SST™ Newsletter

Summer 2003

“I Know It When I see It”….

Pornography Perhaps, but Not Sales Talent

Amidst much hoopla by cable all sports stations, the NBA recently held its annual draft lottery. Much of the hype was over where high school sensation LeBron James would wind up. (Cleveland?) Being an extremely busy person who only concerns himself with serious matters (like what it would feel like to have thirteen year old Michelle Wie drive her tee shot 100 yards past mine ) it started me thinking about parallels to how our clients go about choosing sales talent.

My curiosity was further piqued by learning that author Michael Lewis (Liars Poker and The New New Thing) had just published a book, Moneyball, that focuses on the system Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane employees to choose talent for his team. I had once been on a dais with Lewis who was keynote speaker for a Wall Street investment bank’s annual meeting. He’s a terrific story teller and I would commend any and all of his books to you as great summer reading.

Lewis’ premise this time is that, under Beane, the A’s have achieved one of the best records in baseball (second only to the Yankees) while spending a small fraction of what the Yankees or Red Sox pay. The key is following his systematic approach to choosing talent. Beane often moves against conventional baseball wisdom by doing careful research on behaviors that will predict future performance and winning. His view is that to do the latter, win that is, you need to have better talent than the other guys.

While few would argue with the wisdom of recruiting talent, my observation is that our clients are more like conventional baseball executives than they are like Beane. By that, I mean that the selection of sales talent tends to be an ad hoc event guided by intuition more than research and a pre-established system.

Fundamentally, there are four steps to choosing sales talent:

1. Determining the qualities that are required for success
2. Distinguishing between those qualities that are talents and those that are skills
1. Talents are traits with which we are born.
2. Skills are abilities that we ca learn
3. Developing two systems
1. Recruit for talents using objective measures like tests and behavioral interviews
2. Train for skills
4. Consistently using and reinforcing the system

Talents & Skills

For Beane’s Oakland Athletics talents consist of those accidents of birth like speed and arm strength. Even the best baseball instructors in the world can do little to nothing to enable players to run faster or throw harder. Similarly, there are natural sales talents that candidates either have or don’t have. For example, prospecting for new business requires persistence and tenacity. Sales leaders and trainers can teach it until they are hoarse, but some people will approach a new contact with optimism that it will result in more business and others will do anything they can to avoid calling on a new prospect. Persistence and tenacity are talents because fundamentally, you can’t teach them.

Sales skills on the other hand, are teachable and learnable. Representative ones include asking good questions, listening and customizing communication in the SST model. Both Balance (packaging messages to appeal to all types) and Shade (tailoring messages to match the communication preferences of the buyer) are easy to learn. While you recruit for talent, you train for skills. The requisite skills to succeed in your sale determine your training agenda.

I Know it When I see It

While Beane’s Oakland Athletics use hard objective data, most of our clients rely on their gut feelings formed during an interview. Most often they will describe their approach as what we call the “I know it when I see it” method. I’ll be the first to confess that I once relied on that approach in selecting sales talent. Suffice it to say that if the game had been baseball instead of sales, Billy Beane’s team would have kicked our keisters. While I thought I knew it when I saw it, I hired some real clunkers. Every sales leader I know who uses the “I Know It When I See It” approach will confess to the same.

While we don’t have the luxury of using hard data that is meticulously maintained and publicly available to baseball executives, we should nonetheless, be as objective as possible in our selection system. Principally, there are two objective measures for recruiting sales talent:

1. Standardized Tests
2. Behavioral Interviews

There’s quite an industry out there for Standardized Tests in selecting sales talent. Most organizations are frustrated by what they consider lackluster sales performance and see a test as a silver bullet solution. If you are not careful, however, you could shoot yourself in the corporate foot .Tests need to satisfy certain technical standards for validity, for example.

The best practice in choosing a test is to know what it is you are looking for before you go looking. What is it that sets apart your top performers from your typical ones? What is it that distinguishes sales people who persist from those who jump ship after three months?

Once you have whittled down your list of traits, do a search of the thousands of instruments out there to identify the ones that best measure the traits that define performance in your sale. For example, if tenacity and persistence are must have qualities for top performers find instruments that measure those “constructs”. Don’t get caught up in marketing hype or choose a test that assess “agreeableness” which may be nice in customer service but not be central to sales success.

“If you can measure it, it probably doesn’t matter.”

There’s a famous quote attributable to Edward Thorndike, one of the fathers of psychological testing: “If it exists, you can measure it.” When I cited Thorndike one day to my friend and mentor Ron Cherry, he responded with: “Yes, but If you can measure it, it probably doesn’t matter.”

What Ron meant, of course, was that if we restricted ourselves to established measurements, we would have a very limited number of traits we would assess. Let’s say that you have determined that your top performers have a quality of being able to quickly adapt to different kinds of customers and manage more than one dialogue at the same time. I promise you that the most exhaustive search of the voluminous Mental Measurements Yearbook would not turn up standardized measures of “adapt on the spot” and “manage multiple dialogues” during a sales call.

For these kinds of traits, those that are important but have no corresponding test, the Behavioral Interview is the best course to pursue. The scope of this newsletter does not permit a full treatment of Behavioral Interviews. Suffice it to say, that as much as possible, Behavioral Interviews remove the subjectivity of the “I know it when I see it” method by focusing on specific past behaviors.

If all of this sounds both intriguing but a little daunting, rest assured that there are consultants (like us of course) who can help you with the four steps repeated below for emphasis:

1. Determining the qualities that are required for success
2. Distinguishing between those qualities that are talents and those that are skills
1. Talents are traits with which we are born.
2. Skills are abilities that we ca learn
3. Developing two systems
1. Recruit for talents using objective measures like tests and behavioral interviews
2. Train for skills
4. Consistently using and reinforcing the system

Choosing sales talent is just too important to leave it to the “I know it when I see it” method. Neither winning baseball teams nor winning sales teams are assembled that way. While the Supreme Court ruled that we may know pornography when we see it, we can’t identify sales talent without a system.