What Would More Sales Do for Your Business? 4 steps to get there!
Go ahead, dream a bit: imagine that your sales force were entirely made up of people who produced like your top 2 performers?
What would it mean to you in sales volume, profitability...your income?
To provide a yardstick for measuring your sales force, consider this: Across over 100 businesses of all sizes and types in our recent survey, the average “top producer” outsold the same company’s “bottom producer” (who was still holding on to his/her job) by a ratio of 5.7 to 1! The range was from just over 3:1, all the way up to 9:1. Whether you have a small sales force, or a large one, those ratios are everywhere!
The chart shows the potential effect of replacing the bottom performer with a top performer in a small sales force with a low 3:1 differential. If you’ve done the math, you won’t need much convincing: We would all like to have a sales force made up of only top producers!
Hiring a sales producer is, in traditional methods, a very inefficient process.
Three out of four sales hires, according to our data, don’t work out at all. The new salesperson has only a 25% chance of seeing his first anniversary on the job. Worse yet, of the 1 in four that do stay, only 1 in 10 becomes a true “top producer” within 3 years!
In talking with sales managers, horror stories emerge: The cost of simply connecting the salesperson with a potential buyer, only to lose the opportunity; the costs of overcoming negative word of mouth; the cost of paying a salesperson who simply “takes up space”; the cost of training...and the list goes on.
Why is hiring for top producers in sales so hard? Many factors contribute, but traditional hiring methods and beliefs are at the root of the problem in most businesses: For decades, perhaps millennia, the popular belief has been, “if you can sell, you can sell anything.”
Unfortunately for hiring managers, research clearly indicates this is not the case. The ubiquitous and frustrating “80-20 rule” was investigated by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein, and Patrick Sweeney, and reported in their book, How to Hire & Develop Your Next Top Performer. What they concluded, paraphrased:
· 50% of working salespeople should not be in sales, as they lack the basic characteristics of good salespeople;
· 50% of those remaining are selling the wrong thing, in the wrong place, for the wrong managers.
· This leaves the 25% or so who produce most of the sales.
So, how can we do a better job, and increase our chances of hiring a top producer, nearly every time?
1. Use proven job fit assessments to hire salespeople! Measure how candidates think & learn, act at work, and what careers truly interest them; measure characteristics critical to sales performance, like Pace and Assertiveness…and don’t assume high levels guarantee success.
2. Measure top performers and low performers, job by job. Use those assessments to describe what really determines top performance in this place, in this job, for this manager…and what really makes the difference between top and bottom.
3. Hire for fit. The better the match on these measured dimensions, the greater the probability your candidate will become a top performer...and it’s a much better predictor than experience, or education, or interviews.
4. Build a pool of potential. The time to find your next top performer is now, not the next time you need another body! In the process, continue to improve your sales force, replacing bottom feeders with people who fit your job.
Do the math, make a table like this one, with your own numbers:
