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Ego, Money & Fear
Posted by Patrice Murray on Tue, Feb 02, 2010 @ 07:04 AM
The other day, I read a post by Dave Kurlan on 3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring. Quite a provocative title, no?
I read Dave's points from my perspective as s a former Inside Sales Manager. I have to admit blushing with a bit of embarrassment as I recognized past mistakes in his points. To set the stage, Dave presented on a Sales hiring webinar and was asked: If your recruiting process works so effectively, and your assessments are so predictive, and they save so much time and money and consistently identify top performers, then why don't more companies use them? It is a key question. Dave responded with three reasons (highlighted sections below): ego, money & fear. 1. Ego.
Most sales managers simply have a mindset that they should know how to do this without asking for help, relying on tools, or following someone else's process. If we didn't have well-developed (putting it mildly) egos, then I don't believe we'd be in Sales. Fortunately, a well-developed (ok, big) ego, can be necessary in business success. Unfortunately, when in management and responsible for a team's success, ego needs to be shelved in order to take advantage of tools, processes and perspectives from other sources and experts in these areas. Eventually, we call have to embrace our own "ego-management". Think of a ship's Captain in distress refusing help from the Coast Guard (professionals, experts in their field). The end result could very well be a sinking ship. Seeking out and tapping into resources is the sign of strength, not weakness.
2. Money.
Every company pays their worst performer far more than it would cost to get the right process, tools and skills in place. Even though every hiring mistake costs as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars, some companies simply don't view those losses as line items. It's always baffled me how some Managers will continue to hire people who just aren't the best fit for the position and the culture. Similarly, I've seen managers have great and expensive sales meetings to get the team motivated, and once they're back in the office, everyone goes back to the same routine and same processes. A better ROI would be to invest in re-evaluating your sales process and ensuring that your messaging and tools are geared towards how your buyers want to buy and not how you want to sell.
3. Fear.
Fear of the unknown, of being wrong, of change, of losing control, of being criticized, and of a learning curve. Fear of criticism from Senior Management, your team, fear of change, and fear that the people you hired and the processes you've implemented just aren't going to work. Fear can make a Manager become distracted. Sales Managers, and people in general, are not all-knowing and can't be experts on everything, contrary to what we may think about ourselves.
A good Manager will admit these realities and turn them into 3 powerful reasons to utilize every tool available. It is a different world we sell in now so what you used at another company 5 years ago may not work now. Your product offerings may be changing, your markets may be evolving, your sales goals may be higher, your team players may be different - so embrace that reality and create a new vision for success. Are you ready to turn your negatives into positives for 2010? (Photo credit: Troy Holden)
COMMENTS
This article is so right on. How many leaders/managers/employees right now are in the process of evaluating what they are doing? Go Bridge Group Go!
It is painful to read and admit to but sadly very true. It comes down to being plain lazy. Well done.
Good stuff....soooooo, what are some of the best processes for both selecting AND recruiting A players? My HR team is asking me to shorten and speed up the hiring process which I am very resistant to doing.
The only other element that I feel should be mentioned is that past performance is definitely indicative of future results. However, if a past performance was in a farming role and you are asking that individual to be a hunter, it ain't going to work...
Patrice - good post here. You've highlighted some really important roadblocks that sales organizations hit to keep them from performing at optimum levels. If there's one thing I've learned about asking for help on something is that there's no shame in it. The ability to not do that (ask for help) is really greater than the problem that requires the help in the first place. Thanks for this! Chris
Patrice, nice job taking my three original reasons, expanding and turning them into positives. I like it! Dave
Kevin, thank you for your comment…and kudos to you for resisting the pressure to rush through such an important process. The “people” piece of “people, process and technology” should be well planned to ensure you have the right person for the right position -- considering skills, experience, and personality as well. Hiring decisions need to be well thought out, and the wrong decision can be costly in various ways. We have some great insights to share in our "Building Inside Sales: Your Roadmap to a Best Practice Group" ebook which I hope you’ll find to be helpful, including a section on “Fundamentals of Successful Hiring.”
Your comment, "It's always baffled me how some Managers will continue to hire people who just aren't the best fit for the position and the culture", is so painfully accurate that it should be a bumper sticker. With all of the great assessment tools available to help them, it is amazing how few use such assessments as Predictive Index to improve their selection accuracy.
Quality of hire will diminish when you put pressure on the recruiting funnel by trying to bring down your time to fill average. Some companies can get away with it but it ultimately catches up to them. The big question regarding assessments is what does your company do with them? Do you use them as a tool to hire candidates? Most tuck the assessments into an employee file once the candidate is onboarded. The best approach is to use the assessments during training to measure how much the new employee is learning. And carry this through to the emoyees first review and first promotion so you can measure how accurate your interview assessments are. This is something we do @HubSpot and it works well. It's all in the metrics.
Thanks Joe. I certainly agree. We use the DriveTest (http://salesdrive.info/theDriveTest/index.php) early in the interviewing process before a face to face to screen out misfits. We don't use them later down the line. I do analyze how effective they are and I'm coming up with a 58% accuracy rate. 58% of the time, the assessment predicted an A player. Slightly better thana coin flip? I'm not jumping for joy. What assessments do you use? Thanks!
You guys are working too hard on the wrong assessments. Here are some statistics from Objective Management Group and their completely sales specific, customized sales candidate assessment which is used in the first step of the process: When clients insist on hiring a candidate they love that was not recommended by the assessment, 75% those candidate fail within the first six months. When clients hire candidates that were recommended, 92% of them are in the top half of the sales force within 12 months. Predictive Validity is 95%. If you use any other assessment for hiring salespeople it is a coin flip. If you use the right one, at the right time, it's like having a crystal ball.
Here is a link to some data on Predictive
Index and sales. We represent them in Florida, but other can visit piworldwide.com.
Kevin, We assess during each stage of the 5 step interview process and our assessments are home grown out of MIT Sloan. I believe they work well but there is always room for improvement. We'll be taking a closer look at the Predictive per Dave's suggestion - many thanks.
Thank you all for your input.
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