Understanding the Sales Force

If your company is about to begin a sales development initiative, do you know the factors that will determine its eventual success or failure?  There are many and ultimately, like most systems and processes, they are only as good as the weakest link.

I just finished a great novel called Law of Nines. A traveler from another world visits Earth in hopes of saving her own world. They have no technology where she comes from but they do have magic. Alex, the main character, just can’t wrap his hands around the magic. Jax, the alien, tries to help. She said, “that little black thing you talk to where messages appear – in our world, that would be magic but we would do it without the black thing. That box that brings you up and down in a building – to me that’s magic. Those enclosed carriages without horses to make them travel? Magic.”

We read about yet more school shootings, abductions, madmen dictators’ plans to rule the world, and any of the other recurring events that must be the work of pure evil. Do you get to the point where you say to yourself, “The world is going crazy!”? I do. I also think the sales world is going a bit crazy too.

When a room full of sales leaders arrive for two days of intensive training, there are many things that can and do happen. Here are ten of them:

Before we discuss how to improve sales training, a quick promo for the latest and greatest taking place over at the ever-improving Top Sales World. The June issue of Top Sales Magazine has been published and you can download it here.

Yesterday, I met with a long-time client who, in his previous company, used OMG’s Assessments to identify what needed to change in order to double revenue from $30 million to $60 million. In his new company, which is already about 12x that size, he wants to double revenue again. He said, “I just wasted two years with the _____ Assessment.” The assessment to which he referred was a personality assessment marketed as a sales assessment. It could have referred to any personality or behavioral-styles assessment.

So you have your sales force evaluated and in addition to learning why you are getting the results you are getting, and what you can do to significantly improve those results, you are surprised by some of the individual findings on some of your salespeople. One of the findings that generates the most push-back is Lack of Commitment to sales success.

A recent article in Columbus Business First discussed background checks and use of personality tests. The most important line in the article read, “Personality often is the best insight into whether a person is a good cultural fit for a specific company.”

This kind of story doesn’t happen every day.

One of Objective Management Group’s (OMG) most successful partners had an opportunity to work with young business leaders that had never sold. They were assessed with OMG’s tools, and assembled into 5 teams, all selling the exact same product. They had to go door-to-door, sell an overpriced luxury item, in the same market, over a 3-day period.