All articles written by John Howard, Ph.D., except where noted.

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How to Blend Science with the Art of Sales Excellence
From Jim Sirbasku’s Desk

You are bursting with pride at your most recent hire in the sales department. You lured the guy with a high sales quota from his job at Giant Company to work with your small, entrepreneurial startup and told him you wanted him to work the same magic for you that he worked there. You believe he can do it or you wouldn’t have gone after him. He believes he can do it or he wouldn’t have left his job there to come to work for you.

He arrives wearing his best suit and carrying his updated Rolodex. You put him in a great spot and wait for superior sales figures. And wait. And wait some more. The sales figures you expected never materialize, even though he’s always on the phone and seems to be rattling lots of doorknobs.

You try to analyze the situation and can’t put your finger on the problem. The gears just never seem to mesh. He’s always out of step with your expectations and never quite reaches the level of performance you see in your sales leaders. Or he reached a certain level and never went beyond that. Now he is marching in place.

Such disastrous hiring doesn’t have to happen, yet it often does. Why?

It’s linked to a belief that excellent salespeople are born, not made, and that sales success in one place easily translates to sales success anywhere. These beliefs ignore the fact that a great part of the top salesperson’s success at his previous company was linked to that company’s culture. Oh yes, a previously successful salesperson can be successful in your company too. But success in your company will depend on you redefining his role, training him well, and both of you thinking about selling for your company in a different way. In short, you can’t import his previous success without key changes.

Prior sales success is often the sole criterion that hiring managers look at when considering a candidate for this crucial position. After all, that star by the quota line is a quantitative measurement. You don’t get to count the notches in the belt of most other employees. So why is a previous track record a bad thing to look at?

It’s not, unless it’s the only thing you are looking at. Don’t let your search end there. Look within as much as you do without. Study your own company and customers, and think about what you want sales excellence to look like. Only when you have discerned what your company’s culture requires can you begin to develop a profile for what your top salespersons should look like.

Doing this is not terribly hard if you are willing to look at people in your company who are already tops in sales and still growing, achieving ever-higher quotas and building on their successes. They will provide you with the standards you need to hire future top salespeople.

Elsewhere in this newsletter and in magazines, books and online, you can discover the attributes of top salespeople. I won’t repeat them here. What I will impart is this: Failures at sales are mostly due to a person’s underdeveloped skills and to selling the wrong thing. You can put someone with good skills in a nice suit and give her lots of contacts, and she still won’t be able to sell if she doesn’t have the right attitude, vision, skills and training that you provide.

Also consider that good salespeople are not necessarily born. Some make it look so easy that it seems like native ability, but just like any job done well, a talent for selling takes training, practice and commitment. Yes, there’s an art to attaining superior sales, but art is not magic. If you combine the right characteristics that assessments can help you discern with the right training, hiring top salespeople is a science that enhances the art.

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BOOK REVIEW: Get Into Your Buyer’s Head

In the nicest possible way, author Jerry Acuff tells readers of his new book: “Get over yourself. It’s not all about you.” His powerful message for salespeople everywhere is that to achieve sales greatness, they need to get into their buyers’ heads and determine what he or she wants. Hence the title of his book: STOP ACTING LIKE A SELLER AND START THINKING LIKE A BUYER.

Acuff, who has been selling and writing about selling for years, maintains that people love to buy but don’t necessarily like being sold. In the early pages of his book he encourages the salesperson to adopt a new mindset about selling, then merge it with a philosophy of relationship-building and a good sales process. The result will be great sales, Acuff maintains.

He spices his lessons with vivid anecdotes that put the reader in the buyer’s shoes: The woman from Dallas who, on vacation, walked into an artist’s new gallery in Santa Fe, only to be badgered by a salesperson to buy what she wanted to sell; a friend who purchased a different computer than he intended to because the seller took the time to find out how he was using his computer; and Acuff himself with a colorful tale of sitting in a BMW in the dealer showroom and trying to figure out why the model cost $20,000 more than the Infiniti he was considering. A thoughtful salesman helped Acuff decide what he really wanted by determining how Acuff viewed the driving process.

What makes the book easy to read is Acuff’s experience and life lessons detailing what selling means to him. Years ago, after listening to a tape series, he decided that selling was teaching first, then finding out what people want and helping them to get it. He also developed his own five rules of buying:

1. You will sell more if you think like a buyer rather than act like a seller (he gives this one away in his book title.)

2. The quality of your business is directly linked to the desire of your prospective customer to want to have a conversation with you.

3. The size of your business is linked to your ability to ask a customer questions that engender thinking.

4. High-pressure environments tend to create little exchange, which results in lack of meaningful dialogue. Low-press environments tend to create greater exchange and customer receptivity.

His rules add up to a paradox, Acuff says: The less you care about the sale, the more you sell. Because when you care about the buyer, you think like the buyer thinks.

Acuff is the founder and CEO of Delta Point Inc., a consultancy in Scottsdale, Ariz., and a veteran speaker and consultant on the issues of sales excellence, change leadership, and building customer-focused organizations. He is also the author of THE RELATIONSHIP EDGE IN BUSINESS, which follows his theme stressing the importance of building meaningful customer relationships.

ABOUT THE BOOK
STOP ACTING LIKE A SELLER AND START THINKING
LIKE A BUYER: Improve Sales Effectiveness by Helping Customers Buy
Authors: Jerry Acuff with Wally Wood
272 pages
ISBN 978-0-470-06834-2
Publisher: Wiley
272 pages

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CASE STUDY: Identifying sales leaders with Profiles Sales Indicator™

A top salesperson at any company is pretty easy to spot by her healthy sales earnings. Less easy to identify is the great candidate for your particular sales opening. Even if she demonstrates a successful record at her current company, does this mean she will be just as productive in your organization? Not necessarily; organizations can differ significantly in size, mission, and products sold.

One staffing organization located in the Midwest wanted to enhance sales productivity. It found a customized solution using the Profiles Sales Indicator™.

Method
First, the organization looked at the sales totals of 13 recruiters. Using these totals, the company classified six of the 13 as top performers, with average sales earnings of $107,011. It classified seven of the 13 as bottom performers, with average sales earnings of $40,977.

Then, using this sample of recruiters and the Profiles Sales Indicator™, the employer developed a Job Match Pattern describing the qualities of the existing top performers for the recruiter position.

The 13 recruiters were then matched to this pattern. A Job Match Percent of 79 best identified the top performing employees. The employer selected this as a benchmark, meaning that 79 percent or higher should identify a top performer.

Of the 13 recruiters, six obtained a Job Match Percentage of 79 percent or greater.

Results
A detailed examination revealed that the average sales generated by recruiters in line with the Job Match Pattern at 79 percent or higher was $97,730. Meanwhile, those who did not match the pattern at 79 percent showed averages sales of $48,932.14, a difference of almost $50,000.

The Profiles Sales Indicator™ helped this staffing organization successfully identify 83 percent of its recruiters as top performers. The employer is positioned to better select employees that are likely to succeed, earning more now and in the future. The company now uses this pattern as the benchmark to predict recruiter performance.

10 Steps to Keeping Your Top-Performing Sellers

1. Make sure they fit the job before you hire them. Don’t just hire a warm body to fill an open position.

2. Feed their confidence by encouraging them to take ownership and rely on their own decisionmaking skills; empower them to help their clients without having to clear every decision.

3. Coach them on the power of persistence; suggest they follow up phone calls with emails and meetings with thank-you notes. This helps keep the salesperson and the company’s name in front of the client.

4. Educate them on your organization’s mission and values as well as the products or services they sell. This will help them believe in what the company stands for, as well as what they are selling.

5. Define specifically what kind of performance the company wants and how you will measure that Five of the six, or 83 percent, were top performers. Additionally, five of the six registered above the 79 percent benchmark. One of the seven bottom performers (14 percent) achieved the same mark.

6. Know what’s most important to them on the job and meet their needs. Provide them with the resources they need to do their job well: reliable phones and fax machines, transportation, assistants to help with paperwork.

7. Ask them to help you recruit their talented colleagues who would be a good fit with your organization.

8. Promote them only if they demonstrate the desire and the ability to do the new job. Doing well in one area does not mean a top performer will do just as well in the new position. He or she may not want to move up. If not, offer new training that will help the employee grow in his current position.

9. Be open to new ideas and products. Top performers often see a way to do their job better.

10. Encourage honesty and integrity; don’t ask a top performer to do something you would not do.

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STRATEGIES FOR WINNING: World Class Salespeople*

Spotting the 20% who Sell the 80%
Who would have predicted that Vilfredo Pareto’s famous 80-20 rule, formulated more than 100 years ago, would still apply to sales organizations today?

Research consistently demonstrates that more than half of those in professional sales lack the basic attributes required for success in this difficult profession – attributes that world-class salespeople possess as natural gifts or develop through training or single-minded focus. Of the remaining half, half of these have the potential for success in some form of sales, but are currently selling the wrong product or service. That leaves about 25 percent to sell about 80 percent of the world’s products and services.

Enlightening, isn’t it?

That’s why it’s important for you to have a keen understanding of the attributes of world-class salespeople. If you can recognize them, you can hire more of them! You can also tell when salespeople on your team need training and support, and you’ll have a good idea of what they need.

Measure your salespeople by this list of the ten attributes shared by world-class salespeople:

1. Irrepressibly Positive Attitude
All of their glasses are half-full and every cloud they encounter has a silver lining. Knock them down nine times and they stand up the tenth. Without this iron optimism, a life in sales is a stressful and daunting existence. Do your sales heroes live in a partly cloudy or partly sunny world?

2. Understand That Sales is a Numbers Game
They don’t lose their cool when a call goes badly, a deal goes south, or a first contact ends in refusal – they simply focus more carefully on the next call. They know their hit rate from past experience. They know how often they’ll have to take No! on the chin to get to one Yes! Do your salespeople know the value of their calls?

3. Live to Prospect
The world-class salespeople are prospecting all of the time – especially when things are going well. They know that sales success is directly dependent upon continually filling their pipelines with well-qualified prospects. Prospecting is their obsession. They never stop. Is prospecting 24/7/365 in your organization?

4. Totally Sales-Driven
These people live for the chase that results in a closed deal; they are internally motivated to go to whatever lengths they must to win the business. They seem to have unceasing energy. Once they decide to act, nothing slows or stops them until they have succeeded. Are your salespeople in top gear?

5. Competitive
They don’t like second, and they are not good losers. Sure, they know they must affect a “good-loser” performance from time to time for social reasons. But deep down, they need to win, and losses just stiffen their resolve. They can’t be kept in second place for long. Is your team too good at losing?

6. Obsessed with the ‘Next Step’
Everything they do is about getting to the “next step” – about getting the next level of commitment to bring the customer ever closer to the level of trust and confidence needed for a ‘Yes!’ World-class salespeople think solely in terms of specifics like where, when, how, and how much. Concepts like sometime, in the future, later, whenever, are simply not in their vocabularies. The most successful salespeople at Profiles know that their success is inevitable, but they still drive to “accelerate the inevitable.” Are your salespeople driving their case forward at least one step with every customer or prospect contact?

7. Know That They and Their Products are World-Class
Quiet confidence oozes out of top salespeople, and unbridled enthusiasm for the company, their products and services gushes from them at every meeting. No one is left untouched by the passion they pull upon when they talk about themselves, their companies, or their products and services. They evangelize. Have your people been to the top of the mountain?

8. Qualify Hard Before Investing Time and Energy
Time is too precious to waste on people who don’t need what they provide. They understand their products and services inside out, understand the needs they address, understand why their offerings are so much better than those of their competitors, and know enough about their prospective customers to find themselves rarely in front of someone who is not a genuine prospective customer. Do your salespeople look before they leap?

9. Expect to Hear ‘No!’
Once they know they are in front of the right people, these champions are confident that they considered every possible ‘No!’ situation that might arise, and they understand how to address these objections in a way to build the confidence and trust of their prospective customers.

Are your front people always ready to handle key objections?

10. Sell Through Customer Knowledge
Ask customers of world-class salespeople what sets them apart and they’ll tell you, “They understand us.” These people never stop trying to find out more information about their customer and his needs. They know that the only way they can deliver sales is through partnership and problem-solving.

How much do your salespeople know about their customers and prospects?

When you hire salespeople, you must look for these attributes. While this sounds simple, how do you objectively measure these attributes?

Effectively Spot the 20 Percent
That’s a challenge we faced in building our 800- strong worldwide sales force at Profiles, and we met it head on with the development of the Profiles Sales Indicator (PSI)™. The PSI™ analyzes your existing salespeople to produce a profile of what it takes to be a successful salesperson in your organization. Using your prospective salesperson’s responses to a 15-20 minute online survey, the PSI™ objectively analyzes the person for these attributes:

• Competitiveness
• Self-reliance
• Persistence
• Energy
• Sales Drive

By comparing these results with the profile of your most successful salespeople, the PSI™ can predict on-the-job performance in these critical sales disciplines:

• Prospecting
• Closing Sales
• Call Reluctance
• Self-starting
• Teamwork
• Building and Maintaining Relationships
• Compensation Preference

All seven disciplines are essential to the success of the topperforming 20 percent of salespeople responsible for 80 percent of all sales.

The PSI’s clear, readable reports can be used for selecting salespeople as well as for effective management and training of existing salespeople to help them reach the performance levels of your top performers. The PSI™ worked so well for Profiles that we’re certain it will work well for your organization, too. You can read more about it on the web at: www.profilesinternational.com

Take action today to move all of your team into the 20 percent zone, and watch your sales soar.

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission.

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PRODUCT FOCUS: PSI™, PXTS™: Turning the 80-20 Rule on its Ear

Any sales leader weary of witnessing the old 80-20 rule at work – 20 percent of the salespeople are nabbing 80 percent of the sales – can put a stop to that fatigue with two key assessments. Think of them as a gentle one-two punch that doesn’t knock anyone down or out but effectively changes the hiring/ training/coaching landscape.

Profiles Sales Indicator™
First, let’s look at the Profiles Sales Indicator™. This assessment measures the essential qualities of a salesperson, including competitiveness (how persuasive, confident and assertive is she?); selfreliance (does he work independently?); persistence (is she tough when necessary?); energy (can he maintain the company’s pace with zest and enthusiasm?); and sales drive (can she envision success?).

Sales managers often cannot say what makes the company stars shine. They know only that these stars do their jobs superbly and drive the company’s success. They may wish they had 10 more just like them. The PSI™ can help find those successful job candidates by matching them to the company’s star-studded standard. How? With its customized job pattern.

What companies receive in the PSI™ report is a prediction of a job candidate’s performance in the essential areas of prospecting, closing sales, call reluctance, self-starting ability, teamwork, building and keeping up with relationships, and compensation preferences. These predictions can help attack that 80-20 rule at the front end of the hiring process.

The PSI™ takes about 20 minutes to complete and offers clear, no-nonsense reports. It’s also made to specifications, customized by company, sales position, department, manager, geography or any combination of these factors. Simply put, the PSI™ takes the guesswork out of hiring star salespeople.

ProfileXTSales™
Next let’s examine the special qualities of the ProfileXTSales™ assessment. Salespeople work in an increasingly competitive pressure cooker. It’s no wonder that 38 percent of salespeople say they plan to leave their jobs within two years (2006 Sales Performance Study, Miller Heiman). Companies clearly need an advantage in recruiting, hiring and retaining top performers. The PXTS™ puts sales leaders in prime position through its identification, development and retention capabilities.

This assessment gives key information on a person’s thinking style, behavioral characteristics and occupational interests. Its use extends beyond the job candidate to current employees, predicting which ones should play a role in strategic succession planning.

Beyond recruitment, the assessment is a carefully honed tool to help sales executives shape sales teams with training that allows them to not just meet their goals, but surpass them. Managers use PXTS™ for placement, training program selection, promotion and sales coaching.

In the ideal world, all salespeople are enthusiastic, highly trained and perfectly suited to their jobs, where they reap daily success. Companies see little to no turnover in the sales force, and are able to bring out new products regularly to meet customer needs. In this perfect scenario, the 80-20 rule has evaporated.

That world is still a dream, but the PSI™ and PXTS™ are the very real tools that will help sales leaders near the ideal and overcome the wearisome rule of a few superstars reaping all of the success.

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SUCCESS STORY: The Corban Group Finds Right Fit with PXTSales™

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bill Peterson, vice president of executive search firm The Corban Group, details the successes his company has seen with PXTSales.

Q. Why did The Corban Group begin using ProfileXTSales™?
A. We wanted to give our clients additional insight into the candidates we present to them. Because we are an executive search firm and a partner in the hiring process, we want to provide objective information. We don’t sell candidates to our clients. We provide them with a full picture of the candidates we find and screen on their behalf. Corban has a dedicated sales practice and niche specialization in sales and sales leadership. Sales and growing revenue are crucial for companies, and making the right hiring decisions is critical. The PXTSales™ assessment helps validate that we’ve found the right person. It also provides hiring managers the added confidence to make a hiring decision.

Q. What is the major benefit your company sees from this assessment?
A. The method we use to measure our success is the number of repeat clients that we have, or client retention. In the three years that we have been using Profiles’ assessments, we have dramatically improved our client retention. That’s directly related to the quality of hires we’ve made for our companies and the quality of our process.

Q. Have you found other ways to use the PXTSales™?
A. We want to help our clients retain good people, so after the company makes a hiring decision, we provide the PXTSales™ coaching report to the hiring manager. We then help the manager by reviewing the opportunities for coaching and mentoring. This helps our clients improve sales performance and retention.

Q. What kind of flexibility has Internet use of the tools given you?
A. We are located in Atlanta but recruit nationwide. The functionality of the technology allows a candidate to take the assessment at his/her own convenience in the comfort of home. We receive results immediately and have access to several forms of data.

Q. Does The Corban Group use other Profiles assessments?
A. We also use the ProfileXT™. We use it internally, but we also use it with our clients to inject objective information into the hiring process for senior finance and operations leadership. The PXT™ gives us additional insight into the candidate, and it helps our clients explore the right areas in the interview.

Q. When did The Corban Group begin using Profiles assessments?
A. We are celebrating our 10-year anniversary and began using Profiles three years ago. The PXT™ and PXTSales™ have been a great resource for Corban and improved our service level to our clients.

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