:: Words of sales test wisdom from those who know ::

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…)

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.

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…)

Stan K Ridgley, VP Americas, SalesAssessment.com

In sales and marketing, when it comes to growing revenue and cutting costs, we usually separate our thinking. Either we do one . . . or we do the other.

But not both. Right?

But why not both?

This concept of simultaneous cost-cutting and revenue growth requires us to stretch our minds a bit and to understand the dynamic that drives corporate-level decision-making with regard to a firm’s sales force.

The McKinsey Quarterly research report of March 17th 2009 contends that companies fear experimenting with the sales force for one big reason – your sales force is the engine that drives revenue. The thought of overhauling that engine fills senior executives with dread, even if the engine barely chugs along. Rather than take the bold step of restructuring, companies make patchwork repairs as often and for as long as they can. (more…)

Isn’t it funny how different business leaders react differently to the current world economic situation. Sure, business overall is down and sure, there needs to be some right sizing as a result – but there is no reason for businesses to ‘batten down the hatches’ and prepare for a long siege – better than 90% of business is still operating as before!

So what’s really changed since the ‘credit crunch’?

There has been a (not unexpected) knee jerk cost cutting and job culling exercise across virtually all sectors. Maybe not a bad thing considering how inefficient many business were – sometimes a crisis brings the excesses into focus.

There has also been a knee jerk reaction from the bankrupt banks to stop lines of credit, causing misery for business and consumer alike – again, maybe not a bad thing considering how frivolously many people previously viewed credit.

The housing market has stalled – maybe again not a bad thing considering that prices were spiralling globally, putting ‘a place of my own’ beyond the reach of mere mortals.

Global interest rates have reached rock bottom – again, maybe not a bad thing when the banks (more…)