Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Tue, Jun 29, 2010 @ 10:33 AM
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?
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Lagging Indicators
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Leading Indicators
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Quantity of hires
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Quality of hires
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End of year results
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Gap Analysis of results weekly
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Time to fill a position
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Skills identification and gap analysis of incumbent sales force
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Percent of quota attained
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Leadership Involvement
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Turnover
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Identification of “at risk” incumbents
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Objectives Made
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Engagement Levels
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For more information on these and other white papers on sales assessment click here.
Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 10:22 AM
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.
Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Mon, May 10, 2010 @ 03:14 PM
Most of us have heard of online job boards or job portals and understand how important they are to recruiting and hiring. And while they have a certain appeal to many job seekers, rarely does a job seeker focus on only one single job portal. Most candidates are willing to look across many different job boards for job opportunities. Conversely most companies recruiting strategy allows them to choose only one to advertise in given the costs associated with advertising on multiple boards.
Many companies have started experiencing great success finding candidates at a lower cost per candidate utilizing many less well known, free job boards. One of the keys to having success with any job board is the frequent "updating" and utilization of the job posting.
A System that has functionality that allows a company to create a job description and automatically posts to a variety of free job boards such as GoogleJobs, Simply Hired, Craigslist, and Kijiji will lead to an increased number of candidates. In other words a company that now posts on 10 job boards versus just one will clearly not have any less candidates and in fact will have significantly more. Subsequently, the System must automatically keep the post updated. This will keep the job listing fresh and listed towards the top of similar postings.
There are numerous examples of Systems working as described above. A major Real Estate Brokerage has utilized a System for five months now. Since the System was implemented, there has been over a 100% increase in the number of leads generated through job boards in the past. This has significantly lead to a decrease in the need to spend as much money on the more expensive job boards thereby leading to a significant return on investment. For example, here are some job boards without a System and with a System:
| Without System | With System |
Paid Job Board Per Month | $695 | $0 |
Costs for posting on other job boards | $200* (time it takes to post and update to 10 job boards once per week) | $135* (auto-poster capabilities of System) |
Total costs - generate leads thru job boards | $895 | $135 |
# of leads - paid job boards Additional leads generated | 40 0 | 0 10 |
Postings on other job boards | 40* (if no update leads start to diminish) | 40 |
Total leads | 80 | 50 |
Cost per lead | $11 | $2.70 |
We'd be interested in your input with regards to your organization posting listings on job boards. Do you have an online Recruiting System in place for keeping your listing updated? Are you interested in finding such an automated Recruiting System? Click
here to find out more.
Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Fri, Apr 30, 2010 @ 10:59 AM
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?