AlignMark Recruiting and Selection Blog

Push or Pull - How does your Organization Manage your Sales Talent

Do you pull your talent through leadership and work environment? Or do you push your organization to strive to achieve established goals set by management?

Great organizations excel in creating the philosophy that their people “can do” (possess the capability), “will do” (maintain their commitment), and “must do” (have the right alignment) that is required for success, now and into the future. To put it in different words, when talented people are trained and “nourished” to excel in their work, when they are provided a rich, engaging environment in which there is passion and excitement about doing great work and truly making a difference, and when they perceive a connection and alignment between their work and the realization of organizational goals and metrics—great things happen (e.g. individual and team excellence). We call this “Pull Magic”—where employees are passionate about being “pulled” in a direction of individual and organizational greatness.  This is the foundation for talent management practices that have a significant effect on the organization's bottom line.

Do Your Sales Managers and Your Organization:

• Understand expectations and goals?
• Understand actions need to meet expectations and accomplish goals?
• Possesses the abilities and personal qualities required to meet expectations
• Motivate employees to meet expectations; e.g. Do they personally value the perceived benefits of meeting expectations and achieving goals?
• Empower and enable employees to meet expectation; e.g. mitigate organizational and external obstacles; resources made available, etc.?

If the answer is no to more than 1 of these questions, perhaps your organization would benefit from shifting its leadership focus to Pull versus Push.

PULL ADVANTAGES	PUSH DOWNSIDES
Employees & Managers are COMMITTED	Employees ARE OBSTACLES to achieving goals
Employees & Managers are PART OF PROBLEM SOLVING PROCESS	Employees DO NOT PERCEIVE PERSONAL BENEFIT
Employees and Managers UNDERSTAND NEED AND VALUE OF CHANGE	Employees DO NOT UNDERSTAND IMPACT OF ACTIVITIES OR ACTIONS NEEDED

 

Unfortunately many sales organizations, achieve the opposite because they haven’t created this type of environment. In the absence of pull strategies, they resort to “Push” strategies, where people perceive being “pushed” in a direction most likely to benefit the organization − not the individual. Where push strategies are the dominant approach to driving organizational results tend to experience greater employee dissatisfaction, higher turnover, shrinking talent recruitment pools, and higher employee disengagement. Sales people are quick to lose sight of the relationship between their efforts and the organization’s success. Push strategies facilitate the growth of organizational climates characterized by a division between management and sales people and they begin to feel disconnected. A kind of “outcome myopia” emerges where decisions about discretionary effort and levels of engagement are based on what individuals perceive as good for themselves personally, effectively disregarding what is good for organizational success overall. Push strategies can encourage sales people to perceive management as a primary obstacle to the successful execution of their jobs, and they foster the belief that their interests are in direct conflict with management’s.  They view their work environment as “Us v. Them”, with “us” being the sales people, and “them” being management (most often expressed as “senior” management due to the fact that responsibility for managerial decisions often bypasses regional sales management, as those managers develop working rapport with their teams by “siding” with their teams on unpleasant or unpopular senior leadership decisions). The greater the push, the more visible the distinction becomes. And it doesn’t stop there. Push strategies quickly become self-perpetuating cycles. Because push strategies create employee resistance, management finds itself in the unpleasant position of having to “push” harder and harder to drive organizational results.  And of course that leads to more resistance, which leads to more “push,” etc. Ultimately, that cycle has to be broken, and it can only be broken by the kind of intense commitment to improving talent leadership which will result in “pull” rather than “push.”

In summary, sales leaders must break a cycle of internal focus and move towards an organization that is committed and focused to achieve a world-class sales organization productivity. The quickest way to do this is by incorporating some of the “Pull” techniques described above.

Feel free to download our latest white paper on building a world class sales organization through assessment and selection.

What is the Value of Experience in Recruiting and Selection?

During our 35 years experience in the Corporate employee selection and testing market, AlignMark has completed numerous analyses comparing results of behavioral skill assessments to measures of on-the-job performance and has likewise accumulated assessment results on literally millions of job applicants. One finding which has emerged across virtually every individual job studied, regardless of industry, centers on the value of experience and may somewhat surprise even seasoned HR professionals.

The finding across our different studies is that experience, defined as years of prior experience in a similar job, has little or no affect on neither skill assessment results nor job performance. In repeated studies of incumbents as well as applicants (sales, customer service, supervisors, etc.) whereby confidential measures of job performance were obtained along with personal demographics, job experience of individuals seldom correlated to overall job performance or their performance on behavioral skill assessments. Although easily viewed as a counter-intuitive, potential explanations include the following:

• Tenure and Experience are often different factors. Some individuals continually learn from their experiences and others do not - 5 years in B2B sales does not equate to 5 years of sales "experience."

• Tenure may produce a greater accumulation of knowledge that is not reflected in measures of "soft" skills. However, it also appears that such increased knowledge does not often translate into enhanced on-the-job performance for many individuals.

So what are the implications of such findings? For some companies they are unimportant. For example, in a study of 2,000 B2C sales professions results demonstrated no significant differences among experienced and inexperienced job applicants on selection assessments or subsequent sales results. Despite this finding, the company continues to focus the majority of its recruiting efforts on experienced sales professions and accords them preferred hiring status. (See earlier comments regarding failure to learn from experience.) For other companies, implications are embraced more positively and result in challenging existing experience requirements, etc.

Those things being said, I clearly do not advocate universally abandoning experience requirements. Indeed, some experience requirements may be useful for decreasing voluntary turnover associated with mismatched job expectations, etc. However, at the same time, I do advocate differentiating "time" from "experience".

Click here for more information or White Papers on these topics and other recruiting and selection practices.

Real Talent Management Leadership Requires Action!

Caution is the watchword in today's market. Companies are afraid to act. Sales surveys indicate that sales cycles are lengthening due to uncertainty and misdirection. Outsourcing is happening in smaller steps now.

This is the context within which most organizations are choosing to operate. Many of our clients, however, are making savvy decisions where they see the current economic climate as the perfect time to get their talent management systems in order. They understand that improving their talent screening and selection systems, upgrading their leadership talent, and improving workforce productivity-- are the only keys to making their workforce more capable, committed, and aligned to drive even greater operating success. Some of our clients recognize the absolute predictive nature of their human capital assets and systems as "leading indicators" to cost reduction and gaining competitiveness. We encourage all our clients and the many prospects we aspire to work with in the near future-- to work hard on the fundamentals now. Diagnose the strengths and weaknesses in your talent management processes and take action on closing gaps-- optimize both your talent assets and systems now-- so you are prepared to compete when the economy recovers (which is NOW).

AlignMark research and white papers are availble to find out more.