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In This
Issue: |
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How to Blend
Science with the Art of Sales
Excellence
PROFILES TIP OF THE
MONTH:
10 Steps to Keeping
Your Top-Performing Sellers
PRODUCT
FOCUS :
PSITM
,PXTSTM. Turning the 80-20 Rule on
its Ear
CASE
STUDY:
Identifying Sales Leaders with
Profiles Sales IndicatorTM
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Product of the
Month |
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Good customer service begins
with people who are naturally inclined to
serving others.
Our Customer Service
Perspective (CSP) provides the
information to help employers identify these
people. The CSP
will:
give you information to
create a plan that fits
your
customer needs
develop customised
patterns for
job matching by
department
establish a
comprehensive customer
service philosophy that
will extend throughout
your company
help you build a
reputation for excellent
customer
service.
Why let an employee in the wrong
job drive your customers away?
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Contact us now for
a complimentary Customer Service
benchmark.
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What's on at
PROFILES |
| Partner Training:
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Wed 26th September
2007, 2pm - 4pm
Seminar: |
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Thurs
27th September 2007. 6pm -
7.30pm
What
Ails Your Sales?
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Previous
Newsletters |
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Past newsletters can be found on
our website
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Quote of the Month |
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"All business success
rests on something labeled a sale, which at
least momentarily weds company and customer.”
~Tom
Peters, management consultant
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Assessment News |
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SOSII: The Step One
Survey II evaluates job applicants for
integrity, substance abuse, reliability, and
work ethic.
Please Contact us for more
information or a sample report
Validation Study People
Required: We have no requirement at this
point for people to assist us in
the validation of our new assessments.
Thanks go to the people who have
already helped us so far.
Please Contact us if you are
interested in being a guinea pig for a new
assessment. Confidentiality is
assured.
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-Victoria
277 Moray St,
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T: (03) 9673 9888
F: (03) 9673 9898
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What Ails Your
Sales?
Are you selling as much as you
should? Sales are the
lifeblood of every organisation - without sales, organisations wither and
die.
If you or one of your
salespeople falls off track, come to our seminar
this month to find out how to use a systematic
diagnosis to identify where you need to focus
your time , money and effort to get back on
track.
How to Blend Science with the Art
of Sales
Excellence
You
are bursting with pride at your most recent hire
in the sales department. You lured the guy with
a high sales quota from his job at Giant Company
to work with your small, entrepreneurial startup
and told him you wanted him to work the same
magic for you that he worked there. You believe
he can do it or you wouldn't have gone after
him. He believes he can do it or he wouldn't
have left his job there to come to work for you.
He
arrives wearing his best suit and carrying his
updated Rolodex. You put him in a great spot and
wait for superior sales figures. And wait. And
wait some more. The sales figures you expected
never materialise, even though he's always on
the phone and seems to be rattling lots of
doorknobs.
You try
to analyse the situation and can't put your
finger on the problem. The gears just never seem
to mesh. He's always out of step with your
expectations and never quite reaches the level
of performance you see in your sales leaders. Or
he reached a certain level and never went beyond
that. Now he is marching in place.
Such
disastrous hiring doesn't have to happen, yet it
often does. Why?
It's
linked to a belief that excellent salespeople
are born, not made, and that sales success in
one place easily translates to sales success
anywhere. These beliefs ignore the fact that a
great part of the top salesperson's success at
his previous company was linked to that
company's culture. Oh yes, a previously
successful salesperson can be successful in your
company too. But success in your company will
depend on you redefining his role, training him
well, and both of you thinking about selling for
your company in a different way. In short, you
can't import his previous success without key
changes.
Prior
sales success is often the sole criterion that
hiring managers look at when considering a
candidate for this crucial position. After all,
that star by the quota line is a quantitative
measurement. You don't get to count the notches
in the belt of most other employees. So why is a
previous track record a bad thing to look at?
It's
not, unless it's the only thing you are looking
at. Don't let your search end there. Look within
as much as you do without. Study your own
company and customers, and think about what you
want sales excellence to look like. Only when
you have discerned what your company's culture
requires can you begin to develop a profile for
what your top salespersons should look like.
Doing
this is not terribly hard if you are willing to
look at people in your company who are already
tops in sales and still growing, achieving
ever-higher quotas and building on their
successes. They will provide you with the
standards you need to hire future top
salespeople.
Elsewhere in this newsletter and in
magazines, books and online, you can discover
the attributes of top salespeople. I won't
repeat them here. What I will impart is this:
Failures at sales are mostly due to a person's
underdeveloped skills and to selling the wrong
thing. You can put someone with good skills in a
nice suit and give her lots of contacts, and she
still won't be able to sell if she doesn't have
the right attitude, vision, skills and training
that you provide.
Also
consider that good salespeople are not
necessarily born. Some make it look so easy that
it seems like native ability, but just like any
job done well, a talent for selling takes
training, practice and commitment. Yes, there's
an art to attaining superior sales, but art is
not magic. If you combine the right
characteristics that assessments can help you
discern with the right training, hiring top
salespeople is a science that enhances the
art.
Jim Sirbasku,
CEO
Profiles
International
PROFILES TIP OF THE MONTH:
10 Steps to Keeping
Your Top-Performing Sellers
1. Make sure
they fit the job before you hire them. Don't
just hire a warm body to fill an open position.
2. Feed their
confidence by encouraging them to take ownership
and rely on their own decision-making skills;
empower them to help their clients without
having to clear every decision.
3. Coach them
on the power of persistence; suggest they follow
up phone calls with emails and meetings with
thank-you notes. This helps keep the salesperson
and the company’s name in front of the client.
4. Educate
them on your organisation's mission and values
as well as the products or services they sell.
This will help them believe in what the company
stands for, as well as what they are selling.
5. Define
specifically what kind of performance the
company wants and how you will measure that
performance.
6. Know
what's most important to them on the job and
meet their needs. Provide them with the
resources they need to do their job well:
reliable phones and fax machines,
transportation, assistants to help with
paperwork.
7. Ask them
to help you recruit their talented colleagues
who would be a good fit with your organisation.
8. Promote
them only if they demonstrate the desire and the
ability to do the new job. Doing well in one
area does not mean a top performer will do just
as well in the new position. He or she may not
want to move up. If not, offer new training that
will help the employee grow in his current
position.
9. Be open to new ideas and
products. Top performers often see a way to do
their job better.
10.Encourage
honesty and integrity; don't ask a top performer
to do something you would not do.
PRODUCT
FOCUS:
PSITM ,PXTSTM. Turning the
80-20 Rule on its Ear
Any sales leader weary of
witnessing the old 80-20 rule at work -- 20
percent of the salespeople are nabbing 80
percent of the sales -- can put a stop to
that fatigue with two key assessments. Think of
them as a gentle one-two punch that doesn't
knock anyone down or out but effectively changes
the hiring/training/coaching landscape.
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PROFILE SALES
INDICATORTM |
PROFILEXTSALESTM
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This assessment
measures the essential qualities of a
salesperson, including competitiveness (how
persuasive, confident and assertive is she?);
self-reliance (does he work independently?);
persistence (is she tough when necessary?);
energy (can he maintain the company's pace with
zest and enthusiasm?); and sales drive (can she
envision success?).
Sales managers often cannot say what
makes the company stars shine. They know only
that these stars do their jobs superbly and
drive the company's success.
They may wish they had 10 more just like
them. The PSITM can help
find those successful job candidates by matching
them to the company's star-studded standard.
How? With its customised job pattern.
What companies receive in the PSI< report is a
prediction of a job candidate's performance in
the essential areas of prospecting, closing
sales, call reluctance, self-starting ability,
teamwork, building and keeping up with
relationships, and compensation preferences.
These predictions can help attack that 80-20
rule at the front end of the hiring process.
The PSITM
takes about 20 minutes to complete and offers
clear, no-nonsense reports. It’s also made to
specifications, customised by company, sales
position, department, manager, geography or any
combination of these factors.
Simply put, the PSI
TM
takes the guesswork out of hiring star
salespeople.
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Salespeople work in an
increasingly competitive pressure cooker. It's
no wonder that 38 percent of salespeople say
they plan to leave their jobs within two years
(2006 Sales Performance Study, Miller Heiman).
Companies clearly need an advantage in
recruiting, hiring and retaining top performers.
The PXTS puts sales
leaders in prime position through its
identification, development and retention
capabilities.
This
assessment gives key information on a person's
thinking style, behavioral characteristics and
occupational interests. Its use extends beyond
the job candidate to current employees,
predicting which ones should play a role in
strategic succession planning.
Beyond recruitment, the assessment is a
carefully honed tool to help sales executives
shape sales teams with training that allows them
to not just meet their goals, but surpass them.
Managers use PXTS for
placement, training program selection, promotion
and sales coaching.
In the ideal world,
all salespeople are enthusiastic, highly trained
and perfectly suited to their jobs, where they
reap daily success. Companies see little to no
turnover in the sales force, and are able to
bring out new products regularly to meet
customer needs. In this perfect scenario, the
80-20 rule has evaporated.
That world is still
a dream, but the PSI and
PXTS are
the very real tools that will help sales leaders
near the ideal and overcome the wearisome rule
of a few superstars reaping all of the
success. |
CASE
STUDY:
Identifying sales
leaders with Profiles Sales
IndicatorTM
A top salesperson at any
company is pretty easy to spot by her healthy
sales earnings. Less easy to identify is the
great candidate for your particular sales
opening. Even if she demonstrates a successful
record at her current company, does this mean
she will be just as productive in your
organisation? Not necessarily; organizations can
differ significantly in size, mission, and
products sold.
One recruitment
organisation wanted to enhance sales
productivity. It found a customised solution
using the Profiles Sales
Indicator.
Method
First,
the organisation looked at the sales totals of
13 recruiters. Using these totals, the company
classified six of the 13 as top performers, with
average sales earnings of $107,011. It
classified seven of the 13 as bottom performers,
with average sales earnings of $40,977.
Then, using this sample of recruiters and
the Profiles Sales Indicator
the employer
developed a Job Match Pattern describing the
qualities of the existing top performers for the
recruiter position. The 13 recruiters were then
matched to this pattern. A Job Match Percent of
79 best identified the top performing employees.
The employer selected this as a benchmark,
meaning that 79 percent or higher should
identify a top performer. Of the 13
recruiters, six obtained a Job Match Percentage
of 79 percent or greater. Five of the six, or 83
percent, were top performers. Additionally, five
of the six registered above the 79 percent
benchmark. One of the seven bottom performers
(14 percent) achieved the same mark.
Results
A detailed examination revealed that the
average sales generated by recruiters in line
with the Job Match Pattern at 79 percent or
higher was $97,730. Meanwhile, those who did not
match the pattern at 79 percent showed averages
sales of $48,932.14, a difference of almost
$50,000.
The Profiles Sales Indicator helped this
staffing organisation successfully identify 83
percent of its recruiters as top performers. The
employer is positioned to better select
employees that are likely to succeed, earning
more now and in the future. The company now uses
this pattern as the benchmark to predict
recruiter performance.
Our next free seminar
is: "What Ails Your
Sales?"
If you or one of your salespeople falls off
track, come to our seminar to find out how to use
a systematic diagnosis to identify where you need
to focus your time , money and effort to get back
on track.
Thursday 27th
September, 6:00 pm (for 6.15pm
start) - 7:30 pm (drinks & nibbles during)
- Includes free copy
of "40 Strategies for Winning in
Business"
Register via our website
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