Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

Another source is to cultivate professional organizations. That dead time during trade shows and conferences can be well spent getting to know the competitive salespeople who always assemble there.

A very successful rep could produce quota for 10 years or more. How much would you spend on a prospect that size?

It can be dangerous to recruit from clients, but there are times when clients can be a good source of candidates without destroying the relationship. You also can consider rehires—good people who have left you. Maybe the grass is greener for a reason; maybe it’s the stuff they are spreading around over there. Good people can come back if you keep the door open.

Most managers, in their interviewing process, consider only two dimensions—performance and personality. If this is as deep as you look, you’re not going deep enough.

There are a number of reasons salespeople fail and one of the biggest ones isn’t a lack of confidence or commitment. It’s character. And most interviewers fail to ask enough questions in this area.

In our management training course, we teach people how to drill down to character issues in addition to performance. We teach them to ask questions they wouldn’t normally ask otherwise.

During one of our management training classes, one manager said, “I’m not comfortable asking these personal questions.” The most recent exercise we had done in class was to study why employees fail. When we looked at the chart paper around the room, the irony was that 80 percent of their failures had to do with character issues, yet they weren’t interviewing in that area.

What skills, experience, intelligence level, behavior traits, etc. will predict success? The answer is unique to you and your organization.

Your Sales Process Should Drive Your Talent Profile

The first step is to define your best-practices sales cycle— the template for an ideal sale in your industry segment. Then the next step is to work backwards to the activities, information, and strategies needed for each phase of your sales cycle.

FIGURE 4–1 Best-practice sales cycle competency model.

Then work into the skills, competencies, behaviors, and experience needed to effectively execute each of these activities for each of the roles on your sales team (see Figure 4–1). The last step is to create the interview questions that help you to discover these traits—or their absence—and compare them to your profile.

One of the best books in this area is Don Clifton and Marcus Buckingham’s book «Now, Discover Your Strengths». This is an excellent approach to identifying the characteristics that predict success.

When we used Don’s company in the past, we did a study of our most successful reps — hunters in the high-tech software industry — and were able to identify the most important traits to look for. In our profile, the “must haves” were that sales reps be competitive, have big egos that result in drive and ambition, and have the courage to overcome obstacles and initiate action from a blank piece of paper every day. We found that being smart also was critical. Such people make things happen rather than watch and wonder.

Other traits were either “like to haves” or fell in the category of “compensating strengths and weaknesses.” However, if we didn’t have the four “must haves,” we knew that the person probably was not going to be successful and that the cost of hiring such a person was going to be high. We have found this to be true, by the way, of most hunters in most organizations. The four “must have” traits are necessary for competitive evaluation hunters, as we described in Hope Is Not A Strategy.

Hiring Assessments

To find out whether or not people have these traits, a number of companies offer assessments or surveys. Basic intelligence tests and personality style assessments are fundamental and inexpensive for first-tier screening. For complex sales of big-ticket items to committees in competitive situations, however, much more is needed.

One of the best people at defining selection profiles is Ross Rich of Chicago-based Selection Strategies, Inc. He not only knows what to look for, but he also has created a structured two-hour phone interview that listens to what the candidate says and also to what he or she doesn’t say. Although these processes are not 100 percent perfect, they do help to raise red flags for your finalists. This phone interview and interpretation are fairly extensive, so most companies use them for finalists only, but they will show you the weak spots—where you should drill down deeper—before you make the expensive decision to hire a candidate.

As we mentioned, most people look at personality and performance, but there are potential flaws in both these areas. First of all, it’s hard to judge past performance. How quotas are set differs from company to company. Thus, when a résumé says, “I made quota at this other company,” what does that really mean?

One of our principals, Joe Southworth, tells a story of when he was a sales manager at a large software company:

“There was a candidate who I really wanted to hire. He looked great on paper—he had blown away his quota the previous year. I went into the VP of sales’ office, excited about this new candidate, and told him about how he had exceeded his quota last year.

‘Has he made quota every year for the last three years?’ the VP asked me.

‘Well, he’s been selling for 10 years,’ I said.

‘But does that mean he has 10 years of experience or one year of experience 10 times?’ he asked. ‘We’re looking for consistency and improvement. What you really want to know is, is he getting better every year or is he just doing the same thing year in, year out.’”

Two better questions to ask in assessing past performances of salespeople are

1. How did you compare to your peers?

2. Which percentile was your sales performance in each year?

You also should get specifics on how they overcame challenges. Take the groomed references they give you and ask for referrals to other, unsolicited references and teammates who may have worked with the candidate on deals. Their perspective on the rep’s contribution and competency is usually very enlightening. Often their silence or faint praise speaks volumes.

Another important question to ask is what percentage of the reps at your past employer made quota every year? Many salespeople made their quota from 1995 to 2000 because they were reacting to demand in a hot market. If you didn’t make quota, you were considered a failure. In other companies, only 50 percent of the salespeople made it every year. Having this metric gives you some sort of a benchmark to compare quotas.

Different industries also have different sales rhythms — the size and number of deals in a year. Some salespeople are used to a deal a day, some one per week, some one per month, and with some organizations, it’s only one deal per year. Knowing what percentage of their business came from repeat orders vs. new name or competitive sales can indicate whether they are a hunter or a farmer.

Another challenge is taking transactional salespeople and putting them in a long sales cycle. Some salespeople are better at more frequent sales rhythms, whereas others are better at working on bigger deals over long periods of time.

Are Great Salespeople Born or Made?

I am often asked if great selling ability is something that people are born with or whether training is necessary. Without a doubt, there are great intuitive salespeople with innate abilities (see Figure 4–2).

Dave Sample, a long-time client of ours, now at Blackboard, summed up the problem like this: “Heroics don’t scale.” Yes, there are people who can do this intuitively, but there aren’t enough of them. You have to find them and you have to grow them.

Not only that, but intuitive salespeople are unconscious about their competence. If your sales model is different from their experience, they may not be able to adapt because often they are good but don’t know why.

So both hiring and training are important. But what can we change in a person, and what is in a person that is too difficult or time-consuming to try to change?

The nature versus nurture question has been the subject of many stories over the years, as in the movies Wall Street and The Firm, for example. In both stories, the main character was tempted to actions outside their basic principles, with grave consequences, only to find their true character in the end.

In Figure 4–2, it can be seen that there are things in a person’s DNA and in their early development—intelligence, personality, core values—that are very hard to change. And a person may change behavior a little for a little while. But if that change is at odds with the person’s inner fiber, eventually, they will snap back or be ineffective because their heart is really not in their actions. Thus these inner core traits are what you should really focus on in your hiring. In my experience, people usually have to bring these things with them.

The next layer out—goals, habits, and principles — are drivers of action and daily choices. If these are to be changed in a person, they need to be changed within the first 90 days of when the person is hired. The company may set a goal or principle for a person on the outer ring of the figure, but if that goal or principle is not owned in the person’s heart, the result is usually a weak or false effort and ultimately, replacement.

Heroics don’t scale.There are people who do this intuitively, but there aren’t enough of them. You have to find them and you have to grow them.

Knowledge, skills, experience, and attitude are the things that enable a person to accomplish his or her goals or job. Obviously, these can be trained and managed by rewards. The rest of the figure includes the many areas management can address to direct short-term behaviors.

Notice how far inside we have placed habits. This is where the subconscious overrides the conscious. Changing organizational behavior often means changing individual behavior, which often takes time and consistency.

Based on experience, I have identified 10 different elements that need to be considered when hiring a successful salesperson, sales manager, or anybody for that matter. Most of my first interviews last either 30 minutes or two hours. Before I hire a salesperson or principal for our firm, I meet with him or her for at least eight hours—two of which are outside the office at dinner.

In the United States, HR managers are very nervous about the types of questions asked in interviews for fear of litigation. In reality, lawsuits probably are cheaper than bad hires. (A statement such as this usually sends HR managers right through the roof.) The problem is that the cost of bad hires is invisible and the cost of litigation is very visible. The truth is that bad hire costs, as we have discussed, are very expensive.