Think of your best salesperson, the one who sets the bar for the others to follow. How certain are you that this person is really the best you could get, and not just somebody who stands out because they’re a “C” player who just looks great on a team of “D” performers. Sounds impossible, right? I would agree… except I see it all the time.
In lots of sales departments around the world, and in more companies and industries than you’d think, are “C” salespeople impersonating top performers.
How do they get away with this trick? By working for owners and sales managers who have never correctly benchmarked the position – men and women who never hired stronger salespeople because they didn’t know what kind of people and performance they could have been getting all along. But know it or not, you can bet they’re paying for what they don’t know every day.
Here’s why: A true sales superstar will open two, three, or even five times as many accounts as an average salesperson will. Not only that, but also the orders they bring in will typically be
higher grossing, and the clients will remain with the company for a much greater period of time. But even assuming that they only open up twice as many accounts, consider the difference in value that hiring one of them represents. Let’s say you run a company with a staff of 10 salespeople, and your best producer brings in two new accounts worth $50,000 every month. That works out to $1.2 million every single year.
That might be good for your company, but if they are a “C” salesperson masquerading as an “A-list” player, then your poor hiring decision is costing you another $1.2 million a year – money that you’ll never even notice is slipping out from under you because it doesn’t show up on the balance sheet.
Worse yet, your nine other salespeople probably aren’t even performing to that standard, effectively crippling your business without any further indication.
And really, that’s the problem: that poor sales performance isn’t always easy to spot, and its effects are nearly impossible to quantify. Business owners and sales managers don’t always hire correctly, and when they don’t, there isn’t a clear way to spot their mistake if they haven’t brought in superstars in the past. So how can you tell if you’re making this mistake, or stop duplicating it if you already have?
The answer in both cases is to properly assess your current sales team – and certainly anyone you’re seriously considering hiring – before it’s too late. Modern science has shown that certain individuals, because of their selling styles, attributes, and motivations, are many times more likely to succeed in sales than others.
Like any tool or guide, assessments aren’t completely foolproof, but history has shown them to be incredibly accurate… especially when compared to the impressions you can get from interviewing a candidate without any sort of objective backup.
If you aren’t currently assessing salespeople within your company, I can almost guarantee it’s costing you a lot of money – and most likely, money that you never even knew was missing.
With that in mind, I invite you to get in touch with me today 704-847-7390 to find out what kind of team you have, how you should really assess for top talent, and which qualities and traits you need for the people finding new business in your specific industry.
“C” and “D” level salespeople cost companies enormous amounts of money in lost prospects, missed orders, and damage to any sales territory. The only way you can make the problem even worse is by pretending that they’re “A” performers in the first place.
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