If you’ve been following this blog, you know that ESR pushes sales leaders (and sales training companies) on training and reinforcement around political and competitive selling.  In fact, I spoke about these aspects of sales training at ASTD earlier this week. That was an audience mostly of corporate learning and development professionals.

I’ve been a student of political and competitive selling for years, having been influenced by Jim Holden, LaVon Koerner, Rick Page, and the old Target Account Selling content (now The TAS Group).

Political wonk.

I became a political wonk back in 2000, consumed with the Bush/Gore election and, of course, the aftermath with hanging chads, etc.  Now I can’t get enough of it.  It really helps me understand ESR’s clients and once in a while, I’m in the position to assist in formulating the strategy behind large sales opportunities.  Now there’s some personal capital I bring to the table. (As you know I did that for a living for a number of years.)

I’ve been reading a lot about politics recently, getting myself tuned up again for the election season.  I’m now in the middle of the wonderful new book by Robert Caro, Passage of Power. It’s about Lyndon Johnson’s unexpected transition to the presidency in 1963.  Before that I read Peter Bergen’s Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad. Another amazing read, however more on strategy than politics. I’ve read a lot of other non-fiction books on politics as well.

Here’s my point:  Don’t miss this opportunity. If you can keep the emotion out of your analysis of what’s going on, you’ll learn a lot.

Should I put up a LinkedIn discussion group on this?

I’m thinking about putting up a LinkedIn discussion board on the political and competitive selling aspects of the 2012 presidential race.  No one has done that as of one minute ago.  Understand, it would not be a place to offer opinions on one candidate or another, but rather a place to discuss the political and competitive aspects of the battle for the White House.  It would take a fair amount of time on my part, but it could be fun.  Anyone interested?  Either send me an email or comment on this post confirming that you’ll contribute to the discussion at least three times if we go forward with this.

In the meantime, watch MSNBC and Fox.  Read the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. Pay attention and you’ll never look at a tough, competitive, politically-charged sales campaign the same way again.

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Although I was only in Denver for a day, I did get the opportunity to chat with representatives and senior executives from some leading sales performance provider organizations including Richardson, Miller Heiman, Shapiro Negotiations, TACK USA, SEC Solutions (home of The Challenger Sale), Mandel Communications, Mercuri International, Celemi, and 3G Selling. I caught up with a number of ESR’s clients as well as Mike Murrell, president and publisher at Lakewood Media Group, LLC, where I’m a columnist and advisor at Sales and Marketing Management Magazine.  I also had the opportunity to speak, at length, with Ken Blanchard.  I was amazed to find out that his company has 325 employees. Another smart guy.

I learned a lot just from talking with smart sales training buyers and sellers during the course of the day.  There is no question that many corporate L&D (learning and development) professionals have a significant challenge when it comes to serving their sales organizations. I’ve been working with ASTD for the past number of years, doing my best to transfer some of ESR’s experience, insight, and knowledge to them. I know that’s helped numbers of companies figure things out and get themselves on the path to higher degrees of sales effectiveness. It was certainly fulfilling to hear success stories from those ESR has helped.

My presentation was well-attended and, based on feedback after the 75-minute session, appreciated as well.

I covered what we at ESR consider an important issue: advanced selling capabilities.  I spoke about leveraging politics within customer organizations, the importance of financial and business acumen, and the deployment of competitive strategies and tactics.  I briefly touched on other advanced B2B selling capabilities as well, such as channel management and strategic account management.  I also provided the audience with a one-slide diagnostic tool that offers some help in figuring out whether they should consider any of these advanced capabilities.

I’ve put the slide deck up on ESR’s website.  Feel free to download it.  We’re just asking for your name and business email address in exchange for this valuable content.  We’ll include you on ESR’s private mailing list, from which you can unsubscribe at any time.  I can assure you though, with what we have planned in 2012, you’ll want to keep up to date on events, research, and other high-value content and activities around the subject of sales performance improvement, so you’ll want to stay on our email list.

ES Research Group is a strong believer in management by numbers—after all, if it can’t be measured, it can be managed. One area where we think it’s all right to think outside the analytical box is connecting with customers through storytelling. I’ve written about that before here and here.

Being able to relate to your prospects is often the very first thing you must do in a sales call—in person or on the phone. We don’t mean old fashioned techniques like noticing photos in a prospect’s office or trying to create rapport by talking about the weather. Today you have a wealth of information available to build an inventory of stories that help you personally or professionally connect to your prospects. It may be an example of how you helped an existing customer or it may be how you’d held a similar position in a previous role and understand the pressures the prospects are facing. Either way, by having a process in mind that provides quick access to your stories will make it easier for you to convince your prospects you understand and have been down this road before.

ES Research has found that:

• Some people process information better in story form
• Stories are powerful and have been with us since the beginning of time—it is something we understand at a level deeper than we can often realize
• The format of a good story is easy to follow, which enables you to set the direction for a conversation with your customer.

In addition to our findings and intuitive understanding, those who study brain science have found proof that “story structure” is an information delivery system powerhouse, evolutionarily hardwired into human brains.

Connection is the watchword in today’s selling environment. Whether it’s through direct face-to-face sales or by using the latest in social media, we are trying to get our prospects to connect with us on a deeper level. We want richer relationships so we move up the value chain to trusted advisor, challenger, or whatever role works best with the individuals with whom we are working in our customer organizations. We don’t want to be sellers, we want to be business partners. Storytelling in a meaningful way will help you do that.

If you haven’t looked into storytelling as it applies to B2B selling, you can start here.  It’s a podcast interview I did with Mike Bosworth. If you haven’t listed to this, it’s more than worth your investment of time. Mike explains all of this in a clear, concise, and very compelling way.

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Among the subjects I cover in my module is hiring. All of the 75 sales executives and 50 CEOs that participate at one point or another during my eight days of workshops will be hiring sales people, managers and directors during the course of the next year or two.  If an Irish company hires their first employee in the U.S. (as one of many export alternatives) and gets it wrong, they have a major problem. In the past it has happened far too often. 

So, effective hiring has become a very important subject here in Ireland.  I’ve written about sales hiring a lot here on this blog.

One of the things I haven’t discussed here is how the knowledge and interpretation of body language can add to the effectiveness of an interview. ESR’s hiring process model counts on multiple inputs to assure that there is as good a fit as possible between the job requirements and the salesperson’s capabilities: Resume/profile vetting; skill, trait, and behavior profiling; multiple structured interviews; background and reference checking; predictive testing; income verification; and simulations.  If all that is done properly, the likelihood of hiring the wrong person has been significantly reduced.

In addition to asking pre-engineered questions, how can you be certain that the interviews provide accurate data with respect to the candidate’s actual capabilities? One way is to become adept at reading body language.

This idea struck me first twenty years ago. At that point, I read several books on the subject.  Although I’m far from an expert in body language, a little knowledge will get you a long way.

Touching the nose or covering the mouth is one well-known sign of lying.  From Body Language by James Borg (Pearson Books): “Bill Clinton, when testifying before a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, adopted neutral body language when giving obviously true answers. But when he was being quizzed more exactly, he touched his nose every four minutes, or 26 times.”  We later found out that he was lying during those answers. This is one of the examples I use during my workshops.

Observing eye movement can also lead to understanding when someone is lying. We tend to look off to one side or another when recalling what actually happened in the past. When making something up, we look to the opposite site. Sweaty hands, bouncing knees, too much direct eye contact can all suggest that someone may not be telling the truth.

Recently I read the book Never Be Lied to Again by David J. Lieberman Ph.D. Lieberman has a very convincing approach to determine whether someone is lying. It’s somewhat extreme—perhaps more geared toward detectives than sales hiring authorities.  But it’s worth the read just to provide some perspective.

Interviewing is a skill. It requires learning, practice, behavioral change, and reinforcement.  I strongly suggest you invest a few hours in learning about body language. It can provide the knowledge, practical uses, and a refresher when you need it.

Please join me for a complimentary webinar hosted by Sales and Marketing Management magazine, How to Hire Great Salesreps, Thursday, November 15, 2012.

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A few key points from the article:

• To get sales training right, you have to select the right sales training partner. Note: If you’re part of a corporate Learning and Development organization and don’t outsource at least some of your process, methodology, and content development, we should really have a chat.
• An objective assessment of your selling requirements from your customers’ perspective is the first place to start.
• The best provider for your requirements may not either come up on the first few pages of a Google search, nor be listed in the increasingly popular training company lists that are being regularly published.
• Check at least ten references before you go forward with a sales training provider.

And here is my regular sales training column. It’s an update of my popular, “C’mon, Dave, who is the best sales trainer?”

By all means, subscribe to the print and digital versions of Sales and Marketing Management magazine here, and use the Priority Code: DSEN

• It supports demand creation approaches and initiatives
• Enables reps to carry on business value-oriented conversations
• Enables product/service links to customer’s specific long-term business objectives
• Provides basis for gaining and maintaining access to senior executives
• Supports reduction or elimination of commodity pricing demands
• Removes selling focus on product specifications
• Can be a significant differentiator for salespeople
• Raises effectiveness of Consultative/Solution/Challenger approach

So I was already primed when I was introduced to Mike Genstil, CEO and Founder of VisualizeROI.

Mike’s company has a powerful software app that allows those in a selling role to model the impact of their product and service on their customer’s business and supports a dialog with the customer about that value in an engaging and effective way.

Although the model Mike built with me during an interactive web session was basic, he was delighted to provide us with a much more complex model. We reviewed that model and tested the VisualizeROI application his company built.  We like it.

Here’s an example of a Visualizer Mike’s team created for VMware by transforming a complex TCO spreadsheet that was created by a consultant they hired. VMware is using VisualizeROI’s model as part of a competitive marketing campaign. Here it is.

VisualizeROI.com. You might want to check it out.

Without fanfare, here are my favorite iPhone and iPad apps, in no particular order  and subject to change without notice:

iPhone

• Soundhound – Hold it up to music and Shazam! But with Soundhound you get Karaoke-style lyrics to sing along with.
• Camera! (SmugMug) – Best camera app, period.
• LogMeIn Ignition – When I have to log on to my PC.
• GroceryIQ – Syncs with my wife’s app for up-to-the-minute shopping.
• Wikipedia – I’m an researcher.
• Facetime – I love it.
• Walkmeter – Where I’ve walked (or run), how fast, etc.
• Pandora – I’ve built some great channels — with AppleTV, it’s wonderful.
• Dropbox – When I absolutely need to see or email a file or important attachment.
• FlightAware – Commercial and private flight tracks, ETA data, etc.
• OpenTable – For restaurant reservations.  Easy as pie.

iPad

• Flip/Zite/Pulse – My daily news fix is paging through all three, highly customized.
• OnLive Desktop – Amazing app.
• NY Times Crossword Puzzle – Every morning, like clockwork.
• Fortune (subscription version) – I really like Fortune.
• Facebook – For friends and family.  LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. for business.
• Hootsuite – For keeping up with the stream when I’m on my iPad.
• Pandora – Same as the iPhone
• Roboform – All my usernames and passwords.  Not as clean an auto-logon as the PC version, but it works for me.
• Kindle Reader
• IMDB

What are yours?

Picture this: It’s 11:00 at night, raining heavily, ceilings at 200 feet, wind gusting to 25 knots. You’re flying a single-engine Cessna into Martha’s Vineyard airport. You can’t see anything outside the airplane.  You have an instrument approach plate attached to your steering yoke (click on graphic for full-size view). That graphical representation of a procedure tells you precisely what you need to know to get the plane (gracefully) on the ground. You have your instruments to make certain you are in compliance with what the FAA has determined to be the safest route to the runway.

For a single pilot, there is a lot to do. An awful lot to do. Assuming you have the skills, the experience, the focus, and a plan so you know every step along the way, you are “ahead of the plane.” You can anticipate what might go wrong—however minor—and then be prepared if it happens.

As I’ve said before there are many parallels between flying a plane and pursuing a sales opportunity.

The point I’m about to make is not intended to be a sales methodology or process or the basis of one.  I’d just like to share with you some questions that, when answered, will enable you to be strategically “ahead of the sale.” I hope you can see that a formal, documented sales process will account for capturing these and other critical data.

These are the kinds of questions that should be asked again and again during the course of managing a previously qualified opportunity.

• What are the 3 next steps to advance my position in the account? How am I going to execute them?
• What are 3 ways each of my competitors will attempt to advance their position, and what am I going to do about those?
• With which 3 people in the account must I build relationships with so that they will influence a decision in my favor. What’s my plan once I identify those people?
• Based on my understanding of the customer’s business what 3 areas will I based my education of them with regard to a new or better way to achieve their goals and objectives?
• What are 3 key financial benefits the customer will receive as a result of my product or service? Who in their company cares? Whose compensation is based on achieving that financial improvement?
• What are my customer’s 3 most important buying criteria, where do I stand versus my competition, and what am I going to do as a result of having this information?
• What are the next 3 questions I need answers to in order to take or maintain the lead?
• What 3 things will the customer request from me next and what will my response be?
• What 3 things are going on in the customer’s world that might affect the selling opportunity, and what am I going to do about it?
• What 3 things about my company would hurt my chances if the customer learned about them from my competitor, and what am I going to do to mitigate that risk?
• What 3 things about my customer’s corporate culture must I be aware of?
• What are the 3 objections each of my contacts will likely raise (or be thinking) and what am I going to do about them?
• What are 3 things that could cause me to lose the sale today, and what am I going to do to prevent any of them from having that effect?

And the list goes on.

Do you see my point here? This is stuff you need to know to effectively compete, if not win a medium to large size opportunity. Staying ahead of the sale means that have a plan, you’ve answered these questions, and are therefore well on your way to winning that sale.

Selecting the best sales training provider for your company’s needs isn’t easy. In simple terms, it’s a matter of finding the provider at the intersection of a number of critical learning areas. Let’s examine just three of them them individually:

Target industry.  As recently as seven years ago, one of the largest groups of companies consuming sales training were in the high technology industries such as telecommunications, software, hardware and related services. As many as 75% of sales training companies catered their products to these related industries. Then ESR began to see a shift. More and more industries sought to increase sales/sales productivity by providing high quality, industry-specific sales training. Today, as many as 60% of sales training companies ESR has evaluated have clients and tailored offerings for industries including, but not limited to, manufacturing, retail, transportation, pharmaceutical, professional services, financial services, and others. This is a trend that ESR believes is both healthy and permanent.

Sales skills subject areas. Sales training companies typically specialize in one or more sales subject areas, but rarely deliver high-quality solutions in all sales subject areas, with the possible exception of a handful of the world’s largest sales training companies. A typical categorization of sales training subjects might include:  basic selling skills, advanced selling skills, selling to executives, sales management, coaching, inside sales, messaging, negotiation skills, opportunity management, strategic account management, financial acumen, channel management, etc.  Remember please that effective sales training is not picking one subject for this year’s sales kickoff meeting and then another subject for next year’s.  The results of an objective and comprehensive requirements analysis will lead to an approach where some of these (and other subject areas) will be integrated into a long-term learning approach and delivered over time using the media that best suit the situation.

Another important point: Your sales training requirements are best determined without the influence of any sales trainer who might be later bidding for your business.  ESR has found repeatedly that these assessments can be biased toward the capabilities of the sales trainer and gaps not within the sales trainers’ areas of expertise are missed or worse, avoided.  Eliminating that potentially harmful conflict of interest is what was intended by my use of the word “objective” in the paragraph above.

Target company/sales force size.  Most sales training companies have a desire to secure large, long-term training assignments—many with large corporations. The fact of the matter is, depending upon the type of training provided, the resources (and hence size of the sales training company) has a direct bearing on its ability to service the sales training client. Large, global enterprises have few choices for one-stop shopping when it comes finding the right sales performance improvement partner. The challenge of limited sales training company resources and size can be partially, but not completely mitigated by the effective use of sales training-related technologies such as pre-recorded and standardized training modules, live and on-demand virtual learning content, and audio and video teleconferencing.

To the point: Looking at the intersection of your industry, company size and specific sales training required against sales training providers capable of meeting that set of needs can dramatically simplify your decision. The objective of ESR’s sales training provider research is to do exactly that—categorize and match sales training provider capabilities against sales training buyer profiles. We dig much, much deeper, of course, but this approach you set you off in the right direction.

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If under-performing salespeople went through interviews and completed specific job training and yet still lack traits need to achieve results, where is the gap?

ES Research Group knows that one missing link is to test the candidate using a scientifically rigorous psychometric instrument that is directly connected to the candidate’s specific job profile.　　

First, understand what a psychometric test is and is not. It is not a personality test, such as the Meyers-Briggs assessment or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). A psychometric test is intended to be predictive. When valid and well-developed, and integrated into a strategic approach for recruitment and selection, it is an objective decision-making tool directly tied to the hiring decision(s) at hand. It will calculate a candidate’s fitness for a particular role far better than any subjective assessment ever will.

The test must be scientifically sound and sales-specific. This means only a handful of providers most likely will prove adequate. Choose a firm that has partnered with statisticians and psychologists to develop reliable testing instruments that are specific to the sales arena. Reputable firms also will ensure that their tests fully comply with Equal Employment Opportunity laws and case precedents. The provider also must be willing and able to adapt the test to your organization’s own job profile(s). An assessment developed for an inside sales position will differ from one created for a strategic account manager or for a business development specialist.

Hiring managers should expect psychometric testing as a capability of full-service sales training providers. If the provider does not have it, then the provider is coming up short. A preliminary list of sales training firms with psychometric assessment capability could include but would not necessarily be limited to The Complex Sale, Inc., Miller Heiman, Revenue Storm, Kurlan and Associates, and Richardson.  Any sales training provider you consider should have either own their own talent management solution (including psychometric tests) or have an established partnership with a specialty firm such as HR Chally Group, Profiles International, Inc., or the Objective Management Group. (Disclosure: The sales performance improvement providers mentioned are ESR subscribers.)

Connecting the psychometric test to the job profile

When implementing psychometric testing in a sales hiring process, it’s important to understand the differences between traits and skills. Traits are innate capabilities that a candidate either possesses or does not possess. A new hire cannot receive training to correct a shortcoming in an trait. For example, almost everybody would agree that a sales person must be motivated enough to accomplish the objectives set forth in his or her job profile. But a person’s level of motivation is not a skill that can be trained. Rather, an individual’s motivation level is an inherent trait  that already exists in varying degrees from person-to-person. After hiring an individual, there is very little that organization can do to change a person’s level of motivation, and it certainly cannot be taught or coached as a skill. This is why the job profile must deal in traits, and it must be wholly different from the job description or the list of job skills necessary for the role.

Skills can be improved through training, while traits cannot. “Do not hire to skills,” says LaVon Koerner, CEO of Revenue Storm, a sales performance improvement provider that also offers psychometric testing for sales hiring. “Hire to traits, and then, train to skills.”

And so, the psychometric test must measure exactly those traits that appear in the job profile. Koerner also insists that the job profile reflect the company’s defined strategy to serve customers, win market share and outperform the competition. “The question is not so much whether or not the candidate can fulfill a job profile, but whether he or she can execute the company’s specific go-to-market strategy,” Koerner says.

How often do sales managers discover that their new hires are inadequate only after months of training? Psychometric testing helps eliminate these costly mistakes. “Hire slowly, fire quickly,” Koerner says. Most sales managers reverse that process. They hire quickly and spend a multitude of resources attempting to train people who lack necessary traits for their roles. Then, the managers congratulate themselves on having discovered an inadequate hire after the training process has begun. Just consider the costs of training versus the costs of testing and understand why there must be a better way.

Note: This post was excerpted from the ESR/Brief ^TM Psychometric Testing in the Sales Hiring Process – Guidelines for Implementation.

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