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.

Sales Assessment allows for use of leading (vs. lagging) indicators

Is your sales team run by leading indicators or lagging hindsight?  All it takes is a brief look within the talent management practices of the organization to answer this question.  According to McKinsey's War for Talent surveys (200 companies, 1200 respondents) the percentage of companies engaged in positive talent leadership action and execution is very small.Indeed, when it comes to talent leadership, most organizations are failing, and failure is easily traceable to a weak mindset and belief.  In fact, 72% of managers say that winning the war for talent is critical, yet only 9% are confident that their current actions will lead to a stronger talent pool in the next three years. In summary, the McKinsey survey lists the following as views of senior managers’ beliefs about their own organizations:

• Brings in talented people……….……19%
• Develops people effectively………….3%
• Retains top talent……………….…………8%
• Removes poor performers……........3%
• Knows the A, B, and C players…….16%

Where do you think your company falls? How can you improve your leading indicators?

Accurate information drives effective strategies.  This is good news for sales organizations, because, unlike many other functional areas, sales organizations already have great appreciation for accurate information. Operating metrics are a familiar form of sales information and receive intense attention in all sales organizations.  But operating metrics alone are not enough.  Sales leaders need to be passionately and diligently focused on the knowledge, skills, and abilities (i.e., the competencies) required in all their positions and they need to be likewise focused on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their incumbents (individual contributors and leadership alike), internal candidates, and external candidates as well.  The sales organization with accurate information about their position requirements, and the corresponding level of human capital knowledge, skills, and abilities available to fill those positions, is in the best position to be more strategic and intelligent when making all human capital decisions (i.e., selection, promotion, training, succession planning, performance management, etc.). In this definition, “passionately and diligently” means an unwavering commitment to measure, measure, and measure again. Great sales organizations extend their measurements beyond operational metrics to include significant focus on key human capital metrics: skills, abilities, knowledge, engagement and retention levels, quality-of-hire, ROI, etc. These measures are examples of “leading indicators” that great sales organizations focus on and attend to as they know that such indicators do accurately predict ultimate operating metrics like revenue and profitability. All measurement should be directed at providing better information for improved decision-making.

We have found repeatedly when critical, strategic decision-making is attempted without rigorous attention to the predictive data and metrics, wrong decisions are made which will lead to poor sales performance. If a sales leader can lead their managers and sales people to arrive at a point--mentally (through initial belief and eventual successes) where there is “passionate and diligent focus,” both on the targets that will drive its future success and the competencies needed to drive that success, much progress will have been made in building this core belief. Most great sales organizations share the following beliefs:

• Better Talent equals competitive advantage
• Talent Leadership “Mindset” is the catalyst for action
• Strengthening the talent pool is every leader’s job
• Talent “Gold Standard” has been established (be a role model)
• Leaders, especially senior leaders, must be held accountable for aggressively developing center talent
• Real money must be invested in Talent Leadership
• Talent Review processes are critical

Don’t lag behind without focus on leading indicators. Hindsight with poor results is a position your sales organization does not need to face.  Below are only a few of the differences between leading and lagging indicators.  Which do you measure?

Lagging Indicators	Leading Indicators
Quantity of hires	Quality of hires
End of year results	Gap Analysis of results weekly
Time to fill a position	Skills identification and gap analysis of incumbent sales force
Percent of quota attained	Leadership Involvement
Turnover	Identification of “at risk” incumbents
Objectives Made	Engagement Levels

For more information on these and other white papers on sales assessment click here.

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.

8 Key Criteria for a Successful Sales Assessment

There are hundreds of consultative sales assessments out there. Perhaps you use one of them. If not, you should as we know that better decision-making (i.e., improved selection and targeted development planning) will result from the use of an assessment that provides more accurate information both for candidates and incumbents.

If you already use a consultative sales assessment, however, you need to ask yourself whether the instrument you are using is truly world-class - - how does it "stack-up" against the well accepted benchmarks that define "the best."

Does your consultative sales assessment?

1. Measure both "can do" (i.e., sales skills) and "will do" (i.e., behavioral tendencies and personality) components.
2. Provide a "green light" and "red light" metric. In other words, does your assessment yield a probability of success score to be used for selection.
3. Provide sales skill, behavioral and personality information that is easily interpretable based on a massive users database (hundreds of thousands).
4. Utilize job simulation -- where candidates and incumbents experience a "day in the life of" and they use their situational judgment and skills to successfully handle typical sales challenges.
5. Provide accurate selection information and rich developmental information to kick-start a newly hired salesperson's development.
6. Provide you the opportunity to benchmark the skills and behavioral tendencies of your incumbents -- so you can determine where training is required to make your sales force world-class.
7. Generate a custom interview based on the candidate's assessment results?
8. Meet all EEO and ADA requirements?