It is important that the effective sales manager communicate the purpose behind their efforts to help the salespeople grow their skills. When done properly the successful sales manager is able to institute a culture of “excellence” as the prime motivator for increase sales performance.

A sales manager can motivate and inspire salespeople in three ways. Proper compensation plans, conducting effective sales and training meetings, and helping salespeople set higher goals and objectives.

Salespeople are motivated by ambition, the need for recognition and of course compensation. To prompt salespeople to higher levels of performance it is necessary to design an effective compensation plan. An effective compensation plan is one that is going to help both the salesperson and the company achieve their goals.

Companies must incentivize the behavior and results they want. The comp plan should emphasize the desired company outcome. Be it new clients, retention of clients, new product sales or gross profits. Whatever the compensation plan is it needs to be easily understood by the salesperson. It should be so easily understood that the salesperson could figure it out in their head.

Sales meetings provide an excellent opportunity for motivating, training and inspiring salespeople. Unfortunately, most sales meetings fall short on this. Many times the sales meeting becomes a forum for the manager to rant and rave about lagging sales, lack of activity or administrative policies and details. Because of the social nature of most salespeople, sales meetings should be fun, educational and inspirational. It is also a place to publicly praise the sales team for anything positive. Salespeople get beat up constantly so use this time to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. The salespeople should leave the sales meeting high as a kite not as low as a snake’s belly. Most managers fail miserably in this role.

Training prepares the salesperson to maximize every customer encounter. A methodical selling process incorporates specific selling techniques that are custom-tailored for each buyer they interact with.

Through proper training, salespeople better understand their customer’s wants and needs. They’re also better equipped to cope with potential difficulties with the company’s products and services.

Well-trained salespeople recognize genuine selling opportunities more readily than their untrained counterparts.

An effective training program brings new staff up to speed more quickly than when sales reps are forced to learn on their own. As a result, frustrations are minimized and people are less inclined to go elsewhere.

The third part of motivation is goal setting. The manager’s role is to help salespeople become more focused on specific, achievable personal goals that are aligned with the company’s goals. This requires spending time one-on-one with the salespeople to help them enlarge the mental picture they have of themselves and what they can achieve. Some examples of goals might include: sales and gross profits for the year, obtaining more business from existing clients, acquiring new clients, retention of existing clients, etc.

High performance starts with clear unambiguous goals. They must define what success means to the individual and to the company.

The manager whose first priority is developing his people knows that frequent coaching delivers consistent financial results. Regular scheduling of coaching and review must be an agenda item that’s written in ink, not penciled in.

Coaching is a system that “grows” people by enabling them to learn through guided discovery, not by showing or telling people what to do. Telling is not coaching! Coaching assumes that team members learn by doing. Effective coaches have three major responsibilities: (1) guiding people to discover the tools they need to get the job done; (2) building confidence; and (3) motivating team members to be the best they can be.

An effective sales manager juggles many balls in fulfilling his responsibility to the company, but none is more important than getting out in the field with their sales team. Too many sales managers are too busy shuffling papers, filling out reports and sitting behind their desks. They should be out making sales calls with their salespeople, helping to train them in more productive sales techniques.

There are three parts to coaching. They are field coaching, pre and post call debriefing and coaching for improved performance.

Field coaching has three parts: joint sales calls with the manager, training calls in which the salesperson observes the manager sell and coaching calls in which the manager observes.

1. Joint Sales Calls - working as a team the salesperson and the manager participate in the call equally. These double up calls not only increase sales but also are great learning experiences for the salesperson.
2. Training Call - the sales manager runs the call while the salesperson silently observes. It is important that the manager models the proper selling skills for the salesperson.
3. Coaching Call - the salesperson runs the call and the sales manager silently observes. At the end of the call the sales manager debriefs the salesperson and discusses lessons learned.

Coaching The Poor Performer

To help a poor performer the coaching process would include these five steps:

1. Define the Situation Clearly - gather facts and identify performance results.
2. Counsel - meet with the rep and make it clear that your goal is to help them improve their performance. Avoid blaming, reprimanding or delivering ultimatums. Let the rep know that you believe that with coaching the performance issues can be improved.
3. Ask the Salesperson - what do they think the solution to the problem is. Solicit input from them on what they think they need to change. Avoid giving advice or telling the salesperson what they need to do.
4. Design a Mutually Agreed-on Plan - this plan should be a comprehensive, clearly defined, results-oriented plan. The plan should include activity goals and results or production goals that both parties can agree to.
5. Set a Follow-Up - following agreement on the plan, the rep must understand that the sales manager will closely scrutinize sales activity and results. The follow-up plan includes weekly meeting with the manager to go over results and progress.

When salespeople don’t hit the targets, the manager needs to hold their feet to the fire. In some cases it may be necessary to renegotiate the expectations. But if the expectations were fair to begin with it is better for the manager to send the salesperson on to another career opportunity.