Are you interested in taking your sales team’s performance to the next level? If so, it’s essential to leverage your sales workforce capability strategically, using the individual differences of your salespeople to impact sales results.
In every sales team, there are stars and laggers. Studies have shown that the top 5% of salespeople can sell 50% to 120% more than the average salesperson (Hunter et al., 1990). This means that hiring the best salespeople in the market can potentially double sales revenues.
However, it’s crucial to understand that sales activities are complex and differentiated. Therefore, you need to identify which activities have more impact on your business and which individual traits, drivers, and competencies that make your sales team excel in different activities. By hiring, managing, and training your salesforce strategically, you can maximize their potential and impact your business results significantly. Let’s explore how you can achieve sales objectives and drive outstanding business results by leveraging your sales workforce capability.
From Sales Activities to Business Results
To strategically manage your workforce, you need to collect and control the important metrics. In his book, Cracking the Sales Management Code, best-selling author Jason Jordan breaks down the complexity of sales metrics into a simple hierarchy, providing much-needed relief. He identifies business results as the highest-level goals of a sales organization, such as customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and increasing customer volume and product sales. To achieve these goals, sales teams must create objectives that align with business goals, like attracting more profitable customers or upselling to existing ones. However, these objectives cannot be directly influenced.
Sales managers can influence specific sales activities, such as the actions taken by individual sales reps. Building relationships and cold calling are just two examples of effective sales activities that contribute to the desired business results and sales objectives. With the right tools in place, individual sales reps can hone their unique strengths and differences to drive their team’s performance forward. Here is where individual differences come back into action!
Assessing Individual Differences in Workforce Capability
I guess you got it by this point: Some people are better at performing some activities – some are worse. To optimize your sales team’s effectiveness, it’s important to consider individual differences in workforce capability. These differences in traits, drivers, and competencies act as a moderator between an activity and its ultimate result. For example, if you want to increase the number of new customers by making cold calls, a salesperson who is self-confident, persistent, and able to quickly capture the interest of a listener will see a higher percentage of successful cold calls.
A strategic approach to matching individuals with their strengths can enhance their impact on sales objectives. This can take various forms, from hiring individuals who are already equipped with the necessary skills, to identifying areas where training and development can enhance an employee’s natural abilities
To effectively tap into the potential of your workforce, it is critical to understand and measure the individual differences that matter. This requires the utilization of a scientifically proven tool that can increase the efficacy of sales activities. At The Human Edge, we are proud to be at the forefront of developing such a tool – one that can help sales managers measure and leverage individual differences and create a fully optimized sales team. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey and contribute your valuable feedback and ideas to help us achieve our collective goals.
Hunter, J. E., Schmidt, F. L., & Judiesch, M. K. (1990). Individual differences in output variability as a function of job complexity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(1), 28–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.75.1.28
Jordan, J., & Vazzana, M. (2011). Cracking the sales management code: The secrets to measuring and managing sales performance. McGraw Hill Professional.
