Understanding the Sales Force

Our five-year old son, a frequent subject on this Blog, has two girlfriends.  This is one area in which he does not take after his dad!  While he loves being with both of them, Mary drives him nuts while Sally simply causes him to float on air.  He isn’t really aware of how each girl impacts his behavior after he being with her, but we sure are!  He can be moody after being with Mary while he tends to behave like an angel after spending time with Sally.

If you follow baseball you probably heard that Curt Schilling’s new contract for next year includes $2 million for meeting weight incentives.  For $2 million even I could be motivated to lose 20 pounds! And therein lies the deeper message.

While change is certain, many companies still attempt to sell and manage their sales forces the way they did just ten years ago.  That’s so 20th century.  What are you modifying so that your company can take advantage of, rather than resist the changes that are taking place almost daily?

Based on what I’ve seen from evaluating 8000 sales organizations and 300,000 salespeople, your salespeople are probably no better or worse than those at the 8000 other companies.  However, what would happen if they were more prepared?  What would happen if they prepared for every possible scenario?  What would happen if they practiced every day, like the Red Sox?

Salespeople may be like children, but in training they’re more like bagels in an oven.

Using the OMG Sales Candidate Assessments in your sales recruiting process is remarkable in that you’ll almost always see the findings on the assessment come to life if you handle the phone interview and live interviews the way we teach them.

Lesson – you can’t skip any steps in the recruiting process.  When the assessment says “Not Recommended” you must consider that to be a flat-out No.  When the assessment says, “Recommended”, they must still ace both the phone interview and your face to face interviews or you can’t hire them!