Adopt state-of-the art technologies to build winning teams, says study
Hiring the right talent is one of the top three growth drivers to improve the performance of sales across industries. This is one of the key findings of a study conducted by Mettl, online talent measurement solution provider and Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) India to understand how HR can build high-performing sales team. HR and sales leaders need to understand which competencies make their top performers successful. These competencies then must be replicated to resolve multiple issues faced by HRs across employee life cycle ranging from short listing the right people out of the shrinking talent pool to hiring the best-fit candidate for the organization’s unique requirements to on-boarding these right people quickly to keeping them motivated and ensuring regular trainings for better productivity as well as returns on invest- ments. The report called ‘Demystifying Sales Hiring’ is thus an attempt to better understand the nature of sales across industries as well as identify key factors that lead to success in various sales situations and how HR can build a winning sales team.
The study surveyed more than 1600 sales professionals across industries in 2016-17 and found four main takeaways: • Hiring the right talent emerged as one of the top three growth drivers to improve the performance of sales across industry, company size, buyer type (B2B/B2C). • Teams invest inadequate time to know why their top performers are successful in their organization. • High performing teams focus more on competency-based hiring & analytics and performance forecasting when compared to low performing managers. • Many organizations don’t use simple tools like online assessments and structured interviews for hiring the right sales executive effectively. Additionally, in-depth interviews with 65 sales professionals were conducted and below are some of the top insights of the MettlSHRM study.
Rethinking Sales Job Roles: It’s about What to sell, How to sell and Who to sell We are all selling. But, do we all sell same product through similar process to same buyer? The answer is NO. As a result, for taking right people decisions with the objective of enhancing sales performance, it is critical to deepen your knowledge about your unique sales job roles. MettlSHRM India’s 3 factor model with focus on Offering Complexity (What you sell), Process Complexity (How you sell) and Buyer & Environment Sophistication (Who you sell) can simplify this task of demystifying large number of sales roles into 27 logical categories.
Sales Behaviour Competencies Blueprint: Personal Attributes, Work Orientation, Interpersonal Skills and Leadership Skills
With challenging customer expectations, sales team can no longer afford to be laid-back. Top performing teams are the ones which know the right set of behaviour for their unique requirements. Basis our research, we have outlined a blueprint for sales behaviour competencies for each of the 27 categories. These behaviours can be classified into Personal Attributes, Work Orientation, Interpersonal Skills and Leadership Skills.
Sales Aptitude Competencies Blueprint: Cognitive and Communication Skills
Salespeople are the face of any organisation. They are the ones who know your customers and the ones that your customers are familiar with. Smart selling is more about building smart sales team. Cognitive aptitude and communication skills are must have ingredients for smart sales team.
Adopt state-of-the-art tech to build winning teams: Winning sales teams must be built by ensuring that all stakeholders involved in hiring/training evaluate using identified critical competencies. This can be achieved if state-of-the-art technology solutions are adopted. For hiring right talent, recruiters must dissect the incoming talent through competency-based assessments and hiring managers must adopt these in structured interviews.
THE REPORT IDENTIFIES THE UNIQUE SET OF COGNITIVE AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR EACH OF THE 27 LOGICAL SALESPEOPLE SEGMENTS.