When it comes to sales evaluation / hiring

A new scientific approach for sales scorecard – and what it could save on business managers

Business managers have an absolute unpleasant track record when it comes to evaluating sales talent. When you have the right sales resources, you see instant results and amazing things begin to happen. On the other hand, when you have a mediocre (or worse) salesperson on board, you shell out paycheck after paycheck with a difficulty of cutting your loss, while hoping you might make up your investment soon.

As the pool of good sales candidates fades, the selection process becomes more challenging, the margin of hiring error increases. Further the difficulty of evaluating newcomers throughout their set probation period scale up and the difficulty to take a decision (to fire or to keep who is not making his numbers) becomes another hell of a job.

Among the above situations lie many factors that make this evaluation difficult, but they all have one common cause, the lack of data that should be measured in order to take a decision upon.

Thus, to take a proactive approach rather than keep wishing for a  better availability of good sales candidates, we are here to describe a solution that could collect the required data and act as a preventive tool in the hiring process and as a reactive tool when evaluating newcomers and current salespeople in order to ease our successful decision process.

The Solution

Envisaging the importance and potential of such a solution, HEED set the required discipline to invest in the research and development of this project; thanks to one of our clients. Today, we are delighted to present a validated program, based on a scientific approach, that eliminates the margin of error and helps bring focus to the initiative.

Think of this program as a term of formulating a marriage. Its mission is to provide data that could be accurately measured in order to compare the candidate pedigree versus the desired profile. This tool aids to evaluate his/her capabilities in regards of the sales efforts required to complete the expected sales deals and targets.

This is what we call a sales scorecard, where each competency will be given a certain coefficient based on the sales efforts needed to accomplish certain sales steps within the sales process. Further this tool includes a methodology that will guide to acquire the required data to grade every competency accordingly.

What’s different in our approach

In various meta-analysis investigating the determinants of salesperson performance, well-established models of sales performance concluded that motivation, role perceptions, and aptitude are the major impact on sales performance, unlike what previous attempts focused on others mediators like Personal Characteristics (sales experience physical traits, and other technical skill level (product knowledge) which has indirect minimal impact on salesperson performance, especially that most of those traits could be easily developed.

Thus many previous attempts to build a reliable scorecard for sales people failed, as they were linking the competencies to the sales tasks but not to the sales on-ground efforts that require certain motivation, energy and aptitude.

We broke down all those traits into their simplest forms and competencies, Emotional Competence. Then we developed a methodology to evaluate those competencies, and most important we leveraged on our solid sales experience and our understanding to the sales on-ground efforts to link those competencies with the required sales efforts. We made sure to treat Motivation (energy fuel for salespeople) as the focal point of all the Emotional Intelligence dimensions.

How We Could Help

HEED comes in to aid in deploying this tool by :

  1. Defining appropriately the sales efforts required from every sales position according to your sales process in order to complete efficiently his job and reach his targets.

  2. Use our developed scorecard tool  to build coefficients for  those efforts based on a minimum and maximum points.

  3. Mapping Emotional Intelligence to those sales efforts required for the job.

Further our engagement includes building up all hypotheses needed to do the required observations. Such scientific analysis will draw a better picture and good insights for better planning and decision making.

As a boutique management sales consulting firm we leverage on our discipline to execute the set plans that link together people, plan, processes and systems.

If you are facing such challenges or any other uncertain sales challenges, and interested in optimizing your sales performance feel free to contact us or directly respond to mazen@logicshape.com.

Managing Partner
mazen@heed-mm.com
Founder of HEED, a sales management consulting firm focused on aiding companies to structure, transform or optimize their sales by integrating science into selling.

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