Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Selling is a Low Compliance Sport Selling is a Low Compliance Sport Growing up I was frustrated because I had no hand-eye coordination. I was always being picked last for team sports. As a result of this, I started looking around for sports where I could participate. In college my roommate was on the school lacrosse team. On Sunday mornings he taught me how to “sweat out” the excesses of Saturday night by going to the gym to run or lifting weights. Since neither lifting nor running requires any real hand-eye coordination, success, on an amateur level, is determined by personal focus and determination. Like sports, the AHS System view is that each of us is “made” for a career or profession. Unfortunately, when it comes to sales hiring, most companies lack a good system for hiring salespeople. More, most managers charged with hiring salespeople have given very little thought to what it takes to make a good salesperson. As a result, they are perpetuating the same sales hiring mistake of  “looking for someone who has previous sales experience” or better yet, “previous industry sales experience.” Consider the 80/20 rule to see why this doesn't work: If 80% of the sales are being produced by 20% of the salespeople, the majority of people hired for sales are lousy at it. Selecting applicants with previous sales experience has nearly zero predictive value of future success! Yet, most sales managers continue to select the applicants they are going to interview by looking for previous sales experience. Given the 80/20 rule this is totally illogical. Take heart, though, and let’s see if we can find a quality that does make a good salesperson... Any client who’s been with Advanced Hiring System™ for any amount of time has heard us say that High Compliance is the kiss of death in sales. (We measure Compliance in the Styles test, the second test we give to all applicants.) Think about the selling process and it’ll be obvious to you that High Compliance and sales just don’t mix. What happens in the sales process is that salespeople are being paid to talk to people who are starting at “No.” If they weren’t at “No”, there’d be no need for salespeople. If prospects started at “Yes”, our clients would just stick up a form on the Internet and have the prospect fill out the form, plug in their credit card and click. Obviously, then, our client’s products require selling in order to turn prospects into customers. And if you realize that a prospect is generally somewhere in the “no” scale, a salesperson who is a High Compliant, when they meet the prospect who is saying, “no”, “call me next week”, or some other put off, will respond with “OK, see you next week.” They are compliant; they go along with what they are told to do – in this case to get lost. On the other hand, Low Compliants don’t hear the “no”. In fact, they hear “no” as “yes” or at least “maybe.” So, Low Compliants keep on going when the “no’s” are coming at them. Certainly, there’s more to hiring success than just picking Low Compliants. Those of you have mastered the AHS Sales Hiring System and get consistently good sales hires know many other subtleties and details. However, from all of these nuances, one of the most important is to be looking for Low Compliants. Remember, Selling is a Low Compliance Sport. 2:00:03 PM    comment []

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