Which factor drives winning sales teams, excellent reps or excellent managers? Through our findings, there is a clear and vindictive answer – while excellent reps with an average manager will outsell a team of average reps with an excellent manager in the short term, their advantage will quickly taper.
So the trade-off is eminent, but what better place than this and what better time than now to experiment!

Having an assortment of qualified candidates is the perfect medicine for many sales hire problems.

For example, when your organizations ponders on the reluctance of letting people go who aren’t performing go, it is as though they believe “the devil you know” in a sales territory is better than “the devil you don’t.” Or, as one sales leader told us, “I think in this case bad breath is better than no breath.”
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Really? Is that the best you can do? How about building your bench in such a manner that your sales task force cannot reckon with your decision. Sounds decisive? Well, it’s powerful as well. But then how do you build this elusive dream team, this perfect sales taskforce bench?

Without a solid recruitment process in place, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to hire salespeople. Key steps in the process, such as coordinating second interviews or extending offers, may be delayed days or even weeks.

Inconsistencies within the process, such as how data curated assessments or pre-employment checks are being used, may also affect productivity or retention down the road.

So as a sales manager what should you do?

​Start a process and stay judicious to it.
Your internal human resources (HR) group or recruiting partner is an excellent resource to help analyze what’s working and not working within your process, so you can figure out how to best move candidates through the pipeline.

As you develop a recruitment process, watch for red-flags and how you deal with them. 
For instance, is it difficult to schedule in-person interviews because decision makers are traveling? Consider telephone and Skype interviews for your first round and in-person meetings for candidates who make it to the next round. This keeps the recruiting process moving and strong candidates warm.

Prescreen
This is best left to your software which can screen a larger volume of candidates at a faster pace, freeing you to do other things (such as all that traveling). At this stage, prescreening questions that ask about licensing or education level, for example, explore whether candidates meet the minimum requirements for the position which ultimately reduces the mundane aspect of your work. These factors often determine whether a candidate is ultimately suitable, so it’s best to screen for these skills up front to save you and the candidate from embarking on a lengthy, fruitless interview process. Simple and efficient, right?

Conduct assessments which are sales force centric
Data curated assessments which exactly know which competencies and behavioral checks should be made so that you get your perfect sales taskforce served to you in a platter to devour.

Building an effective process is the key to success
Whether a company is making one hire or 100. A solid process helps establish important milestones within the hiring lifecycle and identify measures of success so that hiring stays on target.

A good recruiting strategy backed with a data curated assessment process will serve any sales organization, large or small while taking your mundane processes for a toss. It takes discipline, but in many respects the process and tactics are no different than managing a good sales pipeline. Make it as routine as your daily prospecting and opportunity management tasks, and you will reap valuable, long-term results from these habits.
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Happy hunting!

Originally posted August 23, 2017

Quality sales drives on team effort and not one individual person. Over time, the market landscape and customers have changed to flesh that statement into truth. And in this alternative reality, the everyday salesperson pivots into the spotlight, becoming what you may call a central point of contact.

He or she understands the product, its complexity, and delivers on its nuances to evolved customers with touch points to the marketing, technology and product teams. You get the picture. You need great people to fill these pivotal roles – roles that drive your business.

Funnily enough, pivots are aplenty in the talent market; but what about ones that fit perfectly into your organizational doorknob? Ah. Do we have your attention now?

Touch Points with Talent Acquisition
To sales leaders tasked with hard numbers aimed at profit margins and growth, recruitment may just equate to an unwelcome distraction – a necessary evil best passed along, and left to, the HR department. Thing is, the wrong (or right) people categorically impact company KPIs, sales culture, account retention and even growth.

In fact, today’s talent-driven market demands a close relationship with your HR department. It’s worth its weight in gold, this partnership.

Having put that out of the way, this article is aimed to unveil trends that matter to sales directors looking to acquire and retain the best talent. So, without further ado, let’s just take a grand look at what we have to say.

Starting from Within: The Salary Game
We start with this because remuneration has never always been the most important criteria for candidates, but it rarely does fall out of the top four in that regard. On one side of the coin, you have sales executives ready to ask for more, even at fairly junior levels. On the flipside, hiring managers identify that expectations don’t match commercial realities or visible skillsets.

Your most talented organizational fit is just as likely to gloss over your offering figures as much a newcomer with the potential to be a top performer. But this doesn’t mean that expectations must be met to stay competitive; just that it requires additional thinking.

Is it possible for sales leaders to work with HR to better leverage strong team culture, company brand, or powerful learning and development programs in lieu of a salary bump? Or, do you require adjustment in tandem to market realities? Of course, the latter’s only possible with a sound grasp around who’s paying what, and for whom.

Nonetheless, whatever the truth – it is a matter of cross-discussion between sales leaders and the HR function.

Sales Recruitment: Streamline Your Process

Motivation and talent are the two cornerstones to the success of every winning sales team. But from a nascent perspective, how do you find the right balance of motivation & talent to inspire your sales workforce.
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We summarized what industries have been going after for a long time and uncovered interesting insights. So here is an infographic. Consider it a gift to the precursor which we will give out in the expanse of this month.
Read on to find out more in this infographic:

Suppose, for a moment, that you are an aggregator of X component. You may have to decide between two possible business models, and you are uncertain about which will benefit you most. You can take your product directly to the market, where in all likeliness you will be shelling out Y number of X to an indiscriminate set of employees. Or you can align yourself with a organization where you will be able to sell big numbers but the embargo would require you to feed in constant amounts at a fixed price.

In other words, you must choose between a B2B and B2C model. If you currently face some version of this question, you may be wondering what the differences are in selling B2B or B2C. For some guidance, read on:

Sales is sales, right? If you stand with certain competencies and skill set you can sell your product nonetheless to corporates, aggregators alike, be it B2B or B2C! Well, this notion isn’t true for most parts anymore.

Intricate dissimilarities in terms of approach, intent and maybe process which have been ignored for ages. Although, these ignored facts are no less important for that kick-ass sales team we have all dreamt of, B2B or B2C.

The Sales Call Stigma, how is B2B similar to B2C?

As a first, they both require an array of special process, the prospecting, nurturing, and the works. You know it!

• B2B prospect generation & nurturing may take longer and involve more effort, but you still need well defined strategy and tactics in both arenas.
• They both require a tight and articulate process automation with marketing. If your sales & marketing efforts are not on similar lines, your potentials might shy away.
• “Sales may go up & down, but servicing is primitive for any function”, once a sale is concluded, the affability of the end-user to communicate with your operations, makes all the difference and this is no difference, be it B2B or B2C.

The difference in push – B2B vs B2C

The Logical and the Illogical Difference
B2C or retail sales are more so than never driven by emotion, a perceivers’ immediate need and non-recurring. Whereas B2B or corporate sales are pre-planned, rational and can be recurring.

e-Commerce has changed the situation a bit but in essence this differentiation stays and cannot be affected much in the future.

Cheap vs Expensive.
Subjectivity is in galore here, but on an average account, B2C deals have a much lower price point and are less likely to be paid out over in dividends. A decisive crossover where B2B sales involve products such as air conditioner supplies and such.

B2B services are on the end face of the coin are often retainer-based over a long term.

One-off vs Relationship.
B2C sales contracts are rarely done on prior relationships and seldom result in a continued manner so-to-speak. On the flipside, in the B2B arena there are instances where the entire process is based on the foundation of prior professional relationship.

Experience.
While there are many B2C sales people with years of experience, the learning (and success) curve is certainly shorter than in B2B.

Your B2B workforce must all be team players and executive decision makers in addition of knowing their products at the back of their hand. That can take years to develop and the right kind of skill to make it work.

So what’s difficult?
B2C sales forces are accustomed to a relatively brief buy-sell–buy cycle and a much closer association with marketing and e-commerce. With no respite against a B2C crowd, switching in between two different business functions gets a little frustrating for the manager as well as the salesforce. Thus, the time to choose wisely is here.

On the other hand, moving from B2B to a retail environment might prove to be too intense for the average B2B sales professional, with little of the predictability or planning they are used to.

While building an efficient & effective sales workforce, organizations should take the background into account while hiring. Are they the right find and the perfect fit? Is there a transition from B2B or B2C?

Many companies find that significant training is required to achieve a high level of sales performance as these transitions present themselves. But the fear isn’t unjustified and it’s not unsolvable. Find yourself a recruiting partner which does the ground work and benchmarking for you to find the perfect semblance between efficiency and efficacy.

The decision lies in your hands.

GodSpeed.

Originally posted September 1, 2017

In the digital age, fast moving organizations can no longer afford to hire employees just as per their resumes and the recruiters’ gut instincts. That’s why use of assessments in pre-hiring has become very popular, not just for IQ skills, but for coding skills as well. The goal here is to use an assessment which lets you dig deep into a candidate’s skills in ways that can’t be achieved through group discussions and long interviews, without bias.

However, the most popular form of assessment is MCQ-based which falls short of capturing the hands-on skills of the candidates applying for a coding role. Since the candidate selects a response from a list of alternatives rather than supplying or constructing a response, multiple choice question-based assessment only tests knowledge and recall and not creativity, unique thinking or the ability to construct. While hiring coders, it is necessary to test the candidate’s skills in real-world situations, customized to your organizational needs. This cannot be achieved entirely through MCQ based assessments and for this, Coding Simulator based assessments should be used.

In coding simulator based assessments, candidates are asked to write a code from scratch, and then the code is evaluated on various parameters. These tests are designed to not only to check common coding techniques, but also analytical, interpretational and holistic thinking skills.

Simulator based tests create a real-time environment to check the candidates’ capability to work on real life projects. Doing so gives you insights into the candidate’s skills and their problem-solving abilities; both extremely crucial for programmers. While MCQ based tests only focus on candidate’s knowledge of theories, simulator based test enables you to test candidates’ understanding of these concepts by requiring them to use these concepts in practical applications.

Correlation between MCQ and Coding TestsMettl has conducted online tests for 100+ companies with 60,000+ candidates, and we have done some analysis on our end to present a few interesting insights.
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It has been observed that the candidates who have performed well in technical MCQ based tests might not perform well in a simulator based test as well.  Over the years, we have seen poor correlations between the performance in MCQ based test and simulator based tests.

Only 20-30% of the good performers in the MCQ test are also able to score well in coding tests. So, while most of the candidates recall programming concepts, however very few can apply them to real-world situations. The key here is recalling v/s understanding and application, and it is understanding and application that needs to be determined.

Simulator based assessments enable you to filter out the very best candidates from the lot.  These assessments allow you to gain insight into the quality of code written by the candidate and answer lot many other questions

• Does the candidate know how to code?
• Does the candidate follow coding best practices?
• Is the candidate efficient enough at coding?

​For the effective and valid evaluation of the candidates’ programming skills, following parameters should be measured through coding simulators.
Following are the parameters:

• The correctness of the code: with an online coding assessment, you can design various test cases to check the correctness of the code, if the code runs all type of test cases like basic, corner, necessary etc.

In Mettl we make sure that every question should have at least 10 to 12 tests cases covering from basic to boundary cases.

• Code Quality: Use of best practices as per industry standards in the code. In Mettl we use tools like ‘Static Code Analysis to check if the code adheres to the industry standards.
• Code Scalability: Code complexity, Time complexity, CPU usage, Processing time, time taken to submit the final code.

For different job profiles, different coding skill sets are required; for a trainee level, you might just evaluate the candidate on basic programming fundamentals but for a developer role you will also focus into coding style, code efficiency, data structures etc. Different parameters measured through these simulators let you dig deep and evaluate the candidate’s coding skills are per the organization’s requirement.

Using coding simulator based assessment enables you to identify candidates with strong coding skills, and also sharpen the identification, by simultaneously evaluating the code on various quality and efficiency parameters, which is not possible through manual intervention.  Automated assessments remove subjectivity from the evaluation process and provide detailed feedback of the candidate’s coding skills in a timely manner, resulting in more efficient hiring process.

Originally posted August 6, 2017

Online assessments, for hiring employees to suit the work requirements, are catching on fast. Online assessment systems allow firms to attract applications from a wider demographic of applicants. Filtering them in a time and cost efficient way is not the only benefit of psychometric testing online.

A reliable and stable method of assessing individual scales for certain roles and how they suit the organization, online psychometric tests are changing the way people are being assessed, evaluated, and hired. Assessments range from normative tests that measure the intellect, to aptitude testing which involves assessing the personality. Shorter assessments can serve to weed out unsuitable candidates at the very start.

The Work Behind Hiring: Online Assessments Change Recruitment
Interviews can be subjective. For example, a salesman will come across well in such an assessment because he/she can sell quite well. A tool is needed to tell if the basics of personality are in place, so that both weak and strong areas can be probed.

Whether you choose an online personality profiling tool, an ability or aptitude test, inventory or a solid behavioral interview, or role plays and presentations, the bases have to be covered to ensure that hiring becomes easier. Online assessments for hiring can be done at places and locations that suit them. This brings out the best in the candidate who can get a thorough understanding of the job before proceeding with the application.

Effective Measures of Behavior
There is a direct relation between testing and productivity. Online assessments that are well designed are reliable, stable predictors of behavior. Candidates cannot evade the inbuilt scale for detecting fake responses or gaming the test. As a result, test results cannot be manipulated. Lie scales ensure that the true aspects of each candidate come to the fore.

#2 Engaging Candidates
The use of online tests engages candidates in the selection and recruitment process. Candidates are more likely to engage as the test assigns a measure of behavior, cognition or attitude towards work, which can prove valuable for them as well as the employer.

#3 Predictive Value
The true measure of the effectiveness of any assessment is the capability to be able to assess the future work behaviors, attitudes, and perspectives which are precursors for detecting work productivity and efficiency. Providers develop products that measure and go into depth, providing an all-in-one assessment. The length of time taken to complete the process and the web pages visited while taking the results can also provide a measure of how tech savvy and resourceful the applicant is.

#4 Comfort Levels
As more applicants undergo tests, to be selected and recruited as part of their professional development, comfort levels also have to be taken into account. Employers should see the benefits of online assessments for hiring. Better, higher quality, well researched tools that are effective can make a massive difference to the success with which the right candidate for the job can be hired.

Conclusion
Understanding the essence of a person is more than just asking a few questions or assessing behavior patterns. It involves understanding their motivations, perspectives, attitudes and what defines them. Online assessments for hiring circumvent the subjectivity of an interview situation or the hurdles of offline testing. Choose Mettl for superior testing products that predict the person and not just his/her behavior in a given situation. Mettl offers psychometric tests that are built keeping international standards in mind. APA, BPS compliant tests from Mettl combine the convenience of online assessment with a solid theoretical substrate to define as well as predict personality traits for the workplace effectively.

In the Philippines, R.A. No. 10029 otherwise known as the Psychology Act of 2009, recognizes the important role of the psychologists and the other related diverse functions and specializations in nation building. This law realizes the importance of the psychological services and also protects the public from untrained and inexperienced individuals offering such services.

I remember when this law was shared in our institution, that we will have a board exam in psychology, from the students I can see a mixture of anticipation and fear. Well, of course it is good news for us psychology students that our program was being regularized that we, aspiring psychologists should be competent in our area of expertise. The other side of it was that, for us to be competent, we need to show it, we need to pass the board exam.

But, passing the exam, exclaiming the oath to the public, getting to hold the professional identification card, and extending our names with RPms and RPs is just one part of the story. Having such credentials doesn’t mean we are finished, rather, we are just starting our journey as a psychologist or a psychometrician.

In whatever area we are going to be in – in clinics or in medical institutions, or in schools, or in the corporate world, whether practicing the profession directly or indirectly, we are expected by the people to consider and uphold this idea – ethics.

What are our ethical principles? We can refer to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct by the American Psychological Association (APA) and to the Code of Ethics for Philippine Psychologists by the Psychological Association of the Philippines (PAP) and the Scientific Ethics Committee. I have clustered their ideas to three main points and this would be a good time to refresh on how should we work as a licensed psychologist or psychometrician:

Privacy and Confidentiality
We are expected to take care of the information entrusted to us by our candidates or clients, to make sure that the information is safe at all times and is stored to a location where it is not subject to being leaked or shared with random individuals. We should take into account that the information the clients give – demographics, judgments, secrets, and insights, are powerful, that the individual can be subjected to ridicule and judgments if the information is leaked.

Competence
We are expected to be well versed in our area of expertise, that we should be able to deliver the psychological services properly based on the psychological theories and processes, upholding ethical principles, and mending existing faulty processes for the satisfaction and safety of our clients.

Human Relations and Professionalism
We are expected to relate to people and take care of their psychological well-being by not discriminating them because of their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. We also protect them by maintaining professionalism. We should not divulge in harassment, or in having romantic relationships with the client especially within the time of therapy, or into unjust use and interpretation of assessment exams. In relating to our clients, we should also give them the awareness that they can decide, for example, giving information and asking for their consent to participate in a study or asking them if it is okay to disclose information on someone, although there are cases which this is not applicable, especially when a safety of an individual is at stake.

These expectations are our mission as psychometricians and psychologists. Using what we have learned in our programs, the theories and processes, we can benefit the communities, organizations, or institutions we are in.  We should engrave in our minds that we are the doctors of mental health. Together with other professionals, we strive to support, to give time, and to serve to foster and promote psychological well-being of the individuals around us.
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Share your thoughts!

Originally posted on LinkedIn last February 5, 2016

You wake up from your bed. Groggy, you look at your watch on the side of your bed, then all the blood inside your body rush rapidly as you see that it was already 6:30 am and you will be late for work. You speed to your bathroom, and then you shower. You leap from the bathroom, finding that it is already 6:45, you are now more anxious and desperate into going to work on time. Skipping breakfast, you slide yourself in your car, start it,  then you drive, trying to race with the time. Then, traffic. Time flies as you glance your watch, 6:50… 6:55… 7:00… 7:05.

Yes, you are late, and you come to work tired and irritated because of what has transpired during the first part of your morning. Still, you expect something better, you opened up the door in your office and, guess what, you saw your colleagues frowning, not saying a word and are all busy with what they have to do.

Have you experienced this?

What if, in that incident, someone tapped you on your back and said, “Hey! Good morning!” The rest of your day will be brighter than the start of your morning, if of course, there are no deadlines ahead.

In a study Capella, rapport is a is defined as a feeling state experienced in interaction with another individual. These feelings come out as interest, positivity, and coordination, manifested through actions of involvement, interest, synchronization, and responsiveness to interaction.

A smile, a tap on the shoulder, a simple “How are you?” on your co-worker would most likely generate positive feelings and interest, as well as the feeling to coordinate and to be involved. Building rapport develops harmonious relationships within individuals and is beneficial to the company.

Employees having the right amount of rapport with one another may give rise to increased coordination and teamwork, also, feelings of involvement may lead to feelings of engagement, when translated to action, may lead to a better productivity.

Also, employees with established rapport would, more likely, be staying more with the company.  When employees feel that they are important and involved, they develop a sense of purpose in the company which would make them stay. Still, of course, employees moving out of the company because of family matters, or personal reasons is another story.

On establishing rapport with individuals, it is important to set boundaries. When rapport is too much, professionalism, authority, and respect pay the price. Positive feelings and interest are a must as long as professionalism and respect are still in place.
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If each and everyone in the workplace will give a simple smile towards their co-workers, you can just imagine the harmony and productivity of the employees. Other matters aside, simple gestures in building rapport create an excellent climate in the office which would be enjoyed by employees and employers alike.

Originally posted on LinkedIn last January 12, 2016
Image by wewiorka_wagner