Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

Page Rick

Perseverance

I remember thinking. about the story of Thomas Edison’s early attempts to come up with the right material for a light bulb. He had tried a thousand different elements, and all had failed. A colleague asked him if he felt his time had been wasted, since he had discovered nothing. “Hardly,” Edison is said to have retorted briskly. “I have discovered a thousand things that don’t work.”

Robert E. Kelley, How To Be a Star at Work

Successful people don’t run from challenges — they redouble their efforts. If the door is closed, they find another door. Does the candidate have the ability to stay the course despite unexpected obstacles? What obstacles have they overcome in the past? If they haven’t had any failure to date, how will you know how they will respond when they inevitably experience some?

The challenge here is that perseverance can actually work against successful salespeople in the area of qualification. No one wants to be seen as a quitter, but the best practice for individual salespeople is to choose the right battles and to qualify out of lost causes early. The question is, “Do you have a defined set of criteria for knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em?”

A useful exercise that we use in our management classes is to take each of the 10 P’s and rate your top three performers and your bottom three performers in a job category to see the relative importance of each attribute to that specific job.

Start Performance Management in the Interview

How long does it take to do a performance review? The answer is six months to a year because the first step in managing performance is to set the standards, values, tolerances, and expectations. You should give your candidates the performance review form and set their expectations as part of the interview process.

New hires are like wet cement. You can mold them and shape them early, but as time passes, habits form — both good and bad. After 90 days or so, their attitudes begin to calcify to the point where it may take a jackhammer to change their bad habits.

But how is the performance review actually handled in most cases? Performance reviews are seen as a necessary evil from HR, often written by HR, and often don’t include the behaviors, skills, and competencies needed to perform the adopted sales methodology. They are often seen as just checkboxes to get the HR people off your back.

If the performance review doesn’t include the sales methodology, then perhaps it should be ignored. However, if performance management is driven by the ideal sales cycle, it can be a very constructive performance coaching tool that actually should be reviewed on a quarterly basis rather than annually. This allows sales managers to coach not just deal competence, but the other factors of overall performance such as character, chemistry, competence, commitment, communication, and cognitive skills.

The time to start this process is in the interview itself, where expectations about how you want things done in your organization can be set early.

Talent Scorecard
Best Practice, Talent	Importance	Execution
	Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high)	Agree but we never do this	We sometimes do this	We often do this	We do this consistently
Individual
We have written, tested profiles for each sales position.
We have questions, assessments, and an interview process that produce consistent performers.
We generally have the sales talent in the right roles.
We have sales performance reviews that include our sales methodology and are introduced during the interview process.
New managers are trained how to hire effectively.
We have a training curriculum, built on our best practices, that includes skills, opportunity strategies, and account management.
Opportunity Management
We have junior salespeople ready for territories when they open up.
We have a pool of candidates in our industry on which we can draw when we have an opening.
We have full-time internal recruiters.
We have a high win ratio in head-to-head competitions.
Account Management
Our customer service people consider themselves part of the account sales team.
We have sales reps and managers who have earned trusted advisor status with their clients.
Industry/Market
We have industry knowledgeable sales consultants available to our sales team.
We are recognized thought leaders by the customers in our industry.

SECTION III: Technique

CHAPTER 5: Technique

Never mistake motion for action.

Ernest Hemingway

Jim Dickie is a partner in CSO Insights, a sales consulting practice that surveys hundreds of sales organizations every year and publishes an excellent benchmarking study. In their 2005 State of the Marketplace Review of 1,040 firms, he says that only 23.3 percent of companies spend more than $2,500 per year training their sales forces. And this includes all types of training.