Manage Your Sales Team: Revenues for Hire

This article is based on a conversation with Patrick Sweeney and David Solot, who are (respectively) executive vice president and area vice president at Caliper, a management consulting firm that has advised more than 25,000 companies on how to hire and develop top performers. Along with Caliper’s CEO Herb Greenberg, Sweeney is coauthor of the New York Times best seller Succeed on Your Own Terms (McGraw-Hill, 2006). Patrick Sweeney and David Solot can be reached at Caliper, 506 Carnegie Center, PO Box 2050, Princeton, NJ 08543. Phone: 609/524-1200 Website: www.calipercorp.com.

 With annual revenues of more than $4.9 billion, “Acme Software” is one of the world’s largest providers of data security services, data management software, and security outsourcing. Originally the data processing arm of a Fortune 500 company, Acme pioneered the development of data management software and now provides solutions to institutions in the fields of financial services, higher education, and the public sector.

Acme currently employs in excess of 17,000 people in more than 400 offices in 30 countries. The company serves 25,000-plus customers, including the world’s 50 largest financial services companies. Acme’s customer base is highly diversified, with no single customer accounting for more than 4 percent of the firm’s total revenue during any of the last three fiscal years.

About two years ago, the management team of Acme’s North American security services division, which is responsible for approximately a quarter of the company’s total revenue, observed that a handful of the company’s top sales professionals were responsible for the bulk of the division’s income. The relatively poor performance of the remainder of the sales staff seemed mysterious to management, because customers generally initiated sales opportunities due to Acme’s strong brand.

Acme’s management did not know why those top performers were so productive and what differentiated them from the rest of the sales staff. Consequently, Acme’s hiring practices were hit-or-miss, based on the gut feelings of the regional managers, rather than on any kind of formal evaluation of candidates for sales jobs. Because of this, there were many false starts and failures among new hires in the sales group, which added to the company’s cost of sales.

Acme asked Caliper to identify the qualities that distinguish Acme’s top performing salespeople and to develop an “ideal profile” to serve as a model for hiring new sales personnel. Caliper was chosen for this task because it had already been assessing the personality strengths, limitations, and potential of job candidates for the entire North American security services division.

Caliper worked with Acme’s management to identify the top performers using a variety of performance metrics, including growth of existing business, development of new business, and historical performance reviews. Caliper then conducted a job analysis of the sales role via focus groups comprised of key stakeholders and the highest-performing sales professionals. The result of this analysis was a comprehensive competency model containing 80 key behaviors that resulted in success in Acme’s sales environment. These behaviors fell into three general areas:

1. Generating new sales opportunities, e.g., identifying and qualifying leads, gaining access to IT decision makers, and qualifying contacts and opportunities.

2. Managing the sales process, e.g., addressing client strategy, building client confidence, defining customized solutions, and closing sales.

3. Developing an existing account, e.g., planning account strategy, finding ways to meet clients’ expectations, managing internal relationships, and providing after-sale service.

Research has repeatedly shown that employees who consistently perform at high levels are almost always employed in work environments and positions that are congruent with their personality and motivational strengths. Therefore, using the competency model as a guide, Caliper assessed more than 50 of Acme’s top performers using its proprietary, in-depth personality assessment. The assessment measured 24 different traits and motivational factors that have been found to be highly predictive of job performance, matching them to the competency model.

The results of this assessment were telling. Acme’s top performers were highly driven individuals who showed characteristics consistent with the hunter style of selling. They shared a direct communication style that enabled them to persuade others, as well as a motivation to accomplish things quickly and efficiently. They had no trouble aggressively pushing ahead with the sales process and were not apt to get bogged down with overanalysis.

Acme’s top performers were also adept at concisely presenting the benefits of Acme’s products and services to the client and closing the sale quickly. They also demonstrated strong interpersonal skills, which allowed them to form large networks, develop new contacts quickly, and identify large numbers of prospects. They were self-starters who displayed good organizational skills and required little help from management to stay motivated and on task.

At the same time, the top performers exhibited a characteristic relatively unusual among hunter types: they tended to enjoy working collaboratively with teams of people, rather than simply excelling as an individual. This was important to Acme, because its long-term corporate strategy was to extend customer relationships across the various divisions of the company by focusing on developing trusted, well-managed, long-term relationships with its customers. As such, Acme was looking to maximize cross-selling opportunities in order to increase its share of customers’ total IT spending.

With all of the above in mind, Caliper built an ideal profile for the perfect candidate and adapted the assessment tool so that Acme could use it to prequalify sales candidates before offering them a job.