The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

When it comes to recruiting superstars, some people just seem to have the magic touch! I have the pleasure of working with quite a few sales managers who have this gift, but one, in particular, stands out of the crowd. She rarely misses!

My job as a Talent Analyst and coach often allows me to be the fly on the wall within our client organizations. I am able to observe the performance of highly talented salespeople and sales managers and witness the milestones and potholes on their journey to success.  One of my greatest takeaways has been the value of effective performance feedback.  It is often the difference-maker between those that achieve greatness and those that don’t. 

Hiring the right person takes the perfect blend of art and science; you bring the art and we bring the science. Let me explain.

Personality tests are all the rage!

I recently read that 60-70% of Americans today will take a personality test as part of a job application process. Gaining in popularity, personality tests are even used in career planning for those not in the workforce yet as well. Just last week my daughter was given a personality test by a college professor hoping to help his students better understand their potential and how they might match up with a variety of journalism career paths. 

I love the ah-ha moments in my job! You know that feeling… when you are talking about something you passionately believe in and then—bam!—you can practically see the light bulb go off for the other person (even on the phone). That’s a highlight for me and one I was able to enjoy just this morning. Talking with a new client who has never been exposed to the concept of strength management before, I was struck by how differently we each perceived the talents of the young seller we were reviewing. He was stuck in the old management paradigm of fixing people and hoping for improvement with additional experience until it all finally clicked. While this salesperson had quite a few strong talents, her account list and project responsibilities required her to lean heavily on areas I knew were weaknesses. The fit was all wrong!

Our conversation led me to share with you these five common misconceptions about sales talent.

1. Our talents can change over time.

Lots of things change as we get older and gain experience both in life and in our careers… but talent isn’t one of them. Our natural patterns of behavior are set at a very young age and once they are hard-wired, our thoughts, feelings, and knee-jerk responses remain pretty consistent over time. Luckily, as we mature, many of us learn how to use our talents more effectively and work around the weaknesses that keep getting in our way. We also learn which behaviors are socially acceptable and begin to conduct ourselves accordingly. So instead of throwing a fit on the floor, kicking, screaming, and crying like we may have done as toddlers, a highly competitive salesperson will typically act like a good sport in public and save that temper tantrum for those first moments alone in their car. They didn’t become any less competitive; they just learned how to handle themselves in public.

2. Talent is good but it’s not as important as hard work and practice.

Many years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the importance of “deliberate practice.” He maintained that, with 10,000 hours of repetitive training, an individual could become world-class in any field. You may have heard the buzz already, but a new Princeton study recently proved that while practice certainly leads to improvement, that improvement is often marginal at best. Practice makes perfect? Not exactly. The closest that practice came to perfection in this study was in the world of games where it was proven that an individual could become 26% better with deliberate practice. Many attribute that growth to the stable nature of the activity; games have rules and the rules don’t change. At the opposite end of the spectrum, this study showed that in careers such as sales (which we all would agree plays by different rules with different prospects), the bump was only a paltry 1%. Bottom line: If you have talent, you have the potential to grow and become excellent. If you don’t have talent, practice alone won’t get you there.

3. You can fix a weakness if you really focus and work on it.

Actually, sort of true… but not by much. If you dedicate great energy and many hours to becoming better in an area of weakness, you certainly won’t get worse! But the ROI is pretty low. Research shows that when we spend time developing our weaknesses we only become about 10% better—we never become great. What a wasted opportunity because that same amount of time dedicated to developing strengths can make us 10 times better! Every one of us has a unique set of strengths and an even larger set of weaknesses. Want to know what makes the most highly successful people so great? It’s the presence of the right strengths—not the absence of weaknesses. The goal is to focus on your strengths and become great in the areas where you have talent. Then your weaknesses become irrelevant.

We all have hot buttons– those things that fire us up and motivate us to work hard. For me, there is no bigger driver than the need for consistent improvement. I strive to become a little bit better every day. A little more knowledgeable. Better able to share my expertise and coach our clients to more effectively turn talent into performance. I’m not terribly competitive with others, but I am on a serious personal mission to achieve excellence in my craft!

Since excellence doesn’t happen in a vacuum and significant growth only occurs in response to interaction with others, you can imagine how important it is for me to have that interaction and receive regular feedback on my efforts. So many good things come of it! Clearly it allows me the valuable perspective of seeing my efforts through my coach’s eyes; it is enormously rewarding when my growth is recognized by someone who is invested in me. But there is another, less obvious reason that I find such value in feedback. It lets me know that my coach cares enough about me to spend that kind of time on my personal development. It’s hard to feel disengaged or want to leave a job when you feel that kind of connection with someone!

You’re probably nodding along with me, thinking about the positive effects strong feedback has on you as well. That’s because this concept is universal. Across the board, in any job, people need to know how they’re doing. It can’t just be at review time or when something wonderful or horrible happens.

You’re invited to the 5-7 Happy Hour

It is human nature to be drawn to negative information more strongly than positive and without conscious effort, the negative feedback will always jump in front of the positive.

If you are familiar with The Center for Sales Strategy, then you know that our reason for being is “Turning Talent into Performance.” It’s at the core of everything we do. 

Showing up to work with that clear purpose every day, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the only way you can effectively turn talent into performance is if the talented people you are working with are also engaged in the process.  Otherwise, it’s a losing battle.

Our recently published report The Biggest Challenges of Media Salespeople and Sales Managers turned up a finding that surprised nobody around here!

When media sales managers were offered a list of 14 challenges that might give them sleepless nights… 14 problems that, if even partially solved, would generate a big payoff, they voted more often for Finding great salespeople than for any other item on the list. Indeed, this #1 finisher scored more than half again as many votes as the #2 finisher.  

Finding the right person for an open position can be really hard, and it can be very tempting to rush through the process or take short-cuts when possible. But, making the wrong hire can cost your company up to five times their annual salary – and once you finally get rid of them, you’ll find yourself back at square-one, sweating over your hiring process again.

If you don’t have time now to do it right, when will you have time to do it over again?

Save yourself the headache and do it right the first time!

Here are five sure-fire ways to either mess up your hiring process or invest a little time to do it right instead: