In their book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton report that great managers and average managers have different expectations for their employees. According to Buckingham and Clifton, average managers assume that “each person can learn to be competent in almost anything”, while great managers assume that “each person’s talents are enduring and unique.”
Most sales books and sales training programs seem to share the “average manager” point of view. In other words, they seem to assume that anyone can learn to be competent in sales. All that is required is the investment of time and effort in learning a particular set of skills. Once you learn the skills, you are on your way to sales success.
Unfortunately, this approach does not work for everyone. How many salespeople do you know who are struggling to make quota? Why are they struggling? Is it the state of the economy? (If other individuals on the same sales team are making their numbers, blaming the economy won’t earn much sympathy.) Is it because they don’t work hard enough? Is it because they don’t have enough product knowledge? Do the need to work harder on their selling skills? Do they need more coaching from their manager?
What if the “great manager” point of view is correct? What if everyone cannot become proficient in sales? What if success in sales requires a unique set of talents?
Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney report this very conclusion in their book, How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer: The Five Qualities That Make Salespeople Great. After correlating hundreds of thousands of assessments that were conducted over several decades with actual sales performance measurements, they conclude, “Fifty-five percent of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else” and “another 20 to 25 percent have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else.”
If unique talents are indeed required for sales success, what process can companies use to identify which talents are critical? Once these critical talents have been identified, how can companies determine whether individual salespeople and sales candidates have these talents?
The tools and processes that many companies use to source and select salespeople do not address these questions. Consider the following examples:
Employment Ads: Many employment ads list a variety of “knockout factors” such as required skills, education, and experience. The purpose of these knockout factors is to screen out undesirable candidates. However, is there really a correlation between specific knockout factors and an individual’s ability to sell? If 80 percent of a company’s sales force produces just 20 percent of its sales, how good a job are that company’s knockout factors doing of screening out unqualified candidates? Might they actually be screening out qualified candidates instead?
Resumes: Resumes are purely subjective documents. They are written with the specific intention of portraying an individual’s skills and experiences in the best possible light. Do some people misrepresent their qualifications on their resumes? Absolutely! Even when the information on a resume is completely accurate, what correlation does it have with that individual’s ability to sell your company’s offering?
Interviews: The accuracy of the interview process is also suspect. As Lou Adler explains in his book, Hire With Your Head, “More errors are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than any other time. Emotions, biases, perceptions, stereotypes, and first impressions are powerful human forces that profoundly affect individual judgment.”
What do these three examples have in common? They all describe tools and processes that are completely reliant upon subjective information.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using subjective information to make “people decisions”. In fact, subjective information should play an important role in every people decision. However, if a company is struggling with The 80/20 Rule in its sales organization, clearly its current process isn’t working as well as the company would like. Something needs to change. One useful change would be the addition of objective information to the “people decision” process.
How can companies acquire objective information about salespeople and sales candidates? One of the easiest ways is through the use of modern assessment technologies. Extensive research and validation studies have shown these technologies to be very effective at matching people to jobs and predicting performance.
If a company chooses to assess its salespeople and sales candidates, what attributes should its managers look for in the assessment results? What attributes are most responsible for sales success? The answers to these questions are provided in The Attributes Required For Sales Success.