Hire Performance

Chapter 1 Predicting Sales Performance We are sales prognosticators who get paid to predict which potential employees will make money for a business and which will cost much more money to hire and train than they will ever generate. Over the years, we've gotten pretty good at it. We’ve been challenged by companies in the United States and Europe to predict from a hodgepodge of employees which ones have become top-producing salespeople. They make it tough on us. Every salesperson they hired was positive, outgoing, and capable; not a ringer in the bunch. They were all good enough in face-to-face interviews to have persuaded experienced managers to hire them. But some had succeeded. Others failed while many others teetered in the middle. Unlike their managers, I wasn't allowed to see or talk to any of these salespeople. What we had were SalesKey® scores and reams of sales production data. In that time SalesKey® has proven to be approximately 80% accurate at differentiating top producers from mediocre ones. That success rate grows to over 90% when we predict those who will wash out of a sales career. SalesKey® is a sales core competency profile developed in 1997 (the tool was called SalesMAP™ in those early days). Unlike the typical sales personality test that makes huge inferences from a list of adjectives, SalesKey® measures stable traits – personality characteristics, behavior patterns, vocational interests, and skill competencies – associated with job performance in sales positions. This book is about a recruiting program that minimizes intuition and subjective evaluation in favor of tools that provide more objective information about people. Hire Performance is a program that works. Companies putting into practice the principles outlined in this book have seen huge results. • One stock brokerage company saw a 173% increase in productivity in just three months, and this was at a time when the market was very unstable. • Another company started hiring smarter and training their current reps in the behavioral model described in this book. Average rep gross income grew from $12,391 to $19,460 the following year – an increase of 37%. Over eighteen months, rep gross increased 120%. Contacts tripled and the value of the typical sale increased 27%. • A Fortune 500 medical supply company saved more than $4.5 million per year when recruiters began using the Hire Performance system. • In Europe a multi-national manufacturer was concerned about a turnover rate approaching 70%. Before implementing the Hire Performance system, they hired 30 salespeople, and six months later only ten were still on the payroll. After implementing this system of hiring by behavioral analysis, of the 28 reps hired in the preceding year, 25 are still with the company and sales are higher than they have ever been. • Businesses that hire smarter and train faster with SalesKey® cut their turnover rate nearly in half within 18 months. While these case studies are notable, they are not unusual. In studies with clients who have implemented Hire Performance, we have tracked a return on investment of 8623% (that’s not a typo) for every dollar invested in our assessments and training. This book contains what we have learned from years of extensive research into sales productivity and the actual practice of hiring salespeople. We have condensed nearly five decades of combined sales and sales management experience into a simple system you can use to improve your odds at hiring top sales talent. Hire Performance is made of three components: 1. Behavioral profiling 2. Behavioral interviewing 3. Behavioral coaching Behavioral profiling means learning to look for objective, measurable behaviors in the selection process; these are the best clues to future productivity. Behavioral interviewing is a skill that rescues hiring conversations from hypothetical sales fantasies to focus instead on more reliable evaluators. Behavioral coaching takes place after the hiring process concludes, aligning the needs of the organization with the skills and aspirations of the new employee. Your title might be sales manager, VP of sales, HR manager, entrepreneur, or you might work for a recruiting firm, but to make this book easier to read, we will refer to those who make decisions about hiring salespeople as recruiters. Let’s start at the beginning – zeroing in on the question, “Is sales art or science?” Believe it or not, knowing the difference has a profound impact on how you approach recruiting. Conclusion Hire Performance gets results. Master a few key skills and we can predict that your Company will reap great rewards not only in the short term, but for a long time to come.