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Why DISC Scores Consistenly Lead Sales Managers to Ruin

When I first came across DISC in 1989, I was skeptical about DISC. How could the 20-30 set of words in a DISC test help me recruit quality salespeople?

I had signed up for a marketing conference in L.A together with 200 other attendees. One of the presenters Jim Cecil, a Vistage coach, distrtibuted my first exposure to DISC .

It was pre-Internet so administering the test was quite different. in the end, 200 attendees to a $25,000 a seat conference were“ooing” and “ahing.”

Jim explained that DISC alone, is not enough to identify best sales candidate. Without an test to elicit Values, you won’t find top performers.

That said, I took that tool back to Virginia and we began running 100’s of profiles every month. And what I discovered very quickly was the version of DISC we were using was too difficult to use in sales hiring.

Today, sales hiring done right, means getting lasrge numbers of applicants.

We tell our clients 50 applicants per postion minmum. (We used to say 20-30 but applicants have become more clever at faking a track record of success.)

Using the version we had been using with its 20-30 pages of dialogue was too confusing. Plus the verbiage was open to interpretation in any number of different ways.

SInce 1989 I tested 14 different versions but never got closer to a tool that gave us “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

In 2003 I decided to create my own proprietary DISC. What I needed was a sales test that told me, “Should I call this applicant in for an interview or not?”

Most DISC tests have one fatal flaw: They are too vague because they are for many positions. That’s why the Advanced Hiring CORE Style Filtration Extractor(tm) is a sales-only.

We’re happy to share it with any sales manager who is sick and tired of being disappointed with their sales hires. Click the button below and we’re happy to show you an easier, more accurate way to use DISC.

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Hire Salespeople By Keeping a Journal Will Make You More Money

Let’s face it, when it come to hire salespeople is like crawling around in the dark for most managers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I was lucky when I first started at 25 as a Sales Manager to hire salespeople. My boss, Mike, told me that training was secondary to sales hiring. He taught me that if you hire a lousy salesperson, all the training in the world will not make him great. He’ll just be a well-trained lousy salesperson.

He also taught me that if you want to get great when you hire salespeople, you have to keep records. For me that morphed in keeping a journal — well actually two journals. I’ll talk about the second journal in a minute.

But first in the management journal it is important to track which candidates you get with each ad. In this way, you know which ad pulled winners. (And which one pulled mostly duds.)

You also then track how your salespeople do at regular benchmarks. My benchmarks are 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years. At those dates I jot down the level of productivity of the salesperson.

In the Advanced Hiring System, we have incorporated this journal into the sales hiring system. (We’re looking out for your career here.) Plus we want to make it easier foir you to see how well you’re doing with the system.

If you follow this very simple system, you’ll improve every time you make a sales hire.

The second journal, well, that is a personal journal. Life is tough and having a record of your thoughts is invaluable. Being able to look back at notes I made 40 years ago are the most powerful self-improvement tool.

If you’d like to know more about tracking candidates click the button below. We’ve put together a short survey that will help you improve your sales hiring strategy.

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Sales Best Practices During Pandemic

A near complete shutdown of the economy is an unprecedented event. This did not happen during the great depression, not as a result of any world war, nor ever before as a response to a contagious illness. But here we are. Focusing on the important big stuff and developing some best practices will go a long way to helping your sales organization survive, if not thrive, during the pandemic.

The World is Closed
Photographer: Edwin Hooper | Source: Unsplash

A solid sales team is important to any business. We typically devote most of our time to helping companies build great sales teams. If you’re in need of building your team, click HERE to learn more about what we do.

We do, however, talk with some of our larger clients about issues outside the scope of our sales recruitment coaching. I have included some ideas on best practices during a pandemic that we have discussed over the last few weeks.

  • Focus on customer relationships. Retaining your base of regular customers will prove lifesaving for your business. Of course you need to get new business and your competitors who are not focusing on their customer relationships might well be a good target for getting it. Strengthen your customer relationships to make them a tough target for your competitor.
  • Adjust your pitching process. Adapt your offerings to address specific pain points of your prospects. They likely have more time now and perhaps product demonstrations or free trial periods might attract interest. When things return to normal, these prospects might want to keep a valuable product you’ve introduced.
  • Offer flexible terms. Money is tight for most businesses, likely including yours. Minimizing the pain of more drains on cashflow will not only help your prospects, it will also let them know you’re trying to shepherd them through the current environment.

Selling is a challenging profession even in good times. COVID19 is making it an increasingly tricky game. Helping your sales team develop new best practices will go a long way toward recovering the ground lost to the shutdown.

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