- January 11, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If I created a list of the top sitcoms of all time, I could end up with a list that includes the following shows:
- Friends
- Seinfeld
- The Office
- Everybody Loves Raymond
- The Cosby Show
- How I Met Your Mother
- All in the Family
- I Love Lucy
- Cheers
- Family Guy
If I sent out a survey and asked you to vote on the top sitcoms of all time, the list would have 100 sitcoms to choose from and we might end up with a list that looks like this one.
The keys to these two questions and hypothetical lists are that the first list is my opinion and the second list would be the results of a survey, a popularity contest, or opinions of the masses.
While that’s all fine and good when it represents people’s opinions of pop culture, it’s not fine and good when it comes to business best practices, assessments that could impact whether an individual is offered a job, or even business processes.
More specific to the topic of this Blog, Sales Core Competencies, Sales Candidate Assessments, and Sales Processes cannot be created from popular opinion, surveys or personal bias.
Conduct a Google search for attributes of successful salespeople and you’ll see a page with these results:
These articles include the opinions of college professors, writers and editors reporting on survey results, and people sharing their opinions. For example, Hubspot, an inbound marketing company published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like customer service and data analysis. Job site Indeed published a list of 18 Sales Core Competencies which include non-sales competencies like leadership and change management. I’m not suggesting that these capabilities aren’t important, but in no way, shape or form should they be considered core sales competencies. Why would people turn to any of these lists of opinions when there is a widely accepted, definitive list of 21 Sales Core Competencies backed by science and data on more than 2.3 million salespeople? Perhaps it is a byproduct of Information overload and confusion. People don’t always find the accurate list on their first try.
The same thing happens when you search for sales candidate assessments. Pages and pages of assessments all claiming to be the one that will prevent you from making a sales hiring mistake. Most of them are not even sales assessments. Instead they are personality assessments being marketed as sales assessments. Again, why use an imposter when the real, accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment is right there, among the choices? There are simply too many opinions and too much misinformation, as I wrote about earlier this week.
When it comes to sales process the choices are even worse. Consider this article about how most sales processes are so old. Yet there they are, being positioned as the solution for selling in the modern era. More surprising, companies are using them but despite that, there are solid sales processes and useful CRM applications that work in perfect harmony, although you do need experts you can trust to point you in the right direction.
Once upon a time I would have been tempted to use a phrase like, “follow the science” but thanks to years of internet misinformation, it is difficult to know who to trust, who are the true experts and which science is real science. Unfortunately, we must default to skepticism, not trust, the subject of Malcom Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers which I wrote about last week.
I’ll tell you what I think but I’m biased too. I believe in what I’ve developed over the past 37 years but maybe that’s all you need to know. 37 years of time-tested, proven, reliable, accurate and predictive results backed by science.
There is no sales assessment more accurate and predictive than Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment. Period..
Not coincidentally, OMG measures all 21 Sales Core Competencies in detail, providing more than 200 data points on each sales candidate along with our recommendation as to whether the candidate will succeed in the role under consideration. See the competencies, average scores, and sort by industry or company for free. You can even see how your salespeople compare here.
When it comes to sales process, it’s hard to top Baseline Selling, a staged, customizable, milestone-centric, customer focused sales process based on sales best practices. Baseline Selling is at its best when integrated into Membrain’s easily customized, intelligent, process-based CRM application.
Finding the truth is only difficult when you place too much importance on opinions, surveys and writers.
Image copyright CNN
