Connecting HR Leadership to the Bottom Line
The Reality Check Checklist:
Remembering Key Indicators
Of Organizational Health in
"Sales-Centric" Organizations
To summarize the main points of the preceding exercise, human resource officers can have a large impact on the bottom line by helping
their companies to study the following:
- What is the overall sales mentality of the organization?
- What are the organization's values with regard to sales?
- What is the level of internal and external customer relationships
and are there areas of dissatisfaction with regard to service, both internally and externally?
- What is the marketing department's relationship with sales?
- What is sales' view of the marketing department?
- What is the R&D department's view of sales?
- Is there a feedback loop between sales and R&D?
- What is sales' view of the technical and research sides of the
business?
- What is the level of efficiency and dependability of Operations;
i.e., is this department operating to make sales processes more
efficient?
In addition to using 360s and other surveys as forensic tools to get to the critical issues at hand, human resources officers and their teams can do a great service for their companies by conducting in depth interviews. Interviews with members of sales teams and other departments can help net out success barriers and also establish the positive aspects of relationships that work well for them currently.
Additional Considerations:
The Role of Character in Sales Performance
Another area that should be of enormous interest to human resource officers is the relationship between character and performance. The most solid research on character and performance has focused on the performance of sales people. This is one area we continue to focus heavily on in terms of our own research efforts at Headway, since we have built elaborate recruiting models to provide more accurate selection, sourcing and placement of sales people. Research shows that a great sales person at company X will not necessarily be a great sales person at company Y if the cultural fit is not right, if values do not line up, and if the job requires behavioral characteristics or character traits that the sales person does not have.
Following is a brief outline of how we have applied a high-impact character screening model as key strategy for selecting sales people. This methodology promises to have enormous implications for selection and recruiting in other professions as well.
Why the Emphasis on Character
Is Critical
Since a number of leading studies have shown that character traits such as optimism, energy, follow-through, serious-mindedness and thoughtfulness are the actual benchmarks of top-grossing sales professionals, Headway takes a meticulous two-pronged approach to benchmarking and recruiting sales professionals.
1. Assessment of the Job
In the first part of this phase we conduct interviews with the client to assess strengths and weaknesses of the current sales force and to draw a meticulous portrait of the type of character traits, skills, qualifications and experiences that are required in order to meet the company's goals.
Through this process, we will help the client to first establish a competency analysis of the specific traits and skills that are required for a specific sales job.
2. Assessment of Candidates
Once the assessment of the job is accomplished, we then use a wide range of tools including assessment tests, live interviews, and writing exercises (as needed) to precisely evaluate the full range of character traits, behavioral traits, personality characteristics, communication skills, data analysis skills, critical thinking skills, knowledge, qualifications and experiences that each candidate brings to the table.
Additional Background
The first phase of this process-the job assessment process-is critical.
A study done by assessment expert Jeff West of VantagePoint, Inc. at a Fortune 500 company with more than 5,000 sales people, found that a large number of account executives were actually mismatched for their jobs and that high stress and lower than expected performances were the results.
In brief, the study showed that the needs of the account manager role in that corporation had evolved into a job where high consultative selling skills, patience, analytical reasoning and a "high touch-high listening" sales style was required. Interestingly, many of the account executives that had been recently hired before the study had been hired on an older model emphasizing aggression at the expense of analysis in the sales process. This led to the hiring of many highly aggressive sales people who lacked the natural predisposition and character traits of a consultative seller. This mismatch was discovered to be one of the key reasons for underperformance in the sales force.
Earnings Increase When There Is a Character Fit-
Results from the Insurance Industry
A study done at a major insurance company showed a whopping difference in sales production between people who scored in the high range of a sales-specific personality test that emphasized character traits and those who scored in the low to mediocre range.
High scorers on the SalesMax test developed by Bigby, Havis & Associates reported an average production of $7,123,043 a year, while those in the mediocre range averaged $3,224,114 a year, and those in the low range averaged only $2,755,492 a year. The most interesting part of the SalesMax study is this: research supporting the validation of the test did not find a correlation between sales earnings and sales knowledge or skill. What did correlate robustly, however, were personality traits such as resilience, follow-through and optimism, which are also commonly referred to as character traits because they are bedrock traits that do not change over time.
As noted above, we believe that our research and the research of others has only identified the tip of iceberg, so to speak, insofar as the relevance of character is concerned.
We believe that future studies will show a widespread connection between character and competence in many occupations.
Implications for
The Industry Overall
One of the most customer-centered services we provide occurs at the individual level, and this is the level where we try to help our candidates build their own brand.
Building your own brand as an individual is a time-consuming but vital process that involves looking well beyond the resume and exploring a full range of high-tech tools and processes that will enable an individual to make the best possible presentation to the world. Some of the tools we have developed along these lines include PowerPoint Presentations as part of an individual's Personal Marketing Kit© and other high tech tools that go far beyond cover letters and resumes.
All of these tools that help the individual build their own brand, become immediately important to any company that is trying to build its own brand and is looking for team members who share the same brand quality in terms of aspiration, vision, determination and passion.
The last word, passion, may in fact be one of the most important but under-researched predictors of success in every sector of need that presents itself to our profession.
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