Originally published in: MASS High Tech
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 after realizing it was losing business because of underperforming sales reps. Not only had the company made poor hiring decisions, but it was growing and changing rapidly. Its sales force was ill-prepared to adapt to these new customers.
The company's senior vice president of marketing, sales and service knew he had to better match job candidates' skills with the requirements of each position. he also wanted to restructure the sales organization to increase productivity -- a task that would require insight into the individual characteristics of each salesperson.
After using an assessment tool with these goals in mind, the company improved communication between managers and sales reps. At the same time, hiring costs decreased and productivity increased. 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. The question is how long will it be? 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. Business today can rarely tolerate an indefinite learning curve.
At best, it takes about a month before a new employee's performance is recognized as marginal. In the meantime, the business is losing money in terms of opportunities missed, resources invested in that employee, and the effect on the sales team, which may be forced to compensate for its colleague's weaknesses. The company may end up spending an enormous amount of time, energy and money to train, coach or motivate that employee and see little in return.
In fact, Coopers & Lybrand found that for some positions, that investment can reach $250,000 that first year. 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.
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 shortcut to the end of the learning curve. Assessments can help you meet the following sales force benchmarking goals:
- control and enhance success in hiring
- make teams more productive
- design organizations and jobs around people
Employee training is where you position your company to get a return on its hiring investment. Armed with insight into your employees' particular work habits, motivators and selling styles, you can achieve that payback through strategic coaching.
Here again, it is important to abandon old habits and notions about training. Just as learning doesn't begin and end in the classroom, training, too, should be multifaceted and ongoing. This means supplementing formal programs with informal and even impromptu training sessions. These can include:
- Ride-alongs, where sales managers observe reps in action. This allows them to address specific weaknesses in areas such as closing, the discovery process or qualifying leads.
- Reviewing sales calls daily to determine what worked, what didn't and why.
- Role-playing. One application software vendor does this quarterly with each sales rep sharing a real-life situation. The group works on the solution as a team, and in the process, gains knowledge, insight and confidence. The outcome is a motivated sales force with improved capabilities for closing more sales.
In the high tech industry, 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.
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