Profiles of Winners

Recruiting and selecting the best salespeople is always tough, yet it is critical to a sales team’s success. In the fifth year of strong economic growth, managers must work even harder to find good sales candidates and pick those most likely to succeed.

State Farm Insurance

State farm Insurance is staying with its basic selection process, but improving and standardizing selection, according to Agency Recruiting Analyst Katie Mullin. State Farm must be thorough and careful in selecting what are essentially managers of small businesses, State Farm agencies.

Mullin now has a “dashboard” allowing her to monitor selection progress. About 9,800 candidate career profiles had been received from the beginning of 2006 to August 31. About 1,000 of these profiled candidates made it into the pool eligible for appointments, 400 were appointed agents and another 225 were eligible as interns when appointments become available.

The career profile, done by an industry-wide group, is the first screening step. This profile reviews each applicant’s history and likelihood for success as an entrepreneurial agent. State Farm sets the passing score, usually moving half of profiled candidates forward in selection.

Then, meetings and discussions both evaluate candidates and educate them on State Farm agency opportunities. Backgrounds, credit histories, and ability to get licensed are checked. Candidates meet current agents in the field and formulate a business plan for developing their own agencies, presenting this plan to an executive approval committee.

This committee selects the candidates eligible for appointment. Site interviews may follow for specific agencies, or candidates may wait for new positions to open up. Interns get trained, licensed, and helped for four to six months at an agency, after which they are offered a one-year independent agent contract.

After a year, agents are evaluated in several areas: ability to influence and interact well with other people; strategic talents for setting objectives; ability to execute and be accountable for success; and passion and competitiveness. Successful agents are given open-ended contracts to hire staff and run their agencies, with support from State Farm. The company recruits agents from many professions, including teachers, soldiers, attorneys, and small business owners.

State Farm is tightening this system. Specific individuals will coordinate all aspects of recruitment in 13 geographical “zones.” These specialists will oversee sourcing, career understanding, and review of business plans. State Farm is also looking at agency positions that have been difficult to fill, remaining open for more than 100 days. It may have to look harder or differently to fill these positions or offer more support to the incumbent. “Overall, the aim is to do recruiting better, faster, smarter, and more consistently,” Mullin emphasizes.

Roughly 80 percent of State Farm agents are retained through their fifth year, a very high retention rate for insurance sales.

Aflac

Aflac will continue to recruit and select its new associates the same basic way. But Lance Osborne is putting more emphasis on training managers how to select candidates and is considering using personality testing, probably for managing rather than recruiting. Osborne is vice president of field force development, overseeing training and recruitment for Aflac’s 60,000 sales associates. Aflac recruits chiefly from referrals by current associates but also gets 2,000 new reps each year from Internet postings.

“There has been a greater focus on training our hiring coordinators to find high quality recruits and to improve the interview process,” Osborne says. “This year we are doing one-day and day-and-a-half seminars with these coordinators.”

Aflac’s district managers nominate candidates, while regional coordinators do interviews. Preliminary telephone screening is followed by two face-to-face interviews, one to select candidates, then a second to persuade selected candidates to accept the offer.

“A lot of time you don’t get who you want, but you do get who you are,” Osborne observes. So recruiters and interviewers must be professional in appearance to attract professional recruits. And they must demonstrate high integrity if they expect to secure reliably honest salespeople.

Coordinators develop profiles of the qualities they are looking for in new associates. Osborne wants managers to do profiles themselves. “It makes it more real to them, and they will not be asking a series of canned questions,” he explains.

There are rules for the offer interview. “Hiring managers might avoid difficult issues for candidates they really want,” Osborne notes. “We want them to be very honest about challenges salespeople face.” Aflac associates set their own schedules and are motivated by their own goals, not time clocks or supervisors.

Aflac has a target for “average weekly producers,” a metric closely watched on Wall Street as an indicator of growth. The national target is broken down by individual markets.

Osborne is thinking about using formal personality assessments. “I think where I am going to come down is that there is a better argument for using these assessments to manage new salespeople in the first 13 to 18 weeks,” he says. “Now we have to learn about them. A personality profile might give us earlier insights into how we can best manage and motivate them.”

The HR Chally Group

The HR Chally Group specializes in thorough assessments of candidates for sales positions where the money stakes are large and mistakes can be very costly. Chally rates both applicants and current sales employees according to 14 separate skill sets, notes VP business development John G. Wood. For example, this includes salespeople who must sell solutions versus products, strategic versus normal accounts, direct versus distribution sales, inside versus outside reps, and inbound versus outbound selling for telephone work.

The fine-tuning of assessment criteria significantly improves reliability. “In five years of evaluating the current sales force at 80 organizations, we found 60 percent of the people had the wrong skills for their positions,” Wood says. Redeploying people is much less expensive than bringing new people in. And expensive training programs can be targeted with sophisticated assessments. Even a very effective sales force may not be ready when a company changes its sales strategy.

Chally assessments look for underlying abilities, not personality. Wood says top professional salespeople differ widely in surface personality traits. “At a convention of 150 top salespeople, there may be 50 different personality types, some gregarious, some quiet. I know. I have been in those rooms.”

Chally validates its assessments by testing current employees or defining clients’ exact requirements for each sales role. The online assessment has 288 questions yielding 866 data points.

The Chally approach supports the complete cycle of selecting, developing, and aligning talent with company needs. Top managers can use a “talent audit” of the sales department to see what their human assets are and where there are gaps. Wood says the most effective use of Chally tools can boost average sales productivity by up to 35 percent and cut turnover by as much as 30 percent. Getting the Chally system up and running requires two to four weeks for testing new hires and double that for auditing current employees.

Wood estimates that about one-half of new Chally clients have not been using formal assessment tools, perhaps a quarter have been using merely descriptive rather than predictive tests, and the remainder have been using more sophisticated devices. The potential gains are obviously greatest for the first two types.

The Personal Touch

One advantage of the new online testing world is that assessment systems can be very easily linked to systems for posting positions and tracking applicants through the selection process. This saves money and valuable management time. But Wood cautions that the personal element is still critical in recruiting top salespeople in what is now a seller’s market. Highly qualified candidates may lose interest if they are just referred to a Website to take a major personality assessment. Recruiters must first persuade the candidate that the company and position are well worth the effort.