Benchmarking Salespeople Sounds Great but Has Many Flaws

You want to hire better salespeople, don’t you?  And you’ve been told that if you use a sales assessment, you will be able to select better salespeople, right?  And if you have a strong HR background, you may believe that benchmarking is a good first step.  There are many uses for benchmarking in sales, and while the approach taken by most assessment companies helps them, it doesn’t really help you.

Let’s say that you’re speaking with a company that provides a personality assessment or a behavioral styles assessment.  The personality assessment can clearly help you with cultural fit and the behavioral styles assessment can certainly help with identifying the best ways to manage an individual.  But, neither assessment is predictive of sales success because their core competency is not sales and their assessment is adapted, not built, for sales.  In this case, adapted means that they change the names of the findings and the descriptions of those findings to sound more like sales findings.  But what they actually measure, and the questions your salespeople actually answer, have nothing to do with selling.

In an effort to combat the lack of sales specificity in their assessments, many of these companies offer to benchmark your top performers.  It sounds terrific – really – and they can always get you engaged by finding traits and styles common to your top performers.  But these benchmarks are flawed – for several reasons:

• What you consider a top performer in your organization may be very different from an actual top performer in the general sales population, so sometimes they are looking at the wrong people!
• They don’t look at your bottom performers, but know that your underachievers have some of the exact same traits and styles as your top performers.  These commonalities are the traits and styles that caused them to enter sales – not the traits and styles that cause them to succeed at sales!
• The personality and behavioral styles assessment companies are not experts at selling and don’t understand the nuances in marketplace, pricing, selling value, competition, verticals and variations in roles that cause different salespeople to have different results.

Consider Objective Management Group’s (OMG) approach.  Back in 1990, OMG developed the very first assessment specifically for sales.  OMG’s sales assessment is an executional sales assessment and scientifically shows not only if a sales candidate can sell, but whether or not they will sell and succeed – for your company, in a specific sales role, against your competition, at your price points, calling into your market, and from the challenges they’ll face.  It is not based on personality traits or behavioral styles, and we don’t need to run a benchmark in order to figure out what causes salespeople to be successful because we already know.  We have done this times!  And we customize every role configuration to marry our criteria for sales success at various levels of difficulty with a client’s requirements for the role.  However, companies that are used to running these benchmarks still ask for them and we take a completely different approach:

• We look at both groups – top performers AND bottom performers.
• We know that both the top and bottom groups will have some common findings, usually indicative of what the hiring managers were looking for, like motivated salespeople.
• We identify the differences between the top and bottom performers, not the commonalities of the top performers.  For example, members of both groups may have a particular finding as a strength, but only the top performers have a score in a certain range.  Or only the top performers have a particular finding as a strength and the bottom performers have it as a weakness.
• We can usually identify 10-15 findings that are unique to the top performers and, more importantly, predictive of sales success in their particular role at their company.
• We build a third layer of customization to identify candidates that will not only succeed, but perform at an elite level.

Benchmarking can be useful when it comes to training your salespeople.  If you have two regions that are performing similarly, selling the exact same products or services to the exact same types of customers, against the exact same competitors, you can benchmark the training.  Group 1 is your control group and receives no more help than they received previously.  Group 2 is the training group and they get the optimized sales process, their sales managers are trained to coach, and the salespeople are trained on both sales process and methodology.  At the end of the agreed upon time period, compare the before and after results of the two groups in the following areas:

• pipeline quantity and quality,
• conversion ratios,
• pipeline velocity or sales cycle length,
• opportunity size,
• time wasted with prospects who don’t buy,
• percentage of new accounts,
• growth of existing accounts,
• average margin,
• ratio of proposals per opportunity, and
• win rate.

Benchmarking can be quite useful, as long as it doesn’t cause you to look at the wrong data, send you down the wrong path, or make the wrong decisions.  When it comes to sales selection, make sure science is on your side.

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