Sales & Marketing Management - September/October 2008 - (Page 26)

TRAINING TECHNOLOGY INCENTIVES TRAVEL/MEETINGS Q&A Natural Select-ion Common-sense fixes for your hiring and retention ills By Jeremy Cohen S&MM: One of Select International’s flagship offerings is the Virtual Job Audition, an employee assessment tool that puts prospective hires through job-specific workplace simulations. The question is, how can solutions like this, in addition to other computer- and Web-based employee evaluation tools, ultimately help to reduce turnover rates in companies? MO: When you look at many of these types of assessments, your turnover’s going to be caused by multiple factors. It’s going to be caused by market conditions—you’ll have better opportunities out there somewhere. In the sales realm, people are going to leave because they’re either not making as much money as they expected, or because they don’t like their supervisor. What we try to look at—and have an impact on, from the assessment standpoint—is, can we evaluate the characteristics that are likely to lead to someone’s success in a particular sales role? If you have turnover within the first 30, 60 or 90 days, then you probably made a bad hiring decision. On the other hand, if you experience turnover two to three years into the future, that wasn’t really a hiring decision and could be happening for any number of reasons. But early-tenure turnover means that you probably just chose to hire the wrong candidate. Anything that you can do to improve your ability to better match the characteristics of an individual to your particular organization is going to significantly increase your retention rates. Does the candidate have the characteristics that translate into sales success? Those are key and are the most important things you should be looking for. Secondarily, you should be looking at that person’s selling style. Finally, what are the key motivators for that individual? People are motivated by different things. I think oftentimes, we make an assumption in sales that people are motivated simply by money. S&MM: In addition to these solutions at the hiring I t’s quite counterintuitive, when you think about it. After all, times are tough and jobs are scarce. Theoretically, your company ought to be recruiting superstar sales reps to its heart’s content, with turnover barely an afterthought. Unfortunately—as you struggle not to confuse Bob the rep with the guy he replaced six months ago, or the guy he replaced three months prior—you know the above scenario is much more the exception than the norm. And while this should go without saying, the fact that your company’s in the majority here should hardly be reassuring. So what exactly is going on? Why does finding and retaining top sales talent continue to prove so perplexingly difficult? Opinions may differ, but to get to the root of the problem you need to talk to someone who can see the forest for the trees—and you’d be hardpressed to find an individual better suited to that task than Matt O’Connell. O’Connell is executive vice president and cofounder of Select International, a Pittsburgh-based provider of assessment and selection solutions for Global 2000 companies. With a Ph.D. in industrial/ organizational psychology, he also happens to be a bona-fide academic, moonlighting as an adjunct professor of psychology at San Diego State University. And to stuff his resume further still, he’s co-author of the book Hiring Great People, along with fellow Select founders Kevin and Christopher Klinvex. As all of the above would lead you to believe, O’Connell’s bread and butter is designing employee selection tools for companies plagued by absenteeism and turnover. In short, he’s the ultimate sounding board for all things hiring-related, something he demonstrated during a recent conversation with S&MM. Read on: 26 SALES &MARKETING MANAGEMENT SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 stage, what other retention processes can companies www.salesandmarketing.com www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com http://www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Sales & Marketing Management - September/October 2008

Sales &�Marketing Management - September/October 2008 Contents Editor's Letter Brian Tracy University Smart Sales Sales Strategy Smart Marketing Marketing Strategy Smart Management Management Strategy The Low-Cost Sales Leader Why Sales Process Gets the Shaft Training Q&A Technology Making the Case for Travel (Part II) Travel/Meetings On the Road The Way I See It

Sales & Marketing Management - September/October 2008

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