This week we explore an important aspect of a salesperson’s psyche.  If you are a sales manager, this trait will explain your salesperson’s view of himself and how best to manage to that view.

Self Assessment
The ability to practically and objectively identify one€™s personal management strengths and weaknesses. This is the ability of a salesperson to take the skills and techniques that they have gained in evaluating external situations and apply them to evaluating their own performance and abilities.

A salesperson with strength in this area is capable of accurately evaluating his or her own strengths and weaknesses. They see themselves clearly.

A weakness in this area indicates a salesperson who does not judge his or her own capabilities accurately. They incorrectly evaluate their abilities (either over-estimate or under-estimate).  This inaccuracy can create trouble when they set their own goals and expectations.

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Heard a great question from a candidate interview this morning -

“What reservations would you have putting me in this role.”

Friends, that’s what we call stone-cold qualifying.

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I have been catching up on some reading while on this business trip and enjoyed an article that gave some outlandish excuses for being tardy to work. The SHRM article, titled Sorry I€™m Late; a Raccoon Stole My Shoe, will prepare you for the next time one of your employees is running late:

• Someone was following me and I drove all around town trying to lose them.
• My dog dialed 911 and the police wanted to question me about what really happened.
• My girlfriend got mad and destroyed all of my undergarments.
• I woke up and thought I was temporarily deaf.
• I just wasn€™t €œfeelin€™ it€ this morning.
• I was up all night arguing with God.
• A raccoon stole my work shoe off my porch.
• I super-glued my eye thinking it was contact solution.
• I was putting lotion on my face when my finger went up my nose, causing a nose bleed.
• A prostitute climbed into my car at a stop light and I was afraid my wife would see her and think I was messing around €¦ so I got out of the car.

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I just read an employment ad for a company looking for a top-level salesperson. The over-written ad lists “Required Qualifications:”

A bachelor’s degree in business or marketing and a minimum of 5 yrs of related experience; or, in lieu of the degree, a minimum of 9 yrs of related experience with ____________ and/or consulting is required.

Avoid this nonsense – successful selling has more to do with hardwired abilities than it will ever have to do with degrees and years of experience. There is no formula for experience equaling sales ability so a statement like the one above screams HR dept. instead of the sales dept.

The last bullet point (out of 11) appears to be almost a throw-away item:

Leadership skills.

That’s it. No description of what these skills are and what they entail. I could argue that Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) both have leadership skills. Of course, they are two very divergent leaders. Which style is the better fit for this position?

If you cannot describe the traits you desire, do not attempt to “cover that topic” with an ambiguous, catch-all phrase. List the traits, skills and style that specifically define the person you are attempting to find.

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This week school will be out for our kids and I found this SHRM article (membership required) interesting and timely. The article discusses how we here in the US are opting to move our vacations from the 2 week long once a year vacations to more 3-4 day weekend stints. A study was conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. that looked at vacation habits of U.S. workers.

€œWe are becoming a nation of the long weekend vacation, with workers looking ahead to each Monday/Friday holiday for the opportunity to turn a three-day weekend into a four- or five-day weekend. The switch to mini-vacations will only be accelerated by soaring gas prices as travelers stay close to home or even stay at home and use the time to work on the house or explore locally,€ firm President and CEO John A. Challenger said in a press release.

This was echoed in a survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com from Feb. 15 to March 6, 2007. They found:

€¢ 70 percent of workers receive two weeks or more of paid vacation, and nearly 25 percent receive four or more weeks.

€¢ 12 percent do not receive a paid vacation.

€¢ 9 percent lie to their employers, telling them they can€™t be reached while on vacation.

€¢ 20 percent won€™t take a vacation in 2007, 27 percent will take five days or less, and 9 percent will limit themselves to weekend getaways.

Now couple those statistics with the fact we are more available than ever before with cell phones, laptops and PDA’s. It is getting to be almost impossible to disappear for a couple of days to unwind. I’m in Dallas right now meeting with a couple clients and there is no disappearing from the office tasks. Emails still need responses, my cell phone keeps ringing . . . heck, I’m even writing this post. The thought of the family vacation as we knew it back in the ’60′s and ’70′s is quickly disappearing.

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Great article from SellingPower.com titled Don’t Fix Weaknesses; Build Strengths that discusses salesperson development.  The core tenet of this article is to focus on building strengths and not in transforming weaknesses into strengths (it won’t happen).  The entire article is worth the read, but this is the pull quote for me (my emphasis):

In fact, while talent will get you to a certain point, developing and strengthening that talent is what brings the greatest success. Consider this experiment, conducted by the University of Nebraska some years back. To study the effectiveness of its speed-reading courses, the school evaluated students€™ natural reading pace and placed them in one of two groups €“ naturally fast readers and naturally slow readers. After the course, students were re-evaluated. The slow group improved from reading an average of 90 words per minute (wpm) to 150 wpm, a 67 percent increase. But the fast readers skyrocketed from an average of 350 wpm to more than 2,900 wpm, a 728 percent increase! The principle applies across the board to talent €“ when you work on areas in which someone has no natural ability, the improvement will be modest. But when you focus attention on building natural skills, the results will be off the charts.

Absolutely spot on.  The best approach is to refine talents into skills – in sales, that leads to top-level performance.  The key to reaching this level is to only focus on neutralizing weaknesses.  As you will read in the article, many managers hope to make salespeople strong in their weak areas.  Strike that thought from your mind!

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I love that turn of phrase.  And here from Inc.com is another good example of how we have far too many surveys taking place in this country.  From When Warm Weather Arrives, More Employees Call in “Sick”:

Of 1,077 full-time employees polled, 39 percent said they’ve called in sick to take a day off in the past, and 30 percent said they planned to do so again this summer, according to the “Summer Absenteeism” survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

Among employees who faked sick days, most said they used their time off to go to the beach or go shopping. Not surprisingly, the most popular days to skip work were Monday and Friday, the survey found.

In addition to wanting to enjoy the weather, respondents also said they called in sick whenever they needed a mental-health day or had limited time off due to a demanding workload.

One third of the survey respondents have used a sick day to take a day off (I suspect the real number is far greater than 39%).  Employees tend to do this on Monday or Friday.  Employees tend to do this more in the summer.  Employees justify this action as a mental-health day.

Shocking.

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When you boil it down to the basics, sales departments are measured by profit increases. Simple, yes, but that is the crux of the goal. Operational efficiencies are part of the equation, but the focus here is on increasing profits via increased revenue. So how do companies go about achieving improvement in their sales-driven profits?

Profile Your Sale
Too often sales gets muddled by general tactics, inconsistent value propositions and rogue selling systems. Understanding your ideal sale is the first step to repeatable results. The output is a definition of what your ideal sale looks like from this day forward. This clarity provides direction and consistency to all sales efforts.

Evaluate What You Have
The next step is to measure your current team to assess group strengths and weaknesses especially in comparison to your ideal sale. This step usually leads to the realization that some salespeople on your team do not have the best skills for your department’s long-term goals. Yet, these salespeople still can contribute – the advantage is that you now know how to best utilize their abilities.

Manage To Their Strengths
Managers must manage to each individual’s strengths while neutralizing the salesperson’s weaknesses. This approach is the backbone of successful sales management. Our sales development plan provides a specific road map for the sales manager to follow with each individual.

Hire Stronger Salespeople
Nothing has a greater impact on increased sales profits and revenues than hiring stronger salespeople. Mediocrity is a degenerative disease within a company. Accepting mediocrity in your sales hiring is beyond dangerous (“warm body is better than no body,” “hire fast, fire fast,” etc.). Bad hires are worse (gut-level decisions, over-reliance upon resumes, etc.). Change your process, change your hires, change your revenue and profits.

You notice that we do not list 1 or 2 day sales motivation training. These programs are entertaining for annual sales meetings but are pointless for significantly changing a sales team. Habits do not change in 1, 3 or 10 days (I heard it takes 21 days to form a new habit). Enjoy these energetic speakers and perhaps take away a salient point or two. But do not expect a seismic shift in your sales team’s abilities.

This fact means that the sales manager must consistently guide the team to success. This goal is best accomplished by knowing each individual’s strengths, how best to coach them and ensuring that you put the strongest team into the marketplace.

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I’ve mentioned before that I have talked to prospective customers who are adamant that newspaper ads are the best media to place job ads. I couldn’t disagree more with them. Along comes this quick-hitting article from Inc.com:

The number of jobs posted online rose by 9,000 in May to 4,374,400, an increase of 0.2 percent from April, the Conference Board reported Wednesday.

Online job vacancies were up 29 percent from the same period last year, the New York-based private research group said.

I cannot understand why any company would choose to advertise in a printed newspaper.

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Private-sector hiring is occurring in the small companies around the country and has been so for the past 6 months.  From Inc.com:

Businesses with fewer than 50 employees continue to outpace all larger businesses combined in creating new private-sector jobs, a new report shows.

Small businesses added 58,000 new jobs in May, with gains in service-sector jobs offset by slight losses in goods-producing sector, according to Automatic Data Processing reported, a Roseland, N.J.-based employment services firm. Overall, the increases are consistent with a three-month average of 56,000 jobs, the report said.

By contrast, larger businesses in May accounted for just 39,000 new jobs.

The results mark the sixth straight month that small businesses have accounted for the vast majority of private-sector job growth, the report said.

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