This is the story of a certain LatAm subsidiary of a well-known Fortune 500 company which was losing an unacceptable number of bids right at the last minute.

Each bid was large in value and hence expensive to prepare and manage through the sales/bid process. This was causing significant issues for the business by seriously impacting on profitability.

New Country manager
The business had brought in a new Country Manager to turn the situation around.

Investigations confirmed that the company’s rigorous process for ensuring that each bid is of the highest quality was working well, and that the bids were indeed of a good quality

This company is world-renowned for the quality of its training programs, yet, prior to seeing the results of the Fit-4 assessment, the Learning & Development team had determined they should invest even more in negotiating and closing skills.

However, the situation changed as a result of deploying the Fit-4 assessment test which is sales-role specific and measures:

• behaviour;
• critical reasoning;
• functional job skills; and
• motivators.

These are all criteria specifically relevant to the role being assessed. The Fit-4 test compares the results of each individual against a pre-configured High Performer benchmark for that role – in this case the role of Sales Account Manager.

People in this role typically need to be able to:

• proactively identify customer needs;
• based on customer benefit analysis;
• deploy strong engagement skills;
• feel comfortable working with some of the main board; and
• sell ‘need amortization’/ROI (return on investment).

The test discovered that although the salespeople had many strong skills there was a major problem with a lack of Critical Reasoning skills within the team. This previously unidentified skills gap was proving to be a major negative in terms of winning business because the bids developed by the organisation are quite complex in their ROI analysis and require complex final round financial discussions and negotiations.

With Critical Reasoning levels so low, the sales people were being easily outmanoeuvred by their competitors and ‘blindsided’ by even quite reasonable questions from the customer.

This inability to hold their own in such discussions could also easily account for the fact that a typical sales team member also exhibited low Sales Confidence and poor Listening behaviours as well.

The organisation was able to get a long way down the bid process thanks to its position as the ‘big brand’ and so the customer was using the organisation’s bids as benchmarks for ‘beating up’ alternative suppliers.

Solution
To alleviate the problem and as an immediate fix, the company created a ‘buddy system’ with Finance, who now accompany the sales people to all significant customer meetings.

The result? Revenue is moving up again – significantly!

April 2010 – the results of the Fit-4 test were presented to the client.
May 2010 – the buddy system was put in place and the financial development needs had been identified.
July 2010 – revenue and profit had increased to a point where ALL costs (assessment & development) had been covered.
Payback – including additional training – 3 months!
Result – Fit-4 is now being introduced throughout the business for development & recruitment.

 Time consuming but accurate is assessment based on observation. First, you need to define the selling role and develop the list of skills that you want to observe. These should be weighted by importance since not all skills contribute equally to the success of the role. Next, train your observers to avoid falling into the trap of only looking for evidence that supports a view they already have of the sales person. Schedule sales meetings or role-plays where you observe. Try to screen out the effect on the assessment of the subject knowing they are being observed. Finally, decide on a benchmark that defines what good looks like. This approach means spending a lot of time upfront in preparation and is costly for the sales manager who has to observe the sales person at meetings. The result can be robust and objective but does not yield much better information than using the right online assessment and takes hours in the making and hours in the doing. Two and a half hours seems quite short in comparison.

 What if you want to test for a future role? Consider a sales person who wanted advancement to a sales manager role. He was very good in his sales role and if his employer hadn’t been willing to promote him he would probably have gone elsewhere. (Of course, if he had been put in the wrong role they would have lost him anyway.) An assessment centre would have helped, but for a single individual it was inappropriate. However, using an online assessment he was tested in the sales manager role and also in a new senior selling role. The tests revealed that he had potential as a sales manager and would probably be adequate in the role, but in the senior selling role he could excel. The boss didn’t have to persuade him to make the right choice – he himself elected to step up to the senior sales role. The boss was able to provide a focused development plan built around behaviours and competence that enabled the individual to fulfil their promise of excellent results and the whole process took 4 hours including feedback time.

 So it seems in trying to improve your sales results you can either trust to a horoscope and hope approach, develop a full assessment centre or spend 2 ½ hours online with an assessment that is robust, objective, immediate and above all accessible by the sales person and the sales manager.

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.