Building Blocks, Close Up! The Sales Hiring System

Happy Friday, Enablers! And welcome to the 15th edition of Building Blocks, Close Up! Today our topic is sales hiring.

One of the most frequently cited quotes from Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and other books, is:

...get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus...

So, in the sales profession, this is so important that we always take our time, identify what skills and traits we truly need, prepare to select the right candidate, use validated assessments, conduct behavioral interviews, have candidates demonstrate their capabilities, and work hard not to form early biases based on pleasant personalities or fluff talk, right?

Yeah, not so much. That's why I advocate for designing and implementing a Sales Hiring System.

A Reminder About Sales Systems

There are many sales systems, but the ones I prioritize as the "movers and shakers" are:

1. The Sales Hiring System
2. The Sales Readiness System
3. The Sales Training System
4. The Sales Management System
5. The Sales Coaching System

If you're really paying attention to detail, you'll notice The Sales Training System is a subset of The Sales Readiness System. The 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change is embedded in The Sales Training System. And, The Sales Coaching System is a subset of The Sales Management System. Welcome to systems thinking.

With that backdrop as a reminder, today, we'll discuss the system that lays the foundation for all of the others to produce the best results... an effective Sales Hiring System - or in Jim Collins-speak, how to put the right people in the right seats on the bus, and avoid bringing in the wrong people.

Thoughts about Sales Hiring

Can you pick your next sales team (both reps and managers) or individual hire, and get it right? What percent of the time?

Allow me to get passionate (aka, rant) here for a moment. This is the foundation on which everything else builds. It why, in Good to Great, that Collins wrote that famous quote, “Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” The other systems are powerful. They help you maximize the potential of your talent. In fact, great systems can help you get above-average performance from otherwise average players, which is why I build systems. I'm fond of quoting the late Geary Rummler...

“If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”

Geary Rummler , founding partner of Performance Design Lab and co-founder of The Rummler-Brache Group ?

Yes, a bad system will drag down good performers. But hear this clearly...

If you don't have the right players in the right roles, the other sales systems simply won't produce the maximum possible results.

~ Mike Kunkle

Any one system will do something for you. Combine them and it gets even better. But you simply can't over-compensate for the lack of appropriate talent.

• If you want to improve your sales onboarding and decrease ramp-up time while increasing average new-hire production -- the first step of effective sales onboarding is to hire the right talent for the right roles.
• If you want to increase the performance of an entire sales team, there are a lot of things you can do, but the single biggest is to put the right manager in place?(hiring and promoting sales managers effectively).

We all know this, right? Heads nod around board room tables whenever I say stuff like this. So here's the big question...

IF WE ALL KNOW THIS, WHY DON'T PUT MORE ENERGY INTO SELECTING THE RIGHT SALES TALENT?!?

I've seen the massive impact it can make. I've seen first-year, new-hire churn nose-dive from 75% to 25%. I've seen a team with solid B players, but no hardcore A players, double their average monthly production in six months' time with the right (replacement) sales manager in place. In both examples, there were other factors and initiatives in play, but they wouldn't have worked as well without the right talent in place.

And conversely, twice in my career I've had reputable, well-qualified, highly-experienced vendors do complete talent audits of the sales force (reps and managers), with approved job profiles, competency measurements, psychometric assessments, calibrated reporting, and more. Leaders were engaged throughout the process and signed-off on each step. Everyone was educated about how the process and tools worked and what they would tell us. And when the final reports rolled in, senior leaders didn't like what they were being told, and the reports got stuck on the shelf. Think results improved? In both cases, eventually, there were layoffs.

For those of you who are now clapping, laughing, or crying, and may actually want to do something differently, here's a better way to approach sales hiring.

Elements of an Effective Sales Hiring System

Do I think you should do all of these steps? Well, I'll just say that the times I've gotten the whole system implemented, were the times that it worked the best. But I also live in the real world, with all of you, and realize enablers may not always be able to get it all in place, especially if their senior sales leader operates on gut feel and manages with the Harder, Faster, Longer, Louder method. (And if you're a sales leader reading this - sorry, but don't let yourself be the barrier to more effective sales hiring. I've seen this far too often.)

Now, the thing that is a bit different with this system, is that it starts as a "figure it out" method and ends with the system you'll put in place and manage. Let's take a tour.

Determine Sales Competencies

Determine the competencies (skills and behaviors) needed for sales success, in your company, for your various roles. There will be overlap between roles and other things that may be indigenous, but list them all and create a library from which to pull. This is the foundation for everything else in this system. You need to get this right, and there are experts who can help.

• ATD has their updated World-Class Sales Competency Model.
• Sales consulting firms like Alexander Group and ZS Associates do competency work.
• Accenture consults on this, as does AON (see section 6) and many other management consulting firms do the same (like McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain, PwC).
• Dave Brock has a really good one that he shares for the price of a book purchase - see this page for details.
• Here's one I endorse personally: My friends at SkillDirector (see this webcast) who did a lot of work with GE when I was there (and who have a great online tool you can explore) can help you build a competency model and assess skill levels over time (and tie training courses to the competencies, to help identify and close competency gaps over time).
• Some assessment vendors also use competency-based approaches and can help you select competencies by role, which their assessments will then support.
• And there are plenty of other competency experts out there. Some sales training firms do this work, and at SPARXiQ, we're documenting the competency model behind our Modern Sales Foundations methodology right now, to offer it to clients.

[I added plenty of resources here because of the importance of the foundation of defining sales competencies by role. I won't do that everywhere else, or this will be an ebook.]

Determine Traits & Mindsets

Determine the traits and mindsets/beliefs (not personality) required to support the competencies and thrive in the various, challenging roles. (In addition to high skill levels, selling requires certain mindsets and traits -- it's more like being an Olympic athlete than an accountant.) These may also vary by role. Create a library, as with your competencies.

Create Job Documentation

By sales role, create a job description and job specifications or job profile, especially documenting the tasks required for success and slotting in the competencies and traits you defined, to build the requirements for each role.

Select Psychometric Assessments

Find statistically-validated psychometric assessments that can assess the competencies and traits.

Approaches vary, but since I'm a believer in sales nuance, I prefer assessing and profiling top-performers inside a company to find more like them, rather than assessing against a stock "sales profile." Even better, if possible, profile the top, bottom and middle performers (or at least top and bottom), and look for statistically-valid differences between top and middle performers and the top and bottom (helps you know what patterns to avoid as much as what patterns to prefer). If you have a small sales force, you may not be able to do quite as much valid analysis of your own data, and may need to reply more on the assessment company's experience, until you build your own data by hiring more and correlating to performance.

Some vendors sell their assessment as a "weed out" tool. Most will advise you that the assessment should be weighed as a third of the decision process. I prefer to use the assessment to inform the interview and the final decision, and prioritize candidates, more than a weed out factor (but yes, perhaps you might weed out some, based on how far a candidate scores outside your ideal, or how many other prioritized candidates you have).

Whatever you do, be consistent. Other than validity studies, that's what keeps it legal and ethical.

• Note: I don't have a Ph.D in psychometrics, but from the research I've done, I prefer normative assessments to ipsative. Those selling ipsative assessments obviously disagree with me, so do your own research, talk to experts, and find the right approach for you. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good - there is no perfect assessment. Demand validity and "settle" for excellence. Any statistically-validated approach will likely be far better than what you're doing today, especially if weaved in with these other methods.

For those interested in exploring assessments or just learning more, here are some good, non-partisan educational resources:

• https://www.uniformguidelines.com/index.html
• https://wdr.doleta.gov/opr/FULLTEXT/99-testassess.pdf

Consider Behavioral Interviewing

I strongly recommend this, combined with assessments, at a minimum. Establish behavioral interview questions to gauge whether candidates possess these competencies and traits and can provide examples of such from their past (past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior). Establish a way to take notes and score answers, perhaps against a best-case answer. Learn how to conduct a behavioral interview and guide candidates to provide detailed stories and examples through effective questioning. A good framework is SAR: Ask the candidate to give you an example of a time when they [fill in the blank with the behavior you want to assess). Guide them to provide the Situation (which relates to the competency or trait you're assessing), the Action they took, and the Result they got (and possibly, what they learned from it).

Consider Situational/Hypothetical Interviews

These are "What would you do if..." questions that assess judgment. Establish some challenging hypothetical scenarios (preferably built from real case studies at your company, documenting what top performers did in the challenging situation) and prepare questions and best-case responses to assess candidates' answers against.

Consider Orchestrating Skill Validation

If I'm recommending combinations, I'd use assessments, behavioral interviews, and skill validations. Create role plays or simulations (sims) to validate that candidates can actually demonstrate the skills they verbally tell you they have. Sims can be low-tech role plays (please don't use "sell me this pen") or there are high-tech options with virtual coaching solutions, virtual role plays, or full-blown, online, branched simulations with scoring. Your mileage may vary, but role plays work. Hiring an SDR rep or field rep who will prospect? Have them email you and call you. Give them a real or simulated case study or prospect, and see what they can do (calling you, not the real prospect). Use your imagination here, but keep the tasks and sims as real-life as possible, and see how candidates handle themselves. This is where the rubber meets the road and where the talk gets walked.

Perform Background & Reference Checks

For finalists, do background checks (employment, education, criminal, and as desired, drug testing, following your HR and Legal team's guidance) and reference checks. This is just common sense, but since common sense isn't always common practice, don't leave this stuff out.

Putting It All Together

This is where you weave together the above elements (or the ones you choose) so that there is a structured, logical process for executing. (Get consultant advice if you need it). In some companies, especially where each hire was critical, I have implemented all the elements. In others, I selected the combination that made the most sense for the company and culture.

In the link above from AON/Sales Management Association, this slide provides good perspective (and includes some things my system does not, like biodata, which some companies and industries, like insurance sales, do use effectively):

Some Final Things to Consider

Many companies use behavioral interviewing (or so they say; I've interviewed at some where they said they did, yet no one asked me a single behavioral question) but have no plan for how various interviewers will split up the interview questions or no plan to calibrate their ratings of the candidate at the end (which would require using questions consistently and actually taking notes of the responses and rating them). Have a plan.

With some assessment products, if you use the psychometric assessments before the interview, the assessment will provide behavioral questions to help you dig deeper into an area where the candidate did not fit the profile as closely as desired.

A Sidebar on Sourcing: I once developed a hiring system for a business that was highly effective, but we ran into a roadblock shortly after implementation. After we developed the ideal profile, there wasn't a single candidate in the pipeline who was remotely close to qualifying. Keep in mind that few candidates are an exact match. People are, well, human. There's a give and take in hiring. If the person can learn, is willing to, and will accept coaching, you can teach the right person new skills. For traits, you need to be a bit more selective, but also accept some shortfalls than can be compensated for in other ways or coached. In the above case, we didn't have anyone remotely close to the new profile. We had learned to hire right, but now needed to source right (for the new hiring profile). For that, we worked very closely with Recruiting and HR, and figured things out. Interesting lesson though.

I can't run through every combination or scenario, but these are the sorts of things you need to think through. An experienced consultant or vendor partner can help with this, and establish a flow and process. While putting a selection system in place like this seems daunting, it's the research, project work, decisions, and implementing a new process that is the hard part. Once you have the elements in place and a sensible process, and have people trained on how to use the system, you'll build momentum quickly, as people start to see it working.

When you consider how absolutely critical it is to have the right sales talent, and the costs of turnover, failed reps, or the opportunity loss of barely-successful reps who almost always miss quota, you'll be glad you invested the time and energy to hire right.

Resources

For this edition, I've embedded many of the resources in the content above. If you start at Determine Sales Competencies and scroll through to the end of Select Psychometric Assessments, every link is a resource for you. Here are a few others:

• Document: Guide on Behavioral Interviewing from the Defense Logistics Agency
• eBook: How to Hire Sales Pros Who Deliver Results
• Blog Post: Can You Afford To Keep Making Bad Hiring Decisions?
• Blog Post: Do You Know the Difference Between a Top Producer and a Top Performer?

Building Blocks Course Update

Isn’t it crazy that 42.9% of enablers think that there is a lack of appreciation for the work enablement does and at the same time “Content Adoption” is the number one response to the question of how enablement’s success is measured? (Source: SEC Sales Enablement Landscape 2022)

Strategic business impact must be the number one goal for sales enablement if we want to create a sustainable future for the profession and fulfilling careers for ourselves.

~ Felix Krueger

The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement course is only two weeks away from launch and will for the very first time provide a learning path to mastering the framework that has managed to achieve this strategic business impact over and over again.?We can't allow ourselves to be distracted by the wrong things.

Here are some examples of what's possible with The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement:?

ENTERPRISE, PUBLIC, B2B FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM

Result: Achieved a $398m accretive revenue increase in one year from final project completion.?

Approach:

• Full building blocks implementation
• New hire ramp-up (and decreased new-hire churn) through better hiring and improved sales training based on best practices
• Increased incumbents’ sales results through the new sales training and coaching
• Developed specialized sales coaching training for managers to diagnose and close gaps on the performance levers
• Communicated clear expectations and developed accountability systems
• Established regular performance management practices
• Full Sales Management Operating System (smOS) implementation?

MID-MARKET, PRIVATE, MANUFACTURER (Engineered Solutions)

Result: Improved average profitability per sales rep by 11% in only 4 months.?

Approach:?

• Prioritized gap closing for blocks
• Training on strategic account management practices
• Setting clear expectations
• Training on sales negotiation techniques
• Changes in discounting policies

SMB SaaS, PRIVATE, CONVENTION MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Result: Increased sales per rep by 47% in 9 months.?

Approach:

• Prioritized gap closing for blocks
• Changes in territory management
• Prospecting approach
• Consultative selling skills
• Sales coaching and performance management

And that's just a sampling. If you're considering starting an enablement function or taking your sales enablement approach to the next level in 2023 (while saving with our Black Friday launch offer), make sure to stop by the Building Blocks of Sales Enablement course website.

That's it for this week! Did you learn something new reading this newsletter? If you did, or if it just made you think (and maybe chuckle from time to time - bonus points if you snorted), consider sharing it with your favorite enablement colleague, subscribing right here on LinkedIn, and checking out the upcoming?Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Course.

Until next time, stay the course, and?#MakeAnImpactWithEnablement!