Is your top revenue earner your best salesperson?
Jeffrey Bean, a Director of sales assessment company Sales Team Focus Ltd looks at how to answer this old chestnut.
Well it's obvious, isn't it? Your best sales person is the one with the best sales figures! Or is it? Well, let's think about it for a moment. When asked to identify their best salesperson, the short memories of most sales managers prompt them to refer you to the member of their team who had the best results last month. A few will refer you to the person closest to or furthest above their annual sales target. Fewer still will ask against what criteria you wish to evaluate the salesperson.
Consistent, high achievement over the long run is the acid test of good salesmanship. Yet, as sales-people are notoriously job'-mobile, few develop a solid track record of achievement. Despite this, many such 'experienced' salespeople are recruited, often from competitors, based purely on the results of an interview and possibly a personality test. Hardly surprisingly, many fail to live up to expectation. Even when their job application is supported by a track record of success in your industry, does this offer any guarantee he/she will replicate that performance in your own organisation?
To answer that critically important question, let us first consider what factors contribute to good sales performance. Assuming your product/service is of acceptable quality and competitively priced, differences in sales performance between individuals can be attributed to variations in territory size, the true potential of the territory, how actively it has been worked historically and a host of other demographic reasons. Other reasons include the number of existing customers in the territory, whether the individual is focused on existing accounts or new business and how effectively he/she is managed. Last but not least, we have the skill level of the salesperson.
It is universally recognised that it is easier to sell to an existing customer than secure an order from a new client (some say by a factor of 10). Even mediocre salespeople tend to.1 build a client base over time and the longer a salesperson has been on- board, the more customers they are likely to have, All too often, impressions of a salesperson's skill are based purely on his/her quantitative results (often measured in terms of revenue) without any reference to qualitative measures such as profit- ability, likelihood of repeat business or the ratio of new business to existing accounts, So is your top performer's frequent over-target performance due to his/her well refined selling skills or the fact that all the business he/she secures is more or less guaranteed and comes from the half dozen or so house accounts you've had for years?
Put your top performer (who has probably unwittingly evolved into a key account manager) into a new business situation and the result could be disaster. This often happens when a sales manager recruits his competitor's top salesperson.
The results of many top performers are built on sales to clients with whom a solid relationship has been established over time. Recruiting such an individual into your team where the emphasis is on new business generation almost certainly requires some dormant if not long forgotten skills such as prospecting and cold-calling to be revitalised, Whilst not impossible, does the individual retain the motivation to undertake this almost universally reviled task normally associated with the early days of a career in sales?
So, are sales results alone a fair measure of a salesperson's ability or skill level? If you are confident you can eliminate all the external and internal variances listed above and take a sample over a sufficiently long period, then yes. If not, you need another measure. In recognition of these problems, many sales managers are turning to the Sales Success Profile (SSP) from Sales Team Focus Ltd. Unlike almost all other sales assessment tests, SSP measures trainable selling skills, not aspects, of personality.
Taking only 40 minutes to complete, SSP is a computer-scored test comprising 50 'sales scenario' questions with multiple choice answers. The scenarios span 12 stages of the sales process including prospecting, overcoming objections, time management and closing. By measuring a salesperson’s knowledge of best practice at each stage, SSP providing an accurate and objective assessment of a salesperson's skill level in each area.
Used as a training needs analysis tool on existing staff and potential recruits alike, SSP helps sales managers get optimum value for money from limited training budgets by focusing attention to genuine rather than perceived areas of training need.
© Sales Team Focus Ltd
July 1997 |