In yesterday’s Advisor, Harvard Senior Lecturer Frank Cespedes discussed the need for sales and HR to do a better job of using each other’s skills in hiring sales people. Today, we provide Cespedes’ take on sales training.
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Of course, simply hiring the best people isn’t enough to guarantee sales success; onboarding and on-going training complete the process. However, training and development in many sales forces is “more honored in the breach than the observance.”
In a given year, more than a third of companies do not train salespeople at all! At others, sales training budgets increase when sales are good and get cut when sales are not, making it hard for managers to determine cause and effect.
Effective Sales Training
Effective sales training cannot be a single event. People need reinforcement, periodic upgrading and adaptation of skills to new circumstances, and the motivation that is a by-product of any good developmental process. Stated more bluntly: sales training should heed the “8Ps” used in the U.S. Air Force: “Proper Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”
Selling jobs vary hugely in the kind of product or service sold, price points, the customers that reps are responsible for, the relative importance of technical knowledge, and so on. (Just think about selling at Nordstrom versus Costco.) HR managers often ignore this. They develop competency lists and sometimes back up these lists with assessments and training initiatives, but the lists rarely incorporate anything about sales or business development beyond very general “customer-focus” statements. Sweeping generalizations and outright stereotypes about “sales competencies” dominate.
These stereotypes are destructive, encouraging quick-fix approaches based on generic training methodologies that fail to address the company’s more fundamental, specific capability issues. Furthermore, accepting generalizations about sales skills blinds HR managers to the interactions between their understanding of sales competencies and the actual selling requirements.
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Targeted Training Process
Understanding this risk, Roberge at HubSpot (see yesterday’s Advisor) enlisted HR to get into the field and help establish a training process targeted specifically on real behavioral requirements. Based on these efforts, his sales hires now spend their first month in classroom-style training and must pass an exam and six certification tests about HubSpot’s product and sales tasks.
For example, one of these tests includes doing what HubSpot helps its customers do: create a website, blogs, and other elements key to inbound marketing. As Roberge notes, the sales trainees “experience the actual pains and successes of our primary customers: professional marketers who generate leads online. As a result, our salespeople are able to connect on a far deeper level with our prospects and leads.”
To ensure your company realizes equal success, your sales team should ask HR partners how a training initiative will address your organization’s specific sales tasks—not those of a generic selling methodology or an all-purpose competency list.
Finally, realize that recruiting and training are just a part of the overarching HR-Sales connection. However, starting with these tasks can help raise the level of clarity in HR-Sales interactions, align expectations, and build required links between wider HR capabilities and selling outcomes.
(Frank Cespedes, author of Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling, is a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. As an experienced entrepreneur, board member, teacher, and consultant, Cespedes helps business leaders close the sales/strategy gap and create long-term value.)
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80% of employees self-report that they are not engaged.
80% of managers are ill suited to effectively manage people.
The two 80 percents are closely related.
Employers keep hiring the wrong people to be their managers and then they wonder why they have so few successful, engaged employees. Successful employees have all three of the following success predictors while unsuccessful employees lack one or two and usually it is Job Talent that they lack.
1. Competence
2. Cultural Fit
3. Job Talent
Employers do a…
A. GREAT job of hiring competent employees, about 95%
B. good job of hiring competent employees who fit the culture, about 70%
C. POOR job of hiring competent employees who fit the culture and who have a talent for the job, about 20%
Identifying the talent required for each job seems to be missing from talent and management discussions. If we ignore any of the three criteria, our workforce will be less successful with higher turnover than if we do not ignore any of the three criteria.
1. Competence
2. Cultural Fit
3. Job Talent
There are many factors to consider when hiring and managing talent but first we need to define talent unless “hiring talent” means “hiring employees.” Everyone wants to hire for and manage talent but if we can’t answer the five questions below with specificity, we can’t hire or manage talent effectively.
1. How do we define talent?
2. How do we measure talent?
3. How do we know a candidate’s talent?
4. How do we know what talent is required for each job?
5. How do we match a candidate’s talent to the talent demanded by the job?
Most managers cannot answer the five questions with specificity but the answers provide the framework for hiring successful employees and creating an engaged workforce.
Talent is not found in resumes or interviews or background checks or college transcripts.
Talent must be hired since it cannot be acquired or imparted after the hire.
In the article it mentions a series of tests given to the sales team. Are those tests validated? If so, how was it done. If not, how to they get these passed in OFCCP audits?