A binary regression analysis was performed to assess the extent to which ServiceKey® predicts the overall productivity score as determined by the Company. This model was statistically significant. The model as a whole explained between 20% of variance in a company-generated composite performance score and correctly predicted productivity 68% of the time based on this sample.

I really appreciate your coaching and training! While I understood Saleskey and PSS and was using it and getting better with time, I really took a bound in my sales when you spent time with me to put the presentation together to sell one of my prospects who was an analyzer. The coaching you gave me about meeting her needs as an analyzer kept me on the right path to make the sell happen that day. I dropped my voice and tone and helped her realize it was the logical choice for her. While there was a time period she wanted to wait, we overcame that objection by giving her the information she needed as well as again focusing on her goal in her desired time frame and how this was the most logical choice for her. This translated into a $10,999.00 sale! I feel like with your coaching I increased my sales in a smaller amount of time than I would have otherwise just reviewing the material on my own, the practicality was simple after our coaching meetings. Since then I’ve been consistently selling every week, I expect big numbers this quarter for being a new guy!

Again, I really appreciate what you helped me accomplish.

A retail client of our major client transferred $83,000,000 in assets to a major competitor a week ago, a huge loss to say the least. When the President’s Office called the client to try and win the money back they were told that the client would only speak to his PCS (Private Client Services) rep and he did not want any more calls from anyone but that rep, and his language was not friendly. The President’s Office called the Director over the PCS group and let him know. Because the language we teach is used from the top of the org all the way through to the front lines the following is, Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story…..

The director sat down with the rep explained what had occurred and asked the rep what he thought the client’s emotional need was. Without hesitation the rep said the client was a huge Controller (our level III language…high emotional need for control). What we coach is that to influence a Controller’s behavior it’s important to give options. The rep and director sat down and scripted the return call based on the knowledge of the client’s emotional need.

Last Friday the rep called the client with the scripted response saying “We’d like for you to give consideration to one of two options…..”. The client said “I don’t want calls from anyone about this anymore but I will call you directly on Monday and give you my answer.”

I am sure it was a long weekend for the rep and the director. The client did call back Monday morning and said “I’ll take option B”. By Wednesday the $83,000,000 was back in the hands of our client.

Bob’s business thinks about sales using the Hunter-Farmer myth. This approach is championed by some sales gurus with a woefully out-of-date and fragmented understanding of what it means to sell in the 21st century. In this myth, hunters are aggressive and farmers are patient. Sales is about hunting; account management is about farming. The myth contends that hunting and farming are essentially incompatible. Hunters take the lead; like Alec Baldwin in Glen Gary Glen Ross, they must “always be closing.” Farmers clean up after the initial kill.

Bob’s problem is that he is thinking about sales in a way that guarantees a transactional sales experience in a marketing environment that has become increasingly focused on providing an overall customer experience. Today consumers don’t just want to buy a car or a life insurance policy; they want to experience that a company knows what is really needed and works to add value to client’s lives and not just profit to the bottom line of the business. Customers don’t want to feel targeted; they want to be wooed and appreciated.

The Hunter-Farmer Myth was initially developed to explain the origins of attention deficit disorder (ADDD and ADHD). The theory went like this: people who couldn’t focus were operating out of a primitive part of the brain developed when humans were hunters. I don’t know how truthful this is, but I do know that the Hunter-Farmer myth is responsible for a lack of focus in sales organizations. And by the theory’s own internal logic, the hunter is a more primitive state of mind than that required to be a farmer. No wonder this theory appeals primarily to sales Neanderthals.

Farmers always out-live hunters. Hunters are social lone wolves. Even hunting in teams does not lead to specialization; it’s about duplicating tactics rather than gaining a more strategic view of efficiency. Farmers build systems that are designed to maintain long-term results that allow its consumers to live at a level above that of mere subsistence. Look at your own food supply. How many hunters provide food for you today? The answer is none. Your food comes from systems of farming, transportation, and marketing. If we relied on hunters as a culture, we’d still be in the Stone Age. It’s the same with sales organizations. Hiring, training and sustaining hunters keeps a sales organization primitive and functioning at a subsistence level. Bob may not yet recognize the problem, but here it is: most of Bob’s sales are one-off transactions. His salespeople are off to the next sale and rarely develop additional income streams from buyers.

The Hunter-Farmer Myth is really an inadequate parable of sales. The new paradigm is “consulting.” However, consultative selling as a picture of sales is entirely too passive, coming as it did on the heels of a long-running bull market and economic stability. The picture of the consultant was not an adequate metaphor. Consultants sat in a chair and asked questions. At least farmers had to get out in the field, cultivate it, till it, and pull weeds. Early advocates of consultative selling were wrong when they declared, “It’s all about the relationship,” as if asking questions and taking clients to lunch or to stadium suites was enough to seal the deal. Selling is not just about asking good questions; even the consultative sales rep has to take the initiative to contact prospects and move the sale toward its conclusion. Selling is not passive, but active. Not an armchair quarterback at all.

What’s needed is a paradigm that speaks to team work, careful preparation, and being prepared to act decisively at the proper moment. One analogy is that of the quarterback on a football team. Come to think of it, the quarterback might be a better parable for understanding the give and take of the sales experience. The quarterback is not a lone social wolf out to make a kill, but a strategist who applies the resources of a team to develop specialized approaches to problems in order to accomplish a strategic goal. The quarterback certainly asks a lot of questions during game preparation, but who also huddles, and scrambles, and on occasion throws a block or two.

Or maybe we could use the surgeon analogy? The surgeon also works on a team to alleviate pain by applying specialized knowledge and skills toward a strategic end. The surgeon probes during the procedure but only to advance the successful outcome of the operation, never for its own sake. Although surgery requires careful preparation, there are times when the surgeon must react quickly and decisively in order to save a life. For the surgeon it’s not just about a successful operation, but the on-going health of the patient. Surgeons do more than cut; they must also consult, staff an office, and develop a bedside manner.

If Bob wants to increase sales and build loyal customers, he will need to abandon the Hunter-Farmer Myth as unworkable and probably contributing more to his problems than to any solution. Good salespeople aren’t assertive or relational, but appropriately both depending on the needs of the customer. Bob says he wants to create a positive customer experience. In that case he needs to take them out of the cross-hairs of a wily Sagittarius.

Dr. Dave Barnett
Co-founder and President
PsyMetrics Global, Inc.

“Our CSI (client satisfaction index) has risen from around 70 to an all-time high of 90. 90 is unheard of in our space and nobody comes close. I attribute alot of this increase to ServiceKey.”

This month they are at 89.5. This means that 90% of surveys returned rated the service interaction a 8,9 or 10 on a scale of 1-10

In a separate conversation we received a report that attrition has dropped to 8% in that company. Although the argument could be made that the labor market is soft, the fact is there is not a single competitor near that measure. It’s not just the soft labor market.

We have duplicated our program with a significant bottom line impact on client satisfaction and attrition inside the call center environment. This is not a service-to-sales situation so our process works even if up-sell and cross-sell is not the focus.

Read the rest of the study (pdf file).

Sales Candidates and Sales Employees Comparison

Latest study of 184 terminations from financial services company reveals pre-hire behavior patterns of those terminated for misconduct as well as unsatisfactory sales performance. Strong validation of Level 1 scales.

Click here for study (pdf)

Last weekend I was walking along the beach in Rye, NH with my youngest son Nicholas. It wasn’t long before he said, “Dad, I want to find a gem to take home.” Anyone familiar with beaches in New Hampshire knows the shorelines are filled with rocks of all sizes. Over the course of a half hour we conducted a search following these steps: I’d find a cool little rock and submit it to Nicholas for his approval. He’d say, “Dad, that’s not a gem it’s just a little rock!” The cycle continued, I’d identify a rock that stuck out as being different and cool in my mind and pass it along to Nicholas for approval. I searched and searched, but had no luck. Each time I submitted a unique rock for approval, I heard: “Dad, that’s just a rock. We are looking for a gem.” Now, I’m familiar with what gem means to my wife, but deciphering the meaning of the word “gem” to an 8 year old turned out to be far more elusive. Then I found it! I’m not a geologist, and my description is probably completely inaccurate, but I believe my winning submission had quartz with some small black pebbles of some sort mixed in. I finally had it! This time my rock met his approval and he said, “Dad, that’s AWESOME! Isn’t it sick?! I’m taking that one home with us.” My little rock (a gem in his eyes), stayed with Nicholas the entire weekend and is on display in our house today.

As I thought about our experience together that day on the beach, my mind drifted to the challenge of influencing people when we don’t know what their “gem” is. Nicholas didn’t know exactly what his gem would look like, but he knew when we found it there’d be meaning for him. Many of us would’ve seen just a rock with some shimmer and black dots, but to Nicholas, for a brief period of time, it meant everything. Oftentimes, what’s meaningless to us is meaningful to those around us.

Over the course of the last twelve months I’ve been involved in helping a group of call center managers turn their service personnel into revenue generating assets to their firm. In this organization, they are compensated for this “revenue” in the form of compensation for referrals to the sales group.

As we started the program, I learned that in research circles, academia, and the minds of a large majority of service team managers, we make some dangerous assumptions about the service people who work for our companies. Often the perspective is that folks who have decided to work in a service role are not really wired to make money (if they were, they’d be in sales). Other then potentially moving into management, they don’t even have specific goals they’re trying to accomplish. I wrote an article about importance of goal orientation in sales people, and refuse to believe there are no goals hidden in the minds of most service people. These hidden goals are the elusive “gems” we have to uncover to help service people and service teams maximize their potential.

In any environment where there’s money to be made, potential gets lost when we’re not able to help individuals identify the reality of their unique personal opportunities. Unfortunately, the belief that service people lack specific, personal goals has been embedded in the culture of most service organizations. Even experienced service people have been “wired” to come in, put in the hours, provide a good experience for clients, and go home. A respected, and very important calling, no doubt! However, when there is a way to make a specific amount of money, managers have a major leverage point to finding the elusive “gem” for their hardworking service people who simply want to go above and beyond. Since most service folks don’t come wired to look at the opportunity, our role as managers is to walk the beach with them and discover that which has meaning for them. What does their “gem” look like? What will get them engaged at an entirely different level, maximizing their potential and increasing the returns to the firm? I’m not naïve, and I recognize not everyone is interested in material goods and money. It’s about what that money enables us to do, that makes it powerful.

For example; I was sitting with a service rep named Jason in a call center “ghosting” his calls and had knowledge of his potential through an assessment our company utilizes. Based on the results of his assessment, I knew Jason should be leading the pack in this Service into Sales environment. When I asked him how he was performing relative to his peers in referrals to the sales group, Jason responded, “middle of the pack”. Reports confirmed he was slightly below average in referrals to the sales group. The typical management approach would be to tell Jason “you can do more, we need more, and you could make more money.” Since he was solid in all other metrics, Jason saw no compelling reason to act. I asked him if he’d thought the possibility for additional income with the new program. Jason answered, “Nah, not really.” I replied by saying, “based on what I know about you and on what I’ve seen, you should be at the top of the charts! What’s the top person going to make this quarter?”

The answer was a couple thousand dollars. I asked what he thought he might do with that amount of money. He wasn’t sure and hadn’t thought about it. His manager overheard the conversation and piped in with “Jason, you’ve been talking about wanting to go home to Florida and spending time with your family.” Jason’s reply, “yeah, but I can’t afford that right now. I’m thinking about going at the end of the year.” That statement gave me exactly what I was looking for – Jason’s “gem.” Jason and I then spent a couple of minutes talking about exactly what he would need to do each day in order to go home and visit family at the end of the quarter. I don’t know the ultimate outcome of this story, but I do know we shifted the focus away from that which is meaningful to the company and management, to that which was meaningful for Jason. This process can and should be repeated. This is how we help people achieve their full potential. Other stories have evolved over the past year, paying off student loans in half the time, cutting in half the time it will take to accumulate the down payment for a house. A trip that was dreamed of but never viewed as attainable, doubling the credit cards payments being made. “Gems” come in all shapes and sizes.

The key is to initiate the discussion about the reality of what could be, and then enable the rep figure out how to make it matter personally. My usual starting point is to look at one’s potential versus their current performance. I almost always monetize the figure, but in some cases the “gem” is performing at a very high level to quicken the promotion to management. Once I have the value of the missed opportunity turned into a dollar figure, I ask reps to think about what they might do with the money. I don’t ask for a response today, rather I ask them to think about it for a couple of days, and ask family members “if we had an extra $3,000 in three months, what would we do with it?” It’s not the answer that’s important to me. Like my walk on the beach with Nicholas, I’m simply helping them identify the “gem” that has meaning to them. I then tie that identified goal into a daily activity that’s completely within their control. “Based on the data we have for you let’s figure out how many times you need to ask clients about deepening our relationship with them in order to make $3,000 in three months.”

I’m certain there are people for whom I just won’t find that leverage point, but too often we make the assumption that all service people just don’t have goals because they can’t articulate anything when asked to respond. Help them see the true and very real opportunities they have and then let them identify exactly what success means to them. Help them identify what until now has been hidden pain. Don’t be surprised if you see energy, engagement and enthusiasm spike when you’ve helped them find their elusive “gem”.

What is the relationship between job behaviors and personality? Why do many sales personality tests seem to offer little value in changing individuals or organizations? As a performance management company, PsyMetrics Global studies the relationship between what people are and what people do.

Businesses have used personality assessments since the 1920s to help unlock individual productivity. Many sales personality tests on the market today are based on research done over forty years ago. Unless your employees are selling consumer products door-to-door as reps did for much of the 20th century, most of those tests are simply inadequate. They are outdated and typically do not work well developmentally because by the time a person enters the work force basic orientations of personality are essentially hard-wired into the individual. Another problem was that managers were not trained psychologists. Researchers may know the meaning of “drive” and “ego strength,” but these attributes tend to be difficult to quantify and manage in industrial/organizational (I/O) settings.

Personality tests ask about what people are and make inferences about what they do. Our assessments ask questions essentially about behavior and make inferences about personality. Our theory and practice is built on the premise that personality is essentially a cluster of identifiable stable behavior patterns that appear in a large number of people regularly enough to be classified as sub-categories of personality. Extroversion, for example, can be viewed as a cluster of behaviors (initiating social dialogue, disclosing information, and ease in interaction) that occur frequently.

Our approach to behavior and personality is not purely behavioral, however. That would put us in the school of B.F. Skinner and other behaviorists who dismiss the whole notion of personality. Much of the American workplace has been heavily influenced by the behaviorists’ emphasis on rewarding desirable behavior and punishing unwanted behavior. Behaviorists minimize the personhood of the employee and examine only quantifiable objective metrics. They consider the origin of behaviors less relevant than their impact on performance. Following on the call reluctance research of my former partners, Dudley & Goodson, I developed SalesMAP™ to ask purely behavioral questions about selling to help quantify objective metrics. But the wholly behavioral approach was not without problems. Were behavioral questionnaires measuring stable traits? An individual might behave one way in one sales environment and do something different in another setting.

Four Levels Developmental Model

Clearly some aspects of individual performance are more difficult to change while others are relatively simple. It appeared to me that any model of job performance had to deal with both the intangible personality factors as well as individual behaviors. In our Four Levels of Developmental model, Level 1 is comprised of the most stable traits an individual takes from job to job. A person’s Energy, Risk Sensitivity, Initiative, Helpfulness, and Goal Orientation are behavior patterns that are very difficult for individuals to change. By the time a person enters the workforce, these attributes are probably fixed and as such are best understood as aspects of personality described behaviorally. We refer to these as Level 1 behaviors, and they are best managed during the selection process.

Level 3 behaviors govern social interaction and are also quite stable. Individuals’ predisposition to behave in certain characteristic ways in relationships can be mollified if not completely modified. Level 2 behaviors relate to training and management issues and Level 4 productivity differentiators are more task-driven and are mostly behavioral. SalesKey® and ServiceKey® were developed in line with this model to measure the personality characteristics, behavior patterns, occupational interests, and skill competencies associated with job performance in sales and service.

In training and coaching, we seek to change behaviors, not transform personality. No amount of intervention is probably going to turn an introvert into an extrovert. But introverts can learn behavioral techniques to apply to sales and service interactions that make them more effective in communicating with people whose personalities are quite different than their own. Since personality is, in our view, primarily a pattern of behaviors, we have to get behind the behaviors if we are going to understand deeper reasons for behavior and develop complex influencing strategies.

To that end, in the Level 3 section of the model, we adopt a “psychodynamic” model. This approach looks at behavior as being generated by the organism to satisfy basic needs. In other words, people do what they need to do. We do not infer personality from behavior so much as we infer five universal and innate needs that drive individual performance development. In coaching we are not trying to change these needs but to identify them and affirm them so that by giving people what they need, customers are more likely to approach rather than avoid sales and service people, thus increasing productivity. This is not like the many unvalidated assessments and programs that label people based on temperament. People are complex and driven by all five needs. Those behaviors that can be changed are best approached by identifying the emotional needs that sustain non-productive behaviors, either diminishing their strength or teaching individuals how to better channel compensating needs into more productive behavior.