As brain surgeons go, I guess I would be far to the left of the 1st quartile of a normal distribution. Translation: You probably shouldn’t ask me to perform surgery.
As a professional boxer, not much better. I’d likely need a brain surgeon. As a pilot, I’d hopefully be average or better. As a pilot, average would be good enough to safely complete a properly planned flight. Average pilots, fortunately, still have over a 99.9% success rate. We’ll come back to this later.
But as a sales person, is average good enough? Many Sales leaders would likely shake their heads and claim that average would mean failure. Looking at their sales league tables which often show over half their team falling short of their quota’s, they would have a point. They may feel that they need a team of Rock Stars if they are going to make their numbers. There is some logic to this thinking. After all, prior performance is usually a good indication of future results. So a team of Rock Stars would be a passport to riches, wouldn’t it? Well, maybe.
The ‘maybe’ is because there are a number of potential flaws in this thinking. For example, can these so-called Rock Stars perform in a new environment? (often they can’t). Can you actually recruit true Rock Stars? (maybe their current employer will have a say). And is there an unlimited supply of Rock Stars available? (unlikely).
Then there are a couple of other variables that will affect the performance of these new hires. As every sports fan knows, the coach has a heavy influence of the team performance, no matter what the raw talent. And then there is the matter of strategy, tactics and skills. If these are found wanting, so will the performance of the hired guns. So just how much of an impact should realistically be expected from the new hires? And how long might it take to find out if the Rock Star experiment works?
Every sales organization will have stories of hot shots being hired who then failed to live up to their billing. It is indeed a rare sales animal who knocks it out of the park for each and every company they work for. So the net of all of this is that a strategy of hiring for results is fraught with risk and the result of that risk may end up being a mess the successor to the head of sales has to clean up. So what are the alternatives?
Well, we started the discussion thinking about a normal distribution. And we also observed that being average as a pilot means success. So if we take the pilot example and figure out how to make the performance of the average sales person acceptable, our results overall would carry less risk. For example, if we assume 20% are the failing sales people and 20% are the Rock Stars, that leaves 60% of the sale population – the element who could have the biggest impact if they could improve their performance.
The Sales Executive Council published an article that showed that an almost 20% gain in performance could be gained from implementing an effective coaching program. Note, that’s coaching, not a wholesale round of hiring/firing.
Taking another perspective, Entrepreneur magazine published an article in August 2015 titled “5 Things Millionaires Do That Most People Don’t”. They listed them as:
Millionaires work hard
Millionaires are focused
Millionaires are careful about risk
Millionaires are generous
Millionaires never stop learning
While logic may lead us to say most millionaires work hard and are focused, etc; we can’t make the reverse statement that everyone who works hard and is focused, etc, will become a millionaire. But we could probably show that the likelihood of becoming a millionaire (or a more successful salesperson) would increase if we concentrated on developing similar personal traits and worked in an environment where these traits were actively emphasized. So, how could we do that? Well one idea would be to translate the five traits in to actionable programs and processes for the sales team.
For example:
Creating an environment where people want to work harder – build the fun element.
Coach sales people to be laser focused on the important stuff – implement an end to end sales process that emphasizes operational excellence.
Continuously mitigate risk in sales situations – so we focus on the ‘real, winnable opportunities’
Share success with the team – sales is a team sport
Invest in our own skills and expertise – continuously. The moment we think we are the complete article, we’re obsolete.
Back to our ‘average’ pilot one last time. Since even the average pilot executes at near 100% we might struggle to separate the average pilot from the Rock Star. To my mind, every pilot who gets me to the gate safely, is indeed a Rock Star. Every one of them ticks their own version of those five traits. Pilots work a process, they have check pilots review them in the air, they regularly take recurrent training, they rabidly work to remove risk and they look after their crew.