The Global War on Sales Talent - How to Hire and Retain Great Sales Talent.

"Do not demand accomplishment of those who have no talent. Do not charge people to do what they cannot do. Select them and give them responsibilities commensurate with their abilities." – Sun Tzu, Great Chinese Military Thinker

We cannot blame our sales managers if this thought is lost on them. Sun Tzu had written these words 2500 years ago in an essay “The Art of War” and moreover it was in China. But it is wonderful to note that how appropriate and useful are these words in today’s business world, especially in sales.

Improved legislation from the WTO and other international trading organizations have facilitated smoother trading relationships between economies. With the crumbling of protectionist barriers today’s business world has become truly global. It makes sense to hire the best possible talent to succeed in a competitive business environment that transcends national boundaries.

Businesses would admit without much hesitation that often their hiring decisions have proved too costly for them. At times they have hired “sales personalities” and found that they had only posited faith in a popular myth. Wrong hiring decision costs much more than actually estimated by sales managers. Unsuitable and incapable sales staffs do not only impede growth of the organization, they drag it back. It takes two years to rectify the problem of hiring the wrong sales person. If hiring the right sales persons is difficult it is a challenge to retain them on a long term basis.

It is possible to hire and retain the best sales talent. The following steps would help a great deal in that direction.

1- Attract the Best Talent: Whether hiring locally or globally the challenges posed are similar – how to attract the best talent. Offering the best possible compensation and perks as well as an encouraging work environment will create a premier pool of applicants. The challenge is to separate the suitable from the unsuitable. From posting the advertisements for filling up sales vacancies to the final handing over of the employment letters, organizations should plan everything to hire the best possible talent. They should know where talented sales achievers would look for a change of job. Campus interviews are good if raw talent is the target. Referrals from dependable employment agencies and current employees work well in the case of experienced hands when the referring parties know the exact nature of job expectation of the sales position.
2- Creating the Right Profile: The desired profile of the candidates should be created by observing the current lot of outstanding sales performers that the organization has. Some of their traits, if not all, are what the organization should look forward to have in the candidates. Of course, the candidate should have the potential and willingness to develop the remaining traits that are absent in them. Candidates must have multiple profile characteristics such as: high self- motivation, good sales skills, intelligence, empathy, and integrity. Candidates strong in a single characteristic profile or lacking any characteristic profile should be avoided.
3- Having the Correct Selection Method: The HR department that has the primary responsibility of screening candidates should work in perfect tandem with the sales department, which is often not the case. Psychologists Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter have determined in a study about the effectiveness of different employee selection techniques that work sample tests, which simulate important parts of the job are the most accurate predictor of job success. Structured interviews with a predetermined set of questions and a consistent method of scoring candidates is the second best predictor of job success. The sales and HR department should work together to design the tests and questionnaires.
4- Seal the Deal: Once suitable candidates are identified negotiations should be made to get the signed copy of the employment offer. Delay could result in the desired candidate opting to join elsewhere.

Retaining talented and efficient sales staff on a long term basis is a challenge. Sales people have vast contacts and have information about openings in other sales organizations. Dissatisfaction with their current organization would prompt them to explore a new sales opportunity with another company. To avoid this, the following tips will be helpful.

1. Giving the True Picture: While recruiting candidates the HR personnel and the sales manager should give the correct nature of the job and not hide anything that may latter cause disappointment on the part of the new hires. It works against an organization when it tries to drum up the pluses and hides the minuses of working with it. The policy of non-discrimination on the basis of gender, nationality, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, or ethnicity should actually be in practice.

2. Adequate Appreciation and Compensation: Achievers in sales should be praised for their efforts by way of appreciative compliments and adequate incentives and perks. When the times are tough achievers may consider forgoing monetary compensation. But what no human being can do without is the recognition of his/her achievements. Give generous doses of positive reinforcements to achievers.

3. Ignoring occasional failures and not being overly critical would help a lot in this direction. Having a Long Term Plan: Having a long term career plan for achievers with the prospect of promotion, employee stock option plans, and possible retirement benefits would encourage sales personnel to stick with the organization for a long time.

Efforts towards hiring the best talent and retaining them should be robust. Financially, it makes a lot of sense and saves precious time as well as energy.

Having good recruitment and employee retaining practices would yield tangible results if they are implemented with the spirit with which they are created. The willingness to implement the practices must come from the top management.

Sales Dashboard - What Real-Time Data Sales Managers Need To Manage Successfully

The Need for a Sales Dashboard

What does a dashboard on a car do? It provides information to the driver about fuel, speed, miles traveled, and other relevant information. This data is helpful while driving a vehicle. Anybody that has driven or has traveled in a car knows that car dashboards give information that facilitates in making better driving decisions. For instance, indicating low fuel levels should alert the driver to refuel at the nearest gas station. The driver can also gauge how far away the car is from the intended destination by reading the miles covered or avoid traveling in the night if the battery levels are low.

In the world of business, specifically sales, sales dashboards can help to fulfill similar useful functions. The sales dashboard is a control panel that visually displays most information/data, on a single platform, needed to achieve one or more sales objectives. Perhaps the best definition of a dashboard is offered by Stephen Few, author of the book Information Dashboard Design, “A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives which fits entirely on a single computer screen so it can be monitored at a glance.”

The sales dashboard helps sales managers and executives to get a view of their sales organizations, all with juxtapositions at a glance. The data is current and relevant, comparative, and concise. Depending on the nature of the dashboard it can be referred to as a “Performance Dashboard”, “Business Dashboard”, “Executive Dashboard”, or “Metrics Dashboard”.

Sales managers can configure any of the above dashboards depending on the nature of their sales organization and goals set forth by the strategic sales plan and who is the reader of the dashboard. A dashboard can inform a sales manager about things such as: sales per rep by region, call to close ratio, margin analysis, what is the recent success level of any particular sales representative relative to other sales team members on his team; whether the sales figures in the current quarter are on target to meet sales goals; or are the sales figures in this quarter better than that of the sales figures of the same quarter the previous year. All of this rich and relevant data is only 1 mouse click away,

The Ideal Sales Dashboard
A sales dashboard carrying real time data is a unified interface that facilitates efficient and convenient access to the latest data among users in a business environment. Real time data on a sales dashboard cuts away redundancy in information and agonizing waiting periods. Access to information is instantaneous or with negligible latency.

A well managed real time sales dashboard minimizes wasted time and overheads by giving access to data and helping in taking decisions. Web analytics master Avinash Kaushik opines that, “dashboards empower a rapid understanding of business performance by tracking the critical business data in an easy to understand manner. Effective dashboards can be a very powerful communication medium and greatly accretive to driving actions.”

Some of the salient components of the above statement are:

1- Critical business data
2- Easy to understand
3- Accretive to driving actions.

Critical Business Data- The data entered in to a dashboard should be critical to the business. The aim is to bridge the gap between strategic objectives and operational behavior. The data should align with strategy and there should not be any disconnect between what is measured and what is achieved. Since dashboards need to be concise and not lengthy like reports, all the data entered into them should be relevant. It then obviously follows that they should be accurate and not misleading.

Easy to Understand- Simplicity is another essential trait of good dashboards. Dashboards should be simple and easy to understand. They should isolate key metrics and incorporate charts wherever required.

Accretive to Driving Actions- The purpose of a dashboard is to provide information which could help in taking further actions. Nearly eighty percent of Web Analytics dashboards are extra Excel sheets that are not helpful in taking further actions. Wayne W Eckerson suggest in his new book, “Performance Dashboards”, “Performance Dashboards let busy executives, managers and staff view the performance of key business metrics at a glance and then move through successive layers of actionable information in a carefully guided manner, so that they get the insight they need to solve problems quickly, efficiently and effectively.”



At the touch of a button, a dashboard can unearth delinquent and deficient activities.
But for the dashboards to be effective, sales mangers should ensure that they keep these things in mind while preparing them:

· Concise- Unlike reports, they don’t tell a story, they tell specifics. They just tell if sales are better or worse, but do not tell why it is so. Dashboards help business decisions by presenting key performance indicators (KPI) and have to be concise.
· Relevant Data- Data that is remotely relevant should have no place in real time data dashboards. Inclusion of such data would make a dashboard unnecessarily lengthy.
· Latest- The real time data must be current. Old data may be included for reasons of presenting a comparative picture. Data that is redundant has no use.
· Clearly Visible- All data presented in the dashboard should be clearly visible and be available on a single platform or page.
· Easy Access- Dashboards should be easily accessible by people for whom they are intended.
· Updated in Real Time- Dashboards carrying real time data should have the feature of getting updated in real time and from remote locations if need be.
· Graphs and Charts- Maps, charts, graphs, dials, and traffic lights can be included in the dashboard only to make data distinctly visible and not to make it look flashy.

It is in the interest of sales managers and organizations to recognize that a sales dashboard is only an enabler and not an answer. Creating and managing a sales dashboard is only a part of the bigger picture and should work towards bringing organizational change. Managed effectively, real-time data dashboards could be potent tools in aligning resources with strategy and realizing business initiatives and goals.