Most of your sales team suck at their job.

If your sales team runs true to form, about 20-30% of them produce about 70-80% of the revenue.

It’s one of the things that we tend to take for granted. We know that if they don’t perform in a given timeframe, we can present them with the hard evidence and march in the next contender.

I sometimes smile when other professions talk about negotiating their KPI’s. It doesn’t get much cleaner than the sales KPI.

Some companies have a standard practice of “releasing” the lowest 10% of performers knowing that, over time, they will end up with the best “over” performers. Why over performers? Eventually all of them will be exceeding target which means that even though you have let go 10% of your sales team who over achieved, the remaining 90% are performing so well that you hardly feel it. And the practice acts as a prod to the rest of the team.

There is another way of getting 90% of your team over achieving their targets.

You need to train them and coach them to perform at their full potential. Sounds simple, but the problem is that all of us have different skills and aptitudes. Good HR departments started using psychometric testing decades ago. However, it is hard to apply these to a sales profile.

Over recent years a number of sales ability specific tests have been developed that assess a sales person specifically for the job, or role you wanted them to do.

One of the tests is called Fit-4 from www.salesassessment.com

Why is hiring sales people such a risky and expensive business, when it doesn’t need to be.

I interviewed a candidate for a sales manager role this week. When I asked her to describe an experience of having to sack a sales person for non performance she gave me the following story….

The CEO wanted to establish an operation in Sydney. The organisation provides professional training to engineering staff. The decision was made by the CEO to establish an office, hire 3 trainers, and hired a sales person that had a good resume and interviewed well.

Five months later, after giving the sales person extensive induction training and then additional hands on support they let him go. He was just not performing, and yet during the hiring process, which was rigorous, our candidate seemed perfect for the role.

Total direct cost of this exercise was $750,000. This included the cost of the office lease, the salaries of the three trainers and the salary of the sale person; other additional costs that could have been included are the cost of recruitment or the cost of lost opportunities. This was a very expensive exercise as a result of failing to hire a top performer in just one role.

If you want to know if the sales person can do the job, I can help you from making the same very expensive mistake.

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