What will your legacy be?
Your proverbial "fork in the road" is immediately ahead.
Will your legacy be one of zealous guarding the status quo or one of a never-ending quest to build the best revenue-producing, highly-refined sales engine history has ever known?
The easy way is rarely the best way.
Your legacy is completely in your hands.
Human bias screws up quality sales hiring.
Human bias is your single worst enemy in consistently-hiring the best salespeople. Studies clearly demonstrate that once a desirable characteristic or two are identified during the typical job interview, all "objectivity bets" are off.
Studies clear show that it is extremely unlikely that you or that sales manager with 25 years of uncanny sales hiring experience is going to consistently identify top salespeople through the interview process alone.
There is only one way to consistently counter human bias in sales hiring and that is to use a systematic approach that incorporates the three following essential components:
- Sales hiring scorecard
- Structured interview and references
- Valid sales personality test.
Research clearly demonstrates the value of a valid assessment in the hiring process.
If you are unaware or are still having difficulty understanding the value a valid sales personality test can add to your sales hiring process, I suggest you read "The Validity And Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings" by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter.
Yes, you are going to want to read the following paragraph two or three times. It's that significant.
On the basis of meta-analytic findings, Schmidt and Hunter's research presented the validity of 19 selection procedures for predicting job and training performance and the validity of paired combinations of general mental ability (GMA) and the 18 other selection procedures. Overall, the three combinations with the highest multivariate validity and utility for job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (mean validity of .63), GMA plus an integrity test (mean validity of .65), and GMA plus a structured interview (mean validity of .63). A perfect validity which is unrealistic is 1.0.
A coin toss is .50.
Hunter and Schmidt also identified that structured interviews had a mean validity of .51 and unstructured interviews had a mean validity of .38.
For consistent sales hiring outcomes, think Moneyball.
If you constantly seek ways to improve your business model, you will sooner-or-later seek to implement a Moneyball strategy. If you are never satisfied with the status quo, you must see the movie, Moneyball. If you have already seen it, consider watching it again.
The kind of thinking illustrated in Moneyball can profoundly impact the future of your company and career.
The purpose of implementing your own Moneyball sales hiring program is to OBJECTIVELY identify specific data patterns that create sustained increases in sales productivity. Through an interative process good and bad data patterns can be analyzed. Continue the good patterns, stop the bad, measure and then repeat the process.
The associated book Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis and published in 2003. Moneyball is a story about Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics focus on an analytical, evidence-based sabermetric approach to building a winning baseball team. Following is a powerful Moneyball scene about breaking biases. As you watch it, think about your sales team, how you hire salespeople, and the potential biases that are likely getting in the way of your sales success.
The good news is you can create your own Moneyball sales hiring program. You only need a couple of data streams to get started.
The key to improving your sales hiring program is data analysis.
Put simply. If you are not using data analysis to review and improve the kind of talent you are hiring, it's not "Moneyball". A sales hiring program backed by data analysis identifies improvement opportunities. Combine data analysis with your sales hiring program and you are on your way to developing your own Moneyball sales hiring program.
As complicated as the words "data analysis" may sound, it does not have to be. You do not need to be a serious mathematics wizard to begin your data analysis. If you need one down the road, that can always be outsourced. For now, you simply need a strong desire to win, the ability to use a spreadsheet and some data points. Your data analysis can be as simple as graphing two data sets to identify patterns from which to make incremental improvements.
We have developed an E-book that you will want to download to help accelerate your Moneyball endeavor.
