Looking for 2 B2C Contact Centres to test latest Fit-4 Role
I am looking for 2 Business to Consumer Contact Centre Managers who would consider being a trial site for our latest ‘Fit-4′ role based sales assessment offering – B2C Contact Centre (at no cost).
This role has involved considerable development of our existing assessment offering (www.salesassessment.com) due to the lower manager to staff ratio of contact centres. This creates greater demands on the already rigorous and robust nature of our offering and we would like to run two test programs pre-launch. The first would be a run to test the functionality and usability of our radically revised skills assessment package; the second would be to provide in-depth analysis of each member of the team (skills only at this stage) together with a personal and team skills development plan, all benchmarked against the skill map of world class high achievers. For this stage, we would need some management time to discuss the results. There is no charge for this process and you will get a whole heap of invaluable data about your team.
If this could be of interest to you, please contact me urgently. I am looking to start testing immediately, concluding within 2 weeks if possible. Ideally I would like to assess 100 people.
Day 2: True story-Having the right team
I had been working with the medium sized sales force. I had been working with them for about 2 months and had mixed feelings about their abilities. I had originally been brought in to hone their skills as consultative sellers and develop them as account managers. The sales people responded well to the training which is not suprising as many of them far from being consultative sellers or account managers were transactional sellers without much clue how to sell a service/product that could be of strategic importance to the companies that might buy it. Amongst the sales people there was a feeling that it was the fault of marketing that sales were so low and the offer wasn’t that good and..and.. some of this might have been true but it got to be a catalogue of excuses I am not saying this to make anyone feel bad it is what happened. The company had appointed a new Sales Director very experienced, very intelligent he asked me to meet with him. I was expecting to give a report on the training but instead the Sales Director opened up to me and said that the sales peole were not what he had been told to expect, instead of the brilliant startegic sellers he had expected he had inherited a bunch of largely transactional sellers in hats too big for them. He felt handicapped and I guess a little vulnerable. He wanted to know my assessment & recommendations. I am never comfortable giving an assessment from watching people on a training course because how people act in the field may be quite different good or bad. Training courses are not assessment centres I could though give a report back on attitude and behaviour. The Sales Director was very concerned about reaching targets for the rest of the year but had no real way of knowing who was good at what nor could he replace anyone easily or even be sure they were the right person to change. If you have ever been in this situation then you will understand the dilemma. 3 months later after much frustration there was whole sale slaughter in the Sales department. The sales director did this as fairly as he could but all the time thinking “I didn’t sign on to be a hatchet man.”
Now roll backwards wouldn’t it have been great if that sales director had an objective profile of the sales people that show’d their behaviour, attitude and motivation plus how skilled they were and then instead of measuring that against internal benchmarks you did that against world class top performers you would know before you got into post who should stay who should go and who should be developed. You would of course want to validate that against actual figures but instead of being told by someone who knows little or nothing about sales people or selling that you have a fantastic team you know what they are warts and all. Imagine if you did you could really hit the ground running knowing that the decisions you make about sales people are the right decisions.
Let us take the ideas of testing a stage further many sales people could also gain by having an annual MOT benchmarked against world class performers so they can have real input into their own development and be able to answer performance questions like ” I get the meeting why can’t I quite get the sale?” imagine being able to go to another employer equipped with a robust report that has rigorously tested your abilities. Imagine a transactional seller being able to identify the skills and attitude shortfalls they have should they wish to progress to Consultative selling and then seek ways to fill the gap and grow their career.
Enough imagining the tool is here right now and it is called Fit-4 and I am an unashamed advocate for it: robust, rigorous,online easy to use and the results packed with practical, easy to understand information. This is the link to yesterdays true story Fit-4 is also a great tool for helping you to selct the right person for the right sales role and saving money time and heartache on the way.
SDV Training with Sales assessment.com are specialists in helping companies improve their B2B sales. We do this by helping you select the right sales people for the right role, assessing existing sales people benchmarked against world class top performers and we design and deliver sales trainiing and coaching
2 True stories: Day One selecting the right sales person!
Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty!
So I am sitting at a network lunch and telling my table that I help companies improve their sales performance, assisting you to select the right person in the first place to helping you assess the talent that you have and, designing focused reveue generating training &/or coaching. The guy to my left immediately said that’s interesting because my company is now at a point where I am wanting to employ a full time sales person. We converse and he tells me he is going to use a recruitment agency that have previously supplied him with engineers. I ask him what is the cost of getting your recruitment wrong and he says over a 3 month trial period including the agency fee around £8000 but that is acceptable. Now here’s the thing, he hadn’t calculated his time in making the decision nor the sales opportunities lost, or the possible negative impact on existing customers. He had plans for growth; and the wrong sales person could contribute enourmously to that growth, or knock them back a few years. Selection is difficult but in sales it is crucial. There are 3 areas that you need to focus on: first does this person have (more…)
What’s the point of assessing sales people?
CEO SalesAssessment.com
As an expert in assessing sales people I get asked this very often. The answer is simple.
If your team is not populated with top performing sales people – you will get outsold! That means at best you need more prospects per sale, with all the costs that incurs; or worst case – if your competitor has people who are a league better that yours, maybe you never win another deal.
Reality for most companies probably lies today somewhere in between these two extremes – pipelines slipping worse than ever; sales ‘disappearing’ at a higher rate than ever; win ratios becoming progressively worse; costs increasing…. yes, we are all familiar with this scenario by now. So what can be done to reverse this?
Just cloning your top performers, assuming you can achieve this without a rigorous assessment tool, is no longer enough. Think about this – what if your top performer is just not good enough to outsell those sales people in all the new competition springing up everyday. What if the skills required today to be a top performer have changed – and in most areas they have! Customer expectations are changing faster than the skill sets in most sales forces – but it needn’t be so.
The value of SalesAssessment.com’s Fit-4 offering is that it uniquely measures the 4 key areas that determine a sales person’s ability to create revenue, not generically, but for the specific role they are required to perform. Even better, all 4 areas are benchmarked against world class top performers. This means that uniquely with Fit-4, you are dramatically reducing the risk of being outsold by your competition; and since we are continuously aligning the benchmarks as the needs of the market changes, you can be sure that you will always have a team of top performing sales people.
Customers are no longer interested in the pain game.
I know that many times in my 25 years in selling, particularly when I led multiple sales teams, I would have given a lot to unlock the heads of certain sales people. You know the ones I mean. The ones you just can’t seem to click with, the ones who you don’t know whether to use the stick or the carrot on.
We have all at various times had good, poor and average members of our teams. It is easy to know what to do with the first two groups; the challenge has always been to manage and develop the average performers so that they improve. This is the group that can be the difference, that can take you over the numbers. They will have the biggest impact on the bottom line. So the question has always been what would unlock that potential and make them have an impact? (more…)