Case History – Achieve Lowest Turnover in the Entire Sales Force

From time to time, I get pretty cool emails that make me want to write positive articles instead of negative ones.  Today, I got one from an OMG (Objective Management Group) Partner, who wanted to let me know what he learned from one of his clients at a company that you all know quite well (but whose name will be withheld).

He wrote, “They have the lowest turnover of all the departments.”

That’s good, right?  Maybe not.

The Question That Must be Asked

Why would an enterprise (that has standardized on OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment, had OMG customize it for every sales role in the company, and has terrific data from its first year of use) have one department with significantly lower turnover than all the others?

Could it be any of the following 10 Reasons?

1. Difficulty of the Role,
2. Capabilities of the Different Sales Managers,
3. Differences in the Various Selling Profiles,
4. Differences in the Criteria for a Recommendation on the Assessment,
5. Varying Interviewing Skills,
6. Varying Expectations,
7. Differences in Team/Department Cultures,
8. Demand for the Different Products/Services,
9. Varying Degrees of Competition Across Departments, and/or
10. Luck of the Draw.

In most companies, each of those possibilities are always in play.  However, in this particular company, it wasn’t any of them.

The Actual Reason

In reality, it was a very simple difference and you could say that this department was being really smart or that the other departments were being stupid.

OMG’s customized Sales Candidate Assessments could say that a candidate is recommended, not recommended or worthy of consideration.  They could also indicate that a candidate is recommended ideal or recommended perfect.  Each of these 5 possible recommendations is extremely accurate and predictive.

The department with the lowest turnover followed the recommendations, remained patient, and did not hire any candidates that were not recommended.  The other departments thought they knew better despite very strong statistical evidence to the contrary.  Our statistics AND THEIRS showed that 75% of the candidates who were not recommended, but hired anyway, failed within 6 months.  Why would anyone, anywhere go against a powerful statistic like that?  They’re Smarter-Than-Us-Professionals, I declare – or STUPID.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  You don’t have to be creative.  You don’t need magical powers.  And you don’t need to perfect your gut instinct.  Just use a tool that is proven to work consistently and reliably, and use it the way it was intended to be used.  And when it comes to sales selection, you’ll be in good shape.

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