What do you do?  Put up with it!  Vow never to go there again?  If you have time, you complain – much to the embarrassment of those around you.  Would it make a difference?  Would they listen to you?  You get the feeling that they wouldn’t.

Unfortunately, service organisations too often do not set high enough standards for the recruitment of frontline staff in the belief that the lower level jobs do not justify a rigorous and aggressive recruitment process.  The consequence is high employee turnover, service failures and related costs that often go undetected by the organisation, such as recruitment costs, wasted management time and discontentment amongst other employees.

Think back to how you run your organisations.  How often do you look at it from the customer’s perspective?  By creating lasting value for your customers, you will create high value for yourselves.  Therefore, it is the responsibility of business leaders to remove any barriers that will prevent the achievement of service excellence and the creation of high value; they must aim for employee satisfaction, loyalty and productivity, which in turn will lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty and repeat business.
To realise this ‘competitive advantage’ we believe that a committed, motivated and high performance organisation will have:

• a clear vision, values, strategy and goals in which every colleague believes
• co-operation and knowledge sharing through key stakeholder management
• an understanding and insight into future customer needs
• excellence in hiring
• accuracy of placing people into jobs that match their interests, intellect and characteristics – simply put, ‘job match’
• a strong commitment to focused training and continual self-development
• enthusiastic engagement
• quality succession planning
• high levels of staff retention
• excellence in leadership and management – exemplary actions, trust and open two-way
• communication
• a environment where risk taking and initiative are supported
• complete customer focus and an ‘ownership’ mindset as well as a continuous improvement mindset
• a strong emphasis on colleague and associate satisfaction - as strong as its customers
• a culture based on recognition and/or reward for exemplary performance
• teams must reflect the communities they service
• a generous, but affordable salary system.

An Impressive Business Model!

An organisation that embodies these values is ASDA – a company with 400 stores throughout the UK and employing over 165,000 people.  They can demonstrate some powerful statistics:

• they value their colleagues as much, if not more than their customers
• they have the lowest turnover rate for their industry in the UK – 24% compared to the 50% industry average
• more than 5,000 workers have been recognised for 25 years service or more
• on average, every one of its 165,000 colleagues has at least 4 years’ experience serving customers – proof that its stores, depots and offices are some of the best places to work in the UK.

David Smith, ASDA’s People Director, said, “Our track record of retaining colleagues is second to none.  Their hard work and commitment over the years is what makes our business so successful.”

ASDA has clearly accepted the challenge of creating an environment that will attract, retain and motivate those who join the organisation.

If organisations want to succeed they must recruit, train and retain the best people.  They must do all they can to:

• get employees off to a strong start (recruitment, selection and induction)
• foster continuous learning through training and coaching
• create conditions that cultivate ownership attitudes through rewards, performance feedback and result-oriented cultures
• enable each person to contribute their ideas, knowledge, experience and skills
• create a ‘great place to work’.

There is a proven, positive link between high employee satisfaction; advanced customer satisfaction and loyalty; competitive advantage and achieving high profitability.  The law of ‘cause and effect’ is reinforced through employees being contented and fulfilled both within their jobs and working environment and consequently providing superior service to customers; who in turn are delighted with the outstanding service they experience!

Increased Profitability

ASDA’s parent company, Wal-Mart Stores, has again posted record sales and earnings for the fiscal year 2008.  Total net sales for the company were $374.5 billion; an 8.6 per cent increase over the previous fiscal year and a record for any retailer. Wal-Mart lives the mission of saving people money so they can live better. They positioned themselves as the unbeatable price leader. Their customers appreciated it and their shareholders understood it.

The hard work and exceptional efforts of Wal-Mart’s two million associates, managers and leaders around the world is the reason for its success.  Improving the end-to-end user experience is inextricably linked to bottom-line results.

Lee Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer reported that they had driven the right strategy for their customers and for their business in the challenging economic and competitive environment and with the economic environment unlikely to change for the foreseeable future, the same opportunity will continue to present itself.

They had added about $30 billion in sales, which is equal to adding the annual sales of a Fortune 75 business. Even more impressive, Wal-Mart exceeded $100 billion in sales during the fourth quarter - a first for any global retailer. And, notably they accomplished this during a quarter when most of retail was going in the other direction.

Making a Difference

While achieving their business goals, Wal-Mart also made a difference to their communities through commitments made for energy efficiency and sourcing, diversity and healthcare. As the world’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart has the responsibility to lead in important areas such as diversity. Their teams reflect the communities they serve. Their associates have the opportunity to grow and succeed as far as their hard work and skills can take them regardless of qualifications, race, gender or age.

Through their “Sustainability 360″ approach, they sold 145 million energy-efficient bulbs within 15 months - enough to eliminate the need for nearly three new coal-fired power plants in the United States. Only Wal-Mart can have this kind of an impact.

In healthcare, they increased significantly the number of associates with some form of health insurance, from 90.4 percent last year to 92.7 percent this year. They also offer more efficient services to employers, helping customers save money through their $4 prescription program, opening health clinics in stores and engaging in the broader public policy debate.

What makes successful performers?

The Starting Point - is to conduct an analysis of values, tasks, attitudes and characteristics critical for successful performance in the role and within the organisation.  Clear criteria for colleague selection is essential; the focus must be on the mixture of attributes, interests, thinking ability and skills to match each job role.  This is achieved utilising various tools including formal assessments, role play and bespoke computer simulations.

Induction – recruits need to be properly integrated into the organisation in the first few days or weeks of employment and be guided through critical and valuable information on the company’s values, traditions, history, strategy, customers, competitors, policies and procedures.

Continuous Learning – organisations should understand that learning is an “alternative to staleness, boredom, burnout and ineffectiveness.”  The value of continuous learning:

• reinforces the organisation’s core values
• motivates colleagues by building their self-confidence and know-how
• professionalises the service delivery role.

It is the case that no-one is ever fully trained or fully knowledgeable.

The Right People - First Time

Profiles International, the world leader in psychometric assessments, have created three on-line assessments tools that are now available in the UK and Europe through TLSA; these assessments have a significant impact on new business development, customer service and all other roles within a business.

These tools are the ‘Sales Indicator’, ‘Customer Service Perspective’ and the ‘Profile XT’.  Real data from your outstanding people are combined with the specific needs of each job to create a profile against which all new candidates are matched.  Only those who are the best fit for each role are taken on. Used at the beginning of the recruitment process to identify those who will prove the best return on your investment will save you considerable time and money.

TLSA can assist any organisation in establishing a process for recruiting and retaining the best possible people.  It is those people you can then develop into being your stars of the future!  Call 0845 600 1556 or email The Leadership and Sales Academy at sales@tlsa.co.uk for further information.

Readers will have seen recent redundancies in certain sectors of the commercial world that were unimaginable 12 months ago – redundancies amongst professionals such as bankers, surveyors, architects and solicitors have recently become commonplace.  The property, construction and financial sectors have been particularly badly hit and for those organisations that continue to trade under these adverse conditions, it is critical that they retain and maintain the best possible workforce to remain competitive.

Before embarking on any redundancy programme, it is important for a business to identify why it is doing so. The first step is to identify what the ongoing business needs are and where the reduced requirement for people exists. This will identify the pool of employees at risk of redundancy, and from which a selection exercise must be carried out.

In a cost cutting exercise it might be very tempting to retire the 50 year old worker who is earning £40k and retain his younger colleague who is earning a lesser salary.  However, which of them provides better value and is most suited to the job role?  The selection process must ensure that the retained employee is the best match for the job.

Many organisations have used the LIFO principle - Last In, First Out would be adopted as a means of selection.  However, due in part to concerns that LIFO may give rise to claims of indirect age discrimination and, crucially, to ensure that the remaining business retains the skills essential to its future survival, it is far better to adopt a system using fair and transparent ‘competence based criteria’ which includes ‘fit with the job’. The criteria to be used in each case should be specific to the requirements of the job, and will frequently also include consideration of discipline records.

The mature worker can be vulnerable in times of redundancy.  There has been an attitude within HR circles that the people who want to stay beyond retirement are not always the ones that managers prefer – these are the people who are less motivated and talented.  But this isn’t a politically correct thing to say and might explain why so few firms in the past have been courting older workers?  Many companies are now realising that this attitude is incorrect.

Redundancy should not be used as a ‘label’ for removing underperforming staff or the mature worker in the absence of a genuine redundancy situation. However, where there is a real need to reduce staff numbers, a good redundancy programme will focus on the ongoing needs of the business and will retain the workers who are the most valuable to the business.

So who are the most valued workers?  Senior Executives in Europe, America and Asia have admitted for the first time that older workers are the key to retaining high value within the business.  However, few of those same executives had yet done anything to persuade colleagues to stay on beyond retirement or to recruit other experienced individuals.  Businesses are realising that they have to hold on to older, skilled workers.
Consideration should also be given to the challenges that are presented with the significant change in demographics which is impacting now and increasingly so over the next 20 years and beyond.  It is recognised that there will be a ‘skills shortage’ that will have a worldwide impact – the UN has estimated that the 15-59 age group in the UK will decline 5% by the year 2025 – the over 60 population will increase by nearly 9%.

We are starting to see a fundamental shift in thinking across business. There is an increasing white-collar and professional skills shortage, which means that attitudes have to change. Businesses are realising that they have to hold on to, or recruit older, skilled workers.  As the number of young adults drops in the West, and lifespans increase, the limitations of today’s strategy of importing foreign labour are showing.  Persuading older workers to stay on and luring others back from retirement is now imperative.

The Nationwide Building Society is a pioneering organisation which has embraced the retention and recruitment of older workers.  It raised its age for compulsory retirement from 60 to 70 in 2001, and then again to 75 in 2004, ahead of the 2006 age-discrimination legislation.

“Changing demographics meant there was a clear business case for change,” said Nationwide’s head of human resources, John Wrighthouse, who added that customers were more satisfied with the service they got from older people; older workers stayed longer and recruiting and retaining those workers met the company’s fairness and diversity policies.

Nationwide’s policy change has certainly appealed to employees, with 347 of the 19,000 staff now over 60 – including a manager of 74. Nationwide ran a final-salary pension scheme until recently, so Whitehouse believes that people are working on because they want to and not just because they need the money.

However, the reality is that Nationwide is among a minority of companies going all out to attract older people. It is time the majority woke up to the pending crisis. In fact, albeit very controversial, the recruitment of older workers is now so critical that it merits the introduction of positive discrimination - for example, giving older workers more rights on part-time working. It has to be understood that these days older workers may also be caring for even older relatives.

Benefits of retaining older workers

So why should an employer consider retaining the older worker?  There are a number of advantages that the mature worker has over his/her younger work colleagues.  A study of 26 companies in the UK carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions concluded:

• High retention rates
  Employers report that older workers are associated with high retention rates.  This helps to reduce recruitment costs.  It also means that their knowledge, skills and experience can be retained by the organisation.  These factors contribute to profitability.
• Lower  absenteeism
  Employers interviewed also found that older workers are likely to have few periods of short-term absence.  This is associated with cost savings.  It also enables employers to plan work schedules with a high degree of confidence, thus increasing efficiency.
• Reliability, commitment and dedication
  Older workers were considered to demonstrate high levels of reliability, commitment and dedication. This is a substantial benefit as it helps employers to run their business efficiently and effectively.  Employers interviewed commented that older workers could be relied upon to:
  exhibit good time-keeping
  work consistently throughout the day or shift
  consider the needs of the team they work with when planning holidays, medical appointments and other absences
  give ‘over and above’ the basic requirement of the job because they take pride in their work and wish to deliver a good quality service.
• Flexibility and innovation
  Older workers are considered to be flexible workers.  Employers highlighted the fact that older workers are willing to work constructively as part of a team and to adjust their own role or hours of work to support the team effort.  Older workers can also be innovative in applying their experience to new situations.  The employers interviewed often found that solutions identified by older workers are generally ‘workable’ as they are often based on extrapolations of their wider ‘life experiences’.
• People orientated skills
  Many older workers are considered to have strong people-orientated skills.  This attribute is particularly beneficial to businesses that require high levels of customer contact.  The employers interviewed found that older workers can be skilled at diffusing potentially difficult situations with customers or members of the public.  They often show a degree of calm authority when difficult circumstances arise.  This helps to ensure that the business runs smoothly.  This attribute is particularly valued by organisations that deal with members of the public.
• People development skills
  Employers also recognised that older workers make a positive contribution to the development of younger members of staff. This may be through sharing knowledge and experience; by bringing a sense of ‘balance’ to teams; or by creating a ‘virtuous circle’ whereby all staff are encouraged to display the same level of commitment and dedication as older workers.  All of these factors contribute positively to the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the business.
• Ability to deal with change
  Frequently, older workers have experienced periods of change in the past.  Employers have found that this enables older workers to deal with change in the workplace with equanimity.
• Leadership
  The employers in the study also recognise that many older workers offer leadership in the workplace.  The combination of their knowledge, experience, work ethic, and life-skills can be inspirational to others.
• Generic knowledge of other industries
  Older workers have many years of experience that can be of benefit to business. For example, they are likely to have worked for other employers and/or in other sectors of industry - this generic knowledge can be drawn on to the benefit of their own business.

Generally, the employers in the study found many ways in which older workers can add value to their organisations. They work efficiently, contribute to the overall effectiveness of the organisation, and relate well to colleagues and customers. All of this has a substantial and positive effect on business profitability.  It would be unreasonable to assert that all younger workers will have ‘lower retention rates’, ‘higher absenteeism’, ‘lower commitment and motivation’, ‘less flexibility and motivation’, however, the study has demonstrated some compelling reasons why employing the mature worker has advantages.

What is most important is to ensure that the person is perfectly matched to the job role.  Employers must consider the negatives of engaging the wrong person – the money spent on training, management, garden leave, employment tribunals, advertising and recruitment agencies, and the cost of finding replacements.  Set this against engaging the correct person – improved performance, increased job satisfaction and lower turnover.

So, there are a number of proven benefits to retaining (or recruiting) the more mature worker.  One of the challenges for organisations is to identify these high value people.  Although we have a good idea, it can be very subjective.

A more objective way of determining high performers is to undertake a ‘predictive performance study’ which helps companies isolate the traits and characteristics that demonstrate success in each job position to predict the potential of others to perform successfully in each position.  The system quantitatively assesses the strengths and capabilities of each individual employee.  Using this data, a job match pattern is created for each position that provides companies with valid, reliable information to better understand, select, retain, manage and develop its workforce.

Building a model of top performance can help organisations select great workers.  A predictive performance study requires little involvement from the management team and the process is very straightforward:

• Identify the individuals you want to assess in a specific job or position.  (We suggest three or more top performers and several lower performers)
• Provide each person’s name, gender and email address – a computer-generated assessment invitation is sent to each person
• Once each individual completes his or her assessment online, the software scores the assessments in real time and creates a job match pattern
• A report consolidating all the scores, the initial pattern and the various placement and coaching reports is provided during a review meeting.
• Find out how a predictive performance study can help you select the best people for each position, increase productivity, improve profitability and improve your ability to predict performance.

For more information, contact Angela Stephenson at 0845 600 1556.
Lance Gill

As we all come to terms with rapidly changing economic circumstances, one of the most significant challenges facing business leaders is preparing the sales force to ‘sell in hard times’.

One of the alarming facts we are faced with is that many of today’s business to business sales people have no experience of selling in difficult times and many of the sales leaders are in the same position!

Sadly, some organisations are making the same mistakes that were made in the early nineties – the sadness is that they will have the same disastrous consequences.

So how do we deal with the ‘economic rebalancing’’ ‘slow down’, or ‘adjustment’ – any expression other than the feared ‘R’ word.

One certainty is that working harder is not the answer – working differently is!

The first step is to get the approach to sales right. Yes you will need to win new business, but not at the expense of the customers you already have. In the last recession two types of sales people emerged:

·          Professionals – individuals who were planned organised and structured. Individuals who realised that one of the key issues in a downturn for existing customers and prospects alike is ‘confidence’. Decision Makers have to be certain that they are making the right decision when placing business – damage to the business and personal reputation becomes a key buying motive in hard times.

“Our current supplier is good, what if these people let us down?”

Sales people who present as professionals, establish needs and provide solutions – build the confidence that Decision Makers need.

·          Enthusiasts – hard working, chasing everything and selling on price. Success was limited, because this group made price the focus of everything and lost sight of customer needs and values. The consequence – customers did not have the confidence to place business or switch to a new supplier.

So the first step is to make sure the sales strategy is structured, planned and focussed where opportunity exists.

Next deal with three facts that apply in business to business selling in any economic downturn:

1.       Sales Cycles – these are harder to identify and start.

2.       The Approval Process - this will be longer because of nervousness on the part of decision makers and extra layers of management approval, before business is placed.

3.       Negotiation Skills – these skills become crucial, downturn or no downturn there is little point in doing business that doesn’t make profit.

Deal with these three facts and your business will remain strong in a downturn and be ready for the upturn:

·          Sales Cycles

Since the mid nineties we have seen a positive and buoyant economy, in which many sales people have enjoyed constant incoming enquiries from both new and existing customers – enquiries that start the sales cycle.

That has changed; the sales person now has to work with customers to start sales cycles – customers whose instincts will be cautious.

The danger here is that the sales person becomes a headless chicken, chasing any opportunity, working crazy hours and worst of all selling on price – usually unprofitable prices.

The first priority is managing the existing account base, the sales person must become more efficient and effective to ensure that business from existing customers is retained. Three things to focus on are:

·          Coverage – review your coverage plans. Make sure that you are in regular contact with all of your customers utilising a combination of meetings, telephone contact and e-mail broadcast. Produce articles and ideas that will help your existing customers, attract prospects, generate new thinking and most importantly create a sense that you are working with customers and prospects alike..

From personal experience I can recall more than one customer in the downturn of the early nineties saying to me ‘You were the only provider who stayed in contact on a regular basis”. Guess who they did business with as things got better?

·          Structured Weeks – to make sure your coverage plans work you must manage time efficiently. Do you need to bring a disciplined structure to your week that facilitates times for customer meetings, telephone contact, administration and planning? Time is your most valuable commodity – use it wisely.

·          Sales Skills – hard times are when good sales people take a look in the mirror and review their skill sets. The two skills that start the sales cycle are the ability to complete a needs analysis and high yield questioning. Downturn or not, we should complete a needs analysis on the basis of a business review with each customer at least once a year. Today it is essential, have you got plans in place to do this and are your skills sharp?

I would recommend to every sales leader that in their next sales meeting they run a coaching session on completing a needs analysis and using high yield questioning techniques to identify and agree customer needs. That is how you start the sales cycle – the needs analysis should cover the business, the individuals, the market, the customers, the competition and the future. Remember most business opportunities exist in the future. This is crucial – you cannot close sales cycles unless you can start them!

·          The Approval Process - in a downturn it is inevitable that the approval process will slow down. Decision makers become cautious and more people become involved in the decision making process. The result sales people are faced with the statement “I’m waiting for sign off”.

This can be dealt with through the application of good stakeholder management techniques. The challenge for the sales person is to identify at all levels the ‘Economic’, ‘User’ and ‘Adviser’ stakeholders in each sales cycle and then:

·          Use discussion documents to gain access to them.

·          Identify the ‘Decision Factors’ and ‘Buying Motives of each stakeholder – then provide a business solution that meets them.

·          Understand the views of each stakeholder – if they are advocates use them as a source of advice. If they are blockers establish why. If someone is not on your side you must deal with any misconceptions. If you cannot change their views demonstrate that you have recognised and tried to accommodate their views.

·          Ensure stakeholders understand that you are working with them to provide solutions and not just making a sale.

In small accounts this may involve just one or two people; in a large business it may involve a network of many people. Sales leaders should be reviewing pipeline now – especially high value deals- to establish what is being done and what needs to be done to move the sales cycle forwards. Remember if you are ‘waiting for sign off’ and the competition is having a discussion with the board, there is only one winner!

·          Negotiation Skills

It is a fact that in hard times you may have to do more to achieve your targets. In good times a sales person may have to close 3 out of 5 sales cycles to achieve target. In hard times it may be 3 out of 6 or 7. However what the sales person cannot do is win business on price that is unprofitable.

Business to business sales people should always sell on the basis of dealing with Feasibility and Value before discussing terms and conditions:

·          Feasibility – ensuring the customer understands you can provide the solution that will meet their needs

·          Value – the value your solution will bring to the customer

Then – and only then – should terms and conditions be discussed. What is the point of agreeing a price on something a customer is not convinced they want to buy?

Some areas to work on:

·          Practice delivering your price with confidence – if you don’t believe your proposition is worth your price the customer won’t!

·          Expect a reaction – be thick skinned, every customer is going to negotiate

·          Negotiate in small stages – if you do move take small steps, communicate to the customer that there is not huge room for movement

·          Negotiate everything – don’t give anything away. Something may have little value to you, but it may mean a lot to the customer.

·          Walk away – if the customer will only deal at a price where you don’t make money, then walk away. There is no point doing business if you are going to lose money – it creates poor business relationships, lack of commitment and of course disastrous financial consequences.

Sales Leaders why not create a case study and practice negotiation skills with your people.

Plus

The role of customer service in hard times is crucial. Everyone in the business who touches customers is responsible for making sure the customer experience is positive. The most common reason for customers changing suppliers in any environment is consistently poor service. Make sure all customer facing staff understand their roles, refresh their skills and engage them in ideas to improve the service you provide.

Brett Lyons

A high performer is someone who can work smarter and faster, and take on greater responsibility and grow in strength when faced with challenges. It is fair to say that one superior person is worth as much to your organisation as a handful of mediocre people. But who are these high performers?

Making the most of your current resource

Whether looking for a candidate to fill a current role, or a candidate to embark upon a new position, you should not forget internal transfers. Organisations need to take advantage of their existing people and be continually looking for ways of advancing this valuable resource. On average twenty per cent of open, non-entry-level jobs should be filled this way, rather than recruiting externally. Not only does this make the process more cost effective, it also ensures your organisation is offering a development programme and retaining its best performers rather than allowing them to take their knowledge elsewhere.

It is true that underperforming organisations lose good people, but it is also true that employees tend to leave managers, not jobs. It is therefore crucial to continually develop your managers and leaders.
When looking to promote from within your organisation it is important to capture the traits of your top performers and use these to create a benchmarking profile of the crucial roles at a higher level. Look at what makes these people high performers. Research has shown that typically certain characteristics exist in top performers; these are:

•  Thinking style - learning, reasoning, problem solving
•  Energy level - initiative, work ethic, drive, restlessness
•  Assertiveness - achievement oriented, competitive
•  Manageability - co-operative
•  Independence - potential to accomplish tasks with minimal supervision
•  Accommodating scales - willingness to change and deal with others
•  Occupational interests - such as influencing and persuading

Once you have this in place, you can assess people further down your organisation, to discover whether they have the traits to be successful in these roles, and see what development they may require and where they should be heading. This will enable you to map out a succession planning strategy. Also, you may not have even considered certain individuals as they haven’t shown what they are capable of.
 
It is a point to note that high performers tend to attract quality colleagues and promote a culture of best practice, ‘like attracts like’. With strong development and mentoring programmes and a transparent performance evaluation process you will be able to identify your top performers and ensure they remain part of your organisation.  Be sure to reward your top performers for their achievements, whether their role is in sales, customer service, IT or management. Line managers should create an environment where performance objectives are agreed, and in this way the person stays productive and motivated.
 
What should you think about when recruiting?

When looking to recruit new people, the starting point should be to look at your current team and decide who your top performers are. You should then look into their common traits, what makes them successful, and work to recruit people who have similar traits and abilities.  In the past many organisations have based their recruitment selection process around specific qualifications and experience. Of course there are roles which necessitate these specifics, but when it is not necessary this can exclude many people from applying who could undertake the role very successfully. Performance is about results, not about skills or qualifications. Although you need people who are competent at the role, to progress you must have people who are motivated to do the work.

Advertising for a position

To attract the best people for the role, over your competition, make sure that your advertisement is not limiting, boring or unattractive to top performers. If the job description is boring it can look the same as every other job and put off the top performers who are looking for a varied, challenging role. Job descriptions must emphasise what the person will do, learn, and become. As part of this, it is important to clearly describe the impact the person can make. This way you are not limiting candidates on past skills but giving them an opportunity to progress and learn new skills.

From a marketing standpoint, don’t use internal, non-descriptive titles as these can put off high performers who may not have the time or the need to decipher your job title when there are others available to them. 

Interviewing

The first step to consider when looking at your interview process is: are the people who interview trained in interviewing techniques?  It is imperative to ensure that the people interviewing have all the necessary information about the available job – it is impossible to make a decision on the right person for the position if you do not fully understand the job role.  Once you have the correct interviewers for the role, the key is to remain objective. Remember, first impressions do not tell you whether the candidate will excel in the role. Don’t be swayed by what you see – some candidates are excellent at interview techniques and are able to present very well; others are less able to perform in interview, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the good interviewee will be the best employee. Some top performers can be nervous during interview and this can result in poor eye contact, shaky answers and an overall lack of self-confidence. Does this mean that they wouldn’t be good at the job? It is important to ensure that your organisation is recruiting top performers, not good interviewees.
 
If you use technical interviewers to recruit new people they are very able to validate technical competency, but can ignore other critical core skills like working with others, planning, budgeting, and meeting deadlines. The result of this may be a solid team; but it could be a team which lacks motivation and is unable to fulfil the complete role.

• A study by John Hunter of Michigan State University and Frank Schmidt of the University of Iowa indicated that the typical employment interview is only 57% effective in predicting subsequent success - or 7% better than flipping a coin!  Also, the difference in performance between an average employee and an outstanding employee is typically between 17% and 40%.

You should ensure that you have a structured interview process in place. The first key element of a well-structured and successful interview process is preparation. Once you have prepared your interview plan you will have a set of standard questions and you should use this framework to ensure that you cover the same ground with all of the candidates, and are able to objectively assess the information they provide against the selection criteria.

Managers need to differentiate between ‘talents’, which cannot be transferred from one person to another, and ‘skills’ and ‘knowledge’ which can. If managers can identify where a person’s talents lie, then develop his or her skills, knowledge and experience, building on those talents to create consistently excellent performance.

What about the candidates?

Most superior performers are looking for the right career move, not a job. These people are looking for challenges, opportunities and the ability to progress within an organisation. To think that all career decisions are centred around remuneration is a false assumption.

The best candidates don’t typically have the exact mix of skills, experience and education described in the job description. They are able to make up for this with traits that can’t easily be filtered – potential, self-motivation, leadership, tenacity and vision. Therefore, if a company advertises and filters totally on skills, the best candidates can be wrongly excluded from consideration.

Identifying your top performers and recruiting them

To consistently recruit top performers the recruitment manager needs strong recruiting skills. These include the ability to create interesting job descriptions and develop an interviewing process based on job-matching, not just key criteria. Each candidate should be considered for their own merits – ensure that you are not too quick to judge average presentation skills as average ability.

Ensure that you ask all candidates the same questions. If a candidate is chatty and comfortable within the interview it is easy to get distracted and base your judgement on their personable qualities. These will not predict high performance.

Write compelling and interesting job adverts – remember that top people look for jobs based on the challenges and opportunities available.  Base your advertising around how the best people look for new jobs. They don’t have as much time as passive candidates and are more likely to use the internet to enable them to find you quickly. Use the homepage of your website to prominently feature career opportunities. It is likely that top people will enter a few keywords into a search engine and bypass career boards altogether.  Therefore, the usability of your website is crucial – all information should be available instantly. Most career sites make it too difficult for good people with little time to explore career opportunities.

Assisting you to identify and recruit high performers

One of the challenges for organisations is identifying these high performers. Although we have a good idea, it can be very subjective. A more objective way of determining high performers is to use a ‘total person’ psychometric assessment.  The Profile XT™ is an accurate and reliable assessment which provides a picture of the ‘total person’ that can be used in any business role. The Profile XT performs two key functions:

• First - it provides information on the individual in three categories:
 
                        o Thinking Styles – Can the person cope with the mental demands?
                        o Behavioural Traits – Will the person be competent in the job environment?
                        o Occupational Interests – Is the person motivated by the work?

• Second - using a ‘Job Match Pattern’, it identifies how well an individual matches the needs of a specific role and where development is needed.

Using this objective process, the Profile XT™ will enhance your current recruitment and development process to:

• help you identify people who will meet the demands of the job
• reduce the risk of employing average or below average performers
• recruit and develop engaged, motivated and productive people – improving job satisfaction and people  retention. This will inevitably lead to improved productivity, customer satisfaction and increased profitability
• improve sales revenue, KPI’s and success factors in the organisation
• reduce staff turnover, recruitment fees, advertising costs and the associated management time.

For further information about Profile XT™ and how it can support your organisation and your objectives visit www.tlsa.co.uk, email profiles@tlsa.co.uk, or call 0845 600 1556.

And finally, bear in mind that a recruitment technique which is often used is ‘hiring on gut reaction’.
Statistics prove that 63% of all hiring decisions are made during the first 4.3 minutes of an interview.
Source: SRHM Study

Times are tough, that is a given, but in these times companies are having to up their performance, work under growing pressure and gain the competitive edge to succeed. With this in mind the attention should be focusing on customer facing teams to deliver an exceptional level of service and maximise revenue from existing accounts, and on sales teams; encouraging them to look for new opportunities to develop new business.

Sales managers and sales teams drive business success.  In customer relationships these people, together with service teams, are the people that own the brand, enhance reputation and of course generate income. If you are not developing and supporting your people will your competitors be prepared to? The costs of having to recruit new people are far higher than the costs associated with training and progressing the people you already employ. The 2007 CIPD Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey reported the average cost of filling a vacancy being between £4333 and £7750. It seems retaining key people is now even more important given the current economic climate.

Training therefore has a major part to play for both businesses and individuals – for the business it means increased performance; for the individual improved job satisfaction and success. Having just a few poor performers within your company can adversely affect the results you achieve and, as importantly, your customers’ opinions of the entire organisation.

What can you do to ensure you have the competitive edge?

1.         Become a motivational leader

If you ask a group of people “What makes a good leader?” you can guarantee one thing about the answer - it will consist of many different thoughts and ideas on the skills of leadership. People who are leaders will talk of vision, example, direction and coaching and people who are followers will talk of motivation, support, help and role models.

So, in the business world, what are the qualities that people need to be a leader?

There is a difference between a manager and a leader:

Leaders – demonstrate a willingness to originate ideas, implement change, challenge the norm, set strategy and provide direction.

Managers – tend to follow established process and routine. They may do it very well, but managers rarely challenge the norm.

A leader needs to be visionary and identify where their company, department or team needs to go. An individual who will create the vision and ensure that everyone understands where they are going and why. A leader needs to understand markets, customers, opportunities and threats to ensure they achieve long term success.

Outstanding leaders encourage their people, demanding the best of them at the same time as being able to create a motivational environment, retain key staff and attract the correct new staff.

A motivational leader is results driven, is prepared to reward, challenge, correct and discipline staff. Motivational leaders make coaching a way of life, encouraging new skills and behaviours in an environment that allows people to learn by their mistakes. It is prudent to bear in mind that people will remember:

·         10%-20% of what they hear

·         50%-70% of what they see, and

·         90%+ of what they do.

2.         Improve your sales management skills to maximise your team’s results

In today’s highly competitive business environment the question that is always on the tip of the sales manager’s tongue is, ‘How can we gain the competitive edge?’

There are two key areas to look at:

·         Operational Efficiency – how the sales force operates on a day to day basis.

·         Operational Effectiveness – the skills to do the job.

Leading sales organisations have consistently proved that by improving operational efficiency, the sales force can generate increases in revenue of between 4%-10%. This may mean changes in established business practice, making some tough decisions and dealing with resistance to change. However, think about your own sales force – do you make optimum use of sales time, could you manage more sales cycles, could you increase the value of the sales cycles you manage and could you close more deals? All of these generate increases in sales – the first step is always operational efficiency.

Operational effectiveness demands that the sales manager and sales people are consistently looking at how they can improve their skill sets. No business can stand still, and year on year there are demands to improve performance. This means that:

·         Sales People and Account Managers are challenged to deliver more – do they ‘get lucky’ ‘work harder’ or ‘improve their skill sets’.

·         Sales Managers – have to identify the skill sets their people need and then coach and develop the team to deliver performance.

It is really simple, any organisation is only be as good as the people who work for it, so the sales manager has an ongoing responsibility to make people better at their jobs.

A company’s ‘competitive edge’ lies in an existing asset – their people, and their ability to make the sale. A professional sales person focused on specific goals, be they personal or business, is generally motivated and able to maximise opportunities presented to them.

3.         Develop and refresh your sales skills

You cannot win a piece of business in the first five minutes – but you can lose it. When meeting customers or prospects it is imperative that you are able to build rapport that creates a profitable customer relationship. To achieve this you need to understand your customer’s needs, plan a successful outcome for each customer meeting, identify more sales opportunities, professionally manage each sales cycle and close profitable sales.

Selling is the development of customer relationships to produce ongoing business which is mutually beneficial to both parties.

Companies can increase their profits by up to 20% by showing their staff, particularly sales people, how to exploit psychology in the sales process.  The added benefit is a confident sales force with an increased range of skills and self esteem.

This learning process doesn’t have to be complicated if just three key psychological areas are targeted during a sales negotiation:

·                     Communicating the right message

·                     Self perception

·                     Understanding the customer

Communicating the right message is not always as simple as it seems as ‘people don’t always hear what we think we have said’. Therefore, a negative response is often the outcome. On closer inspection, the customer often receives no message, the wrong message or a mixed message.

If sales people develop sufficient psychological acumen, they will understand how people receive messages and so be able to deliver the right messages resulting in more ‘yes’ responses.

Self perception is an on-going process. Successful sales people are profit motivated and will therefore strive to meet financial targets. However, those at the top of their game have come to realise that money is not the only source of motivation.  The big question is what does inspire them?

There are several answers to this, but one of the key issues is about goal setting. Here’s a rather startling statistic to consider: 95% of people don’t set themselves goals, and those people usually work for the 5% that do!

4.                   Identify new business opportunities in key accounts

Winning new clients and keeping existing ones are two focal issues for most companies.  These are key to business growth and development. Companies won’t survive without new customers, but equally, it is pointless winning new business if present clients keep slipping away.

This may be common sense, but it is staggering to discover how many organisations fail to follow through on one of the main principles in winning new customers and keeping existing ones – offering excellent customer service.

Your company’s sales people must be 100% confident that what they sell to the customer will be delivered. It is important to understand that when organisations actively look for new suppliers, one of the main considerations will be the quality of customer service. However, the challenge is to deliver quality as it is seen by the customer, not what you believe quality to be.

Companies often recognise the significance of customer service from a strategic standpoint.  Media marketing messages are always claiming to put the customer first, but all too often the promise is not fulfilled.

Consider your own company and how much contact there is between your staff and existing and potential customers through the internet, email, telephone, fax, letter and, of course, meetings.  Through each of these mediums there is an opportunity waiting to be seized and a relationship to be built and strengthened.

Imagine the impact if one in ten customers bought an additional product from your company, or referred your business to a colleague because they were so pleased with the experience of dealing with your people. There is nothing more powerful than one of your customers recommending you to a friend or colleague and this can become a reality through excellent customer service.

5.         Identify, qualify and win appointments with new prospects

For the majority of new-business sales people the first stage in the process of winning new accounts is winning appointments. This is often very demanding and unfortunately there is no magic formula. Saying this, there are of course things you can do to ease the challenge.

Whether you are going to contact the new prospect by cold calling, telephone or letter, creating an appointment making process is a must for developing new business. This is a key aspect of the role and if it is not set up professionally will impact severely on your performance. You cannot close new accounts if you don’t have prospects to see.

To help you win appointments you must first identify the environment you are comfortable working in – some people prefer silence and solitude; others are happier with background noise and activity.

Time should be dedicated to appointment making. Working in short bursts on a daily basis will help you to maintain your level of enthusiasm. The key is to plan appointment making times and then treat these as if they were meetings.

Ensure that you always plan ahead. A sales person calling on Friday and seeking an appointment ‘next week’ sends a message of desperation. An appointment made 14 -21 days ahead communicates that you are a busy, in-demand professional.

A comprehensive survey conducted by the Institute of Purchasing Management which covered all kinds of people who buy things, established beyond any doubt that ‘only one in five customers will ever volunteer an appointment’. The other four out of five expect, on principle, to be asked!

So, when closing for an appointment always assume that the customer wants to see you, on getting a positive response make the appointment immediately and don’t forget to thank the customer for their time.

Brett Lyons

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-Based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the detail and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

Six Steps for Hiring the Best People Every Time

1. Offer WOW! jobs. Traditional job descriptions listing skills, qualifications, and experience are not marketing tools or predictors of job success. These lists must be diminished in importance. In their place, job descriptions must emphasise what the person will do, learn, and become. As part of this, clearly describe the impact the person can make. From a marketing standpoint, don’t use internal, non-descriptive titles. “Not-for Profit CEO - Back to the Future” was a title we used to find the head of a major charity. In the advert we described the five-year impact the person would have on the inner city.

2. Make it about careers, not compensation. The ad copy must clearly emphasise the challenges in the job, the impact the person can make on the company, and some of the growth opportunities. For example, “Help us launch a new Blue Tooth line” is far more compelling than “Must have five years of product marketing experience.” When recruiters first contact candidates - whether they’re active or passive - the emphasis must clearly be on getting the candidate to evaluate your opportunities as career moves, not just as another job for more money or one closer to home. This will help ease the negotiating process and minimize the threat of counter-offers and competitive offers.

3. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. It’s a Web 2.0 world and this means a complete understanding of search engine marketing techniques. Part of this is writing compelling jobs ads that are easily found. From a more advanced perspective, recognise that top performers don’t enter the job-hunting market ready to hunt and peck for a job that matches their skills and experience. Instead, they tip-toe into the market, first contacting former associates and doing some top-down industry and company research. If this is fruitless, they then expand their search efforts through aggressive networking and Googling for jobs. Sourcing programmes need to target these early entrants by positioning ads in the right places and proactively expanding employee referral programs to ensure that the best people contact your employees first.

4. Provide candidates multiple opportunities to “just look” rather than buy. Most company hiring processes and career websites are designed based on the premise that candidates are ready to apply for a specific job. This is a flawed premise. The best people, especially the early entrants, are just looking and comparing options. To accommodate these people, recruiters must not push the process too fast, managers must be willing to talk or meet with candidates on an exploratory basis, and career websites need to allow candidates to chat with a recruiter in real time and look at groups of jobs, rather than specific requisitions.

5. Make the interview your secret weapon. Here’s something that will shock you - the primary purpose of the interview is to recruit the candidate, not assess competency! However, done properly you’ll more accurately assess candidate competency and motivation than ever before, but this is a secondary effect. Part of this means using the interview to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background, with the expectation that your job will fulfill them. For example, if the candidate hasn’t managed as large a team, or handled a comparable project, or had the exposure your job provides, these voids become learning opportunities and more important than compensation as reasons to accept your position. Obviously, if the gaps are too big, the candidate is unqualified for the job, and if the gaps aren’t sufficient, the job isn’t a worthy move.

6. Use a multi-factor decision tool to negotiate the offer, fight off the competition and prevent counter-offers. Recruiting is not something done at the end of the interview, it starts with first contact. Part of this is suggesting to the candidate on first contact that she should evaluate your opportunity as a career move. During the interview this is reinforced by presenting voids in the candidate’s background as potential learning experiences. While it’s important for companies to judge candidates across multiple factors, it’s equally important for candidates to evaluate different job opportunities across multiple factors as well. Some of these include learning, growth opportunities, compensation, quality of the hiring manager and the team, job match, visibility, cultural fit and work/life balance. This can be formalised by sending the candidate a multi-factor decision form comparing your job with all others he’s considering, including his current position. As long as your job represents a positive long term career move, your job will often win out without compensation being the dominant criteria.

Of course, there are more steps to the process than what’s mentioned here. Regardless, the key to making the end-to-end process work is to step back and understand the unique needs of top performers. This high-level view also allows the integration between the steps to be designed into the process at the beginning rather than as after-thoughts.

While converting the hiring process into a scalable business process is no easy task, it’s not nearly as hard as implementing any major companywide business initiative. If hiring the best is a company’s number-one strategic objective, then nothing is more important.

By Lou Adler, July 11, 2008

This article has been reproduced with the personal permission of Lou Adler, founder and President of the Adler Group www.AdlerConcepts.com.  The article was originally published on 11 July 2008 on their Resources section.  TLSA would recommend ‘Hire with Your Head’ by Lou Adler.

I hear there is a shortage of IT professionals.

Personally, I think that all this shortage talk is sheer nonsense. I meet and talk to IT professionals looking in vain for a meaningful job. They share the frustration of being pigeon-holed all the time. They tell me that organisations don’t seem to be able to recognise skill and talent. They feel that they are misunderstood.

And this is where I think the real problem is - we just don’t seem to be good at recognising talent and hiring the right people. As I looked at how we go about hiring IT staff, it became apparent that the commonly used hiring practices are utterly sub-optimal. Let me illustrate my point with a couple of examples from my long list of hiring faux pas.

The Vicious Circle of Little White Lies

The first order of business is to decide what it is we are looking for in a successful candidate. In an IT professional, we would probably look for a few important traits, such as thinking abilities, technical knowledge, familiarity with the business domain, attitude and fit with the corporate environment.

As it stands, hiring IT managers seem to be obsessed with technical knowledge at the expense of everything else. I continue to be amazed how job postings for developers seem to consist of nothing but acronyms. It seems to be the going order of business to list every technology used in the organisation, be it relevant or not to the position being filled, and for good measure, add a few that might be used in the future.

I am not saying that one should not ask for knowledge of Java when hiring a Java programmer, however for the life of me, I don’t understand what “experience with TCP/IP” means. Do we want the person to know the structure of the packet header? Do we want her know the basics of networks or merely be able to get on the Internet?

What this leads to is the proliferation of inflated resumes (CVs, if you prefer). Because so much attention is paid to acronyms, a candidate stands no chance of an interview if she does not have the right ones on the resume. The vicious cycle is evident: we ask for too many technical skills (and how do we expect a candidate to be current and proficient in all of them?) – resumes overflow with acronyms – we find that such resumes do not guarantee knowledgeable candidates and ask for even more technical skills – more acronyms make it into resumes…and so on!

One can ask a perfectly reasonable question: wouldn’t an interview help to identify bogus experience? The answer to this question is – yes, of course, if this experience is probed. In reality, only a few key skills that are absolutely necessary in this position (e.g. Java skills for a Java programmer) are tested.
IT organisations today are full of people with “stretched” resumes, and most of them are doing a good job. Unethical it though most certainly is, stretching is caused and encouraged by the way we hire people. It is our fault.

Formal Education as a Selection Criterion

On February 20, 2006, the CEO of RadioShack, David Edmondson resigned over an uncovered misstatement in his resume. Apparently, Mr. Davidson claimed to have two college degrees, while he in fact had none: the college registrar had confirmed that he only completed two semesters of study. As well, the second degree had never been offered at that institution. A clearly unethical behaviour in the past on the Edmondson’s side resulted in only one reasonably possible conclusion: an able employee of eleven years, and the most senior officer, and RadioShack have parted their ways. That was the right thing to do.

The interesting question here is, why on Earth would Edmondson lie about something as easily verifiable as an academic credential? I can only think of one reason: Mr. Edmondson would not have gotten as high as he had without a formal degree. It was asked of him, and he thought of no better way than to get really creative.

Now, what is important here is that RadioShack was obviously very happy with the job David Edmondson was doing during his eleven-year tenure, although, of course, he had no formal college education. Apparently, the formal degree was not that key a requirement for the job after all.

Most IT job postings, especially those from larger organisations, ask for a formal degree, typically in the field of computer science or a related discipline. In some cases, this requirement can be justified but in many, I would submit to you, it is unnecessary. It is not the degree that we are interested in when looking for an IT professional, but for the specific skills that we require. A college degree does not guarantee good writing skills in a business analyst, nor does it give us any assurances in respect to the design abilities of a software architect.

One of the best programmers I ever knew had been a restaurant manager with no formal education past high school. One of the most able business analysts on my books, with exceptional writing skills never completed her bachelor’s degree. The point is that the knowledge can be acquired through more ways than formal education, and we simply have to recognise that. I don’t have to mention Bill Gates here, do I?

In case you are still pondering the David Edmondson case, here is the kicker. Ostensibly, he was not a very ambitious liar. He merely claimed to have degrees in theology and psychology from the Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College.

How is that relevant to the job of a CEO of RadioShack?

Pre-selection

Once the job requirements are listed, what happens next? Often, they are given to the company HR department or to a recruitment agency for pre-screening of applicants. It is really important that they do a good job and send us the best candidates possible. After all, there’s little choice in rotten apples. The question is, are these people qualified to do this job well?

More often than not, they are not, and here is why…

In general, HR professionals don’t understand the technical requirements of the position being filled. They can certainly evaluate resumes against the requirements, looking for keywords, but if the same thing is said differently in the listing than in the resume, they simply don’t have the knowledge to make the connection. Frankly, it is just too much to ask.

Large recruitment agencies are not much better, due to their highly levered structure. Even if you do a very good job explaining your requirements, preferences and points you are willing to compromise on to the agency’s account manager, she is probably not the one who evaluates the incoming resumes. Staff in that line of work is typically quite familiar with the acronyms, but not to the point of understanding the relationship and the hierarchy of technologies. IT professionals tell me that talking to recruiters is often frustrating due to this very lack of understanding, not to mention their propensity not to return phone calls and emails from candidates, even when they promise to do so.

The net result of all this is that you are not getting the type of candidate resumes you have hoped for. On the other hand, well-qualified people who may not have the appropriate letters after their names may not be selected for an interview. After this, I don’t blame you for being fearful about a looming shortage of good IT people.

But, do you still think the shortage is real?

Originally published in Projecttimes.com in April 2007

Secret No1: Don’t hire a stereotype!

They don’t exist! Not only that, but a careful evaluation of what you want your new sales hire to do may reveal that the “ideal” sales person in your mind might be exactly the wrong person for your job. The typical sales job description isn’t a job description at all, it’s a people description. It describes the attributes of a certain type of person, NOT what success looks like on the job.

Are all sales jobs the same? Absolutely not! I was interviewing a salesperson for a technical services company who had been selling IT solutions for over 15 years. I asked him about achieving his target over the past five years. His target was 10.5 million dollars, and he had achieved or exceeded this target each year with his current company (his last year he was 130% of target). He had only one customer, though – it was Wal-Mart. He had a team of eight people dedicated solely to the Wal-Mart account. He knew all the players, but his primary job was coordinating the resources of his company and of his client to bring the right people together, and he would direct the sales process. The average sales price of each solution was 5 million dollars, and he would close 2-3 contracts per year. By all measures he was a great sales person. However, the position we needed to fill was for a sales person to open a whole new territory. The territory consisted of a few medium-size clients and a large number of leads. Most of his job would entail heavy prospecting and business development work. On average he would have to close 20-25 accounts annually to meet his target of 4.5 million dollars. Are you starting to see the disconnect here? It had been years since this person had done any prospecting.

He was the quintessential farmer, not a hunter, and although he was a great sales person, he was not the right sales person for this job.  Here’s a little exercise to help you better define what success looks like on your sales job. Whatever your personal biases are about sales people, take a look at your existing organisation. Are all your top performers tall, or athletic (I once worked for someone who thought that all good sales people had to have some athletic ability or they couldn’t sell), or extroverted, or whatever other description you choose? If they aren’t, then you’ve got to ask yourself the following question: If they don’t share those traits in common that you really believe are essential for success, what do they do in the job that separates their performance from your average performers?

Once you completely understand the answer to that question, you are then in a position to conduct a great interview to see if you’ve got a winner. When profiling a sales job, here are a few questions to ask:

· What does success look like in this position?
· What is the target?
· What is the average selling price of the products to be sold?
· What percent of the job is farming and what percent is prospecting?
· Who is the intended customer?
· What level will my new sales person need to influence and sell to?
· What is the average sales cycle?
· What activities and metrics lead to sales success (number of calls per day, number of presentations per week)?
· How would you measure the pipeline after 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months?
· What support does our organisation offer a new sales person?

Asking these types of questions allows you to create a performance profile that is specific to your job. Even different territories within the same company often require slightly different skill sets to be successful. It’s one thing to open up a completely new territory; it’s quite another to mine an already well established territory.

Defining what success looks like is the first critical step to consistently hiring top performers.

Secret No 2: Interview for performance and process

What’s the best interview question to ask a professional sales person? How about, “What was your target and what did you actually achieve? Walk me through your target achievements for the past five years.” This is a great starting point because it quickly gives you the scope of their achievements over a period of time in terms of their results. However, understanding what they did is not enough; you must also understand how they did it. Deep probing questions are the key to understanding what type of sales approach your candidate employs to drive success. Below are a few questions you might want to explore with a sales candidate:

· Where did your leads come from?
· Did you have to find your own leads? How did you find them?
· How long was your typical sales cycle?
· What type of interaction did you have with the client throughout the sales process?
· Who did you meet with and how often?
· What did you do to prepare for each meeting?
· What were the typical obstacles to a sale and how did you address them?
· What did you do to understand your competition?
· How much of your target was existing business and how much was new business?
· What do you enjoy more – farming or hunting for new business? Why?
· What did your support team look like?
· How did you interact with the resources that supported you?
· What was your biggest frustration?
· Did you sell primarily over the phone or face to face?
· Is your approach more transactional or more solution selling?

These types of probing questions allow you to understand the process of success, not just the results. Process matters and you have to decide if your candidate’s approach to selling is compatible with your environment and culture.

Bringing a Book of Business

Now before we move on from specific interview questions, what about the expectation that a new sales person will bring a whole book of business with them? If this is in reality an expectation of the job, then you should test that premise during the interview. Get specific examples of where they successfully transferred business from one company to the next. Explore their approach. How does this person work? Was it systematic or just lucky? Have they successfully done it multiple times? If they have transitioned from one company to another without bringing over significant business, why not? What made the difference? Do they have any non-compete agreements? Are they loyal to their former employers? The key here is fact finding – there are a lot of issues that need to be explored. If moving business over is a key performance objective, you will need to probe and discover if they have successfully moved business before.

Secret No 3: Don’t be fooled by first impressions

This is the biggest mistake that sales managers and directors make. Of course we want sales people who make a good impression on our clients. However, let me ask you this: have you ever met someone who made a great first impression but couldn’t sell? How about the opposite: have you ever met someone who at first pass wasn’t that impressive, but once you saw them in action, you were very impressed with what they accomplished? We teach every sales manager we train to ignore that first impression for at least 30 minutes. Never, ever, ever make a hiring decision in the first 30 minutes of the interview! It simply can’t be done effectively. This is true if you really like the person as well as if you dislike the person. The goal of the interview is to understand what the candidate has accomplished. Once you understand what they have done, you will be in a much better position to measure how your first impression of them will affect performance. Don’t be fooled by the well-dressed £1500 suit who is highly articulate, born with the ‘gift of gab’, and is a ‘natural’.  Many managers are ready to hire that person based primarily on what they see. Don’t do it. Find out what they’ve accomplished and then measure your first impression later in the interview – after you have some knowledge of their successes.

Hiring sales people isn’t rocket science. Some basic common sense will go a long way. Follow these simple rules and you’ll be well on your way to hiring top-notch sales people every time.

Bryan Johanson

This article has been reproduced with the personal permission of Lou Adler, founder and President of the Adler Group www.AdlerConcepts.com.  The article was originally published on 2 July 2008 on their Resources section.

TLSA would highly recommend Lou’s book ‘Hire with your Head’, which gives insightful and invaluable advice on how to build great teams using a Performance-Based Hiring process.

Whilst facilitated by an ever increasing investment in technology, such as CRM, the ability to recruit, motivate and retain the best people is more important. Every contact between customer and sales staff can gain or lose business as customers increasingly expect nothing less than service excellence.
High performing sales people are at a premium and most recruiters complain about the scarcity of good cabdidates. Companies are also finding it difficult to retain sales staff. CVs show sales staff moving every 2 years whereas ten years ago every 7 years was the average. Job ‘hoppers’ used to be frowned on but now they are becoming the norm. A new generation of talented professionals seek more lifestyle benefits, look for greater personal development and offer limited commitment to employers by moving on in under 24 months. The top raft of managers are often so highly qualified and able that they can succeed in almost any job, so employers have to look deeper into their staff profiles to have any chance of keeping them.

This presents companies with a critical challenge – how to hire and retain the best sales people.

Traditional recruitment techniques tend to be based on interviews and basic psychometric testing. Such tests explore past experience, assess numerical and verbal competencies and provide a basic psychological profile. What they do not do is benchmark a candidate against the specific challenges and skills of the role – a key step in recruiting and retaining the right people.

Research from the Harvard Business Review, following 360,000 people for 20 years, indicated that none of the usual selection methods can really predict success. 

In fact, interviewing, CVs and reference checks will only give you a 26% likelihood of recruiting the right person. The research revealed no relationship between performance and educational qualifications, gender, age, race, experience, or any other criteria frequently used to select people for jobs.

One answer lies in Job Matching. Harvard Business Review also discovered that people were most successful when they were ‘matched’ into jobs that they were capable of doing, were motivated to do, in an environment that suited their personality and behaviour. 

Further studies confirmed conclusively that those who were job matched:

• Outperformed their non-job-matched peers in the first six months
• Significantly outperformed the group after 14 months
• Tended to stay in their jobs much longer, reducing employee turnover and the associated costs of advertising, recruitment, management time, down time, morale etc.

Job matching will raise the likelihood of recruiting the right person to 75%.
 
The Profile XT assesses exactly how effectively a candidate’s behavioural traits will fit the needs of a role and identifies those with an innate talent for selling by looking at the ‘total person’. Its versatility means that as well as an effective recruitment tool, it can also be used for training, coaching, promotion and succession planning.

Initially, a job profile or pattern is developed that determines the ideal personal characteristics needed for the job. A profile that is developed through a ‘Job Analysis Survey’ and ‘profiling’ existing high performers. The results provide a job match pattern that illustrates the Thinking Styles, Behaviours and Interests that are ideal for the role.

As an example, call centre staff need good verbal reasoning, high assertiveness levels and want to give good service. Using a job pattern makes it easy to identify where candidates will fit well into positions and where they may have to make adjustments.

The job pattern is a great tool for recruitment and development of internal staff. As an example, take the case a high performing sales professional, do you reward outstanding performance with:

• Promotion to the role of Sales Manager – a role in which the individual is challenged to lead and develop individuals and the team.
• A senior account management role - where the ability to develop customer relationships is the challenge

How do you know the individual’s deeply embedded interests and traits and – more importantly – are they aligned with the prospective role?

There is a quick way to find out – Job Matching!

This is a fast and inexpensive to run, completed on-line questionnaire and immediately generates a suite of informative reports to the company. Data is collected, scored and an overall suitability assessment made.

In the increasingly competitive market for high performing sales staff, Job Matching can effectively identify people exactly suited to specific sales roles, and ensure that given a close fit, staff will stay.
Angela Stephenson