At least a couple times a week clients ask “What makes a good salesman, a good Natural or Adapted Style score?”

Before answering that question, let’s review the definitions of what the two styles mean.

Natural Style is the applicant’s “deep down” personality style. It is who they are off the job and how they see themselves. Natural style is least changeable during the course of our lives.  (It can change, however as the result of dramatic life change like birth of a child, death of a loved one, etc.)

Adapted Style is how the applicant sees themselves needing to behave in order to do their job effectively. It is a more fluid style and will change when applicants see the need to behave differently for different jobs.

Research by Judy Suiter and Dr David Warburton indicates that if there is a strong difference between the two graphs stress, mental health problems and job dissatisfaction can occur.

Advanced Hiring System encourages clients to place most emphasis on the having similar Natural and Adapted Styles. The exception to that is where the applicant is a recent graduate and has little experience in the work world.

Steps for Sales Managers Who’ve Let Their Salesmen Get Fat

A client told me the other day that in an effort to cut turnover over the last 2 bad years, they have pared down the size of their team. As a result, they created greater stability in the sales team. The remaining members of the sales team are doing very well financially servicing their renewal business.

His team is fat, dumb and happy.

At a sales management seminar a number of years ago, Dr. Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, was discussing motivation strategies. Bandler said that how we see ourselves determines how we act.  This, he said, is why pep talks don’t work – either the ones given to us or the ones we give ourselves.

This explains why, by nature, we get into patterns of behavior and do everything we can to maintain the status quo.

If your sales team has become accustomed to making their nut by servicing existing business you can forget new business development from them. They will not do it and will do everything in their power to keep things the way they are.

Bandler described an experiment done among the housekeeping staff at a hotel. They set up hidden cameras to watch the staff making the beds and cleaning the rooms in the hotel rooms.

Questions to the staff members about their weight revealed that 83% of fat staff members said they wanted to get more exercise to lose weight. Yet, when they watched the videos, fat staff members moved slower and made less movements in cleaning the room and making the bed compared to the thin staff members.

Overweight people in the study said they wanted to lose weight, but acted to preserved their fat by moving more slowly.

Fat Salesmen Don’t Hunt

If you’ve allowed your team to live off renewal business during the past 2 tough years, don’t think you can change things with them. The only solution to getting new business is to hire new sales team members.

Fortunately, now is a great time to recruit new sales talent. Take a free profile to learn how we can easily predict whether your applicants have the heart and blood of a top performer. Sales Managers and CEO’s Only. Thanks

Hiring Salespeople is Like Training for a Marathon

Anyone who has ever crossed the finish line of a 26.3 mile marathon knows how it is a life changing event. Less than 50% of those who begin a marathon achieve their goal

Son: What does running a marathon and hiring a sales team have to do with each other?
Dad: Everything, son. Everything

Running a marathon requires daily attention to daily mileage goals. You can skip a day every once in a while. Skip two and your odds of success fall dramatically.

Successful sales hiring is also built from the ground up. Step by step we build. First placing ads, then profiling all applicants and finally only interviewing those applicants that have passed the profiles. We exercise discipline in our interview, as we interview each of the three applicants who pass both profiles.

Some managers tire of the process and try to skip steps. They often try to select applicants by scanning resumes. They think they are saving time, but in the end their team is made up of mediocre players. They try to patch that by giving rah-rah motivation.

Just like training for a marathon, half steps always lead to failure. Skip steps, try and train sporadically and you’ll be lucky to cross the finish line running. In all likelihood you’ll be out of the race.

Note: Alan ran The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Marathon, his first marathon, in 2001 at age 48. This year he’s training for the Tel Aviv Marathon at age 58.