By Debbie Depp
Here's an exercise: Fold your hands together and note which thumb is on top. Now do it again, but this time make the other thumb come out on top. Feels pretty uncomfortable, doesn't it? That's because you're breaking a familiar pattern.
Now apply that exercise to employee training. In high-tech, we're familiar with assessment software to match the right person with the right job. But why stop there? You can use that same behavioral evaluation tool to coax maximum sales performance from those new hires.
If your company is like most, it spends over half of its training budget on increasing sales reps' product knowledge. But through our research of over 3,000 sales forces, we found that the most effective salespeople are generally not those with the greatest product knowledge, but the ones with the best selling skills.
You can foster those selling skills if you know what makes each individual 'tick.' By measuring mental abilities, motivation and interests to provide quantified, objective data, an assessment tool will give you the insight necessary to tailor your training and coaching to different personality types.
Several years ago, a Massachusetts -based software company turned to behavioral evaluation tools to improve the performance of its sales reps. The company had not only made poor hiring decisions, but its sales force was ill-prepared to adapt to the growth and rapidly changing nature of the business.
The assessment tool allowed the company to better match job candidates' skills with the requirements of each position and to restructure the sales organization to increase productivity -- a task that required insight into the individual characteristics of each salesperson.
The result was improved communication between managers and sales reps, a decrease in hiring costs and an increase in productivity. The company became top rated and went public.
Now that we've broken through your comfort zone, let's go back to an area you're probably more familiar with -- assessments as hiring tools.
With any new hire, there is a deviously expensive learning curve. Coopers & Lybrand found that for some positions, a company may invest $250,000 as a result of a bad hiring decision -- hardly the best return on your investment. The financial impact on a sales territory when a poor hiring decision is made is significant. It's difficult, if not nearly impossible, to get revenue back on track.
Without a crystal ball, managers are pretty much at the mercy of a candidate's resume and references. These may yield some good information about a person's employment history, but will reveal little about their mental abilities, work habits, motivation and interests. To get the right job fit, you must see beneath the surface to the essence of the total person.
Behavioral evaluation tools are the next best thing to that crystal ball. They allow you to pinpoint abilities and strengths that will potentially lead to success. They become a paradigm for understanding people and their performance, and a short-cut to the end of the learning curve.
Doing business in the late 20th century, we welcome the latest cutting-edge developments, eagerly embracing new technologies to use for our own products. But those same forces that keep guiding our thumbs back to their familiar positions also blind us to technology's potential to improve our business practices.
Assessment software is a powerful tool that can extend beyond hiring into training and employee management. It gives managers insight into their workers, helping them match employee with job, benchmark their sales force, motivate their reps and coach them to higher productivity.
Use these tools creatively and reap the rewards of having broken through a familiar pattern. Now, you can put your thumbs back. |
