The Key to Identify and Develop High-Potential Salespeople

The race is on. Organizations everywhere compete every day to close more business, capture more market, and out-compete the competition. At the frontlines of the race, we find the sales professionals leading the charge (while being supported by the various divisions of their organizations).

Although the entire organization supports the salesperson—whether through product, price, marketing, or operations—it is the salesperson who ultimately closes the deal, captures the market, and out-competes the competition. A high-performing salesperson can be a crucial difference-maker in the race, but a cadre of high-performing salespeople can win and set records in the process.

What CEO, President, or leader hasn't looked at their star salesperson and thought, 'If only I could have more people like them if only the rest of our people performed half as well…'?

There is no debate about the competitive advantage that highly effective salespeople can provide an organization. Still, there is a lot of variation in how organizations attract, develop, and retain these difference-makers. This variation costs organizations untold sums of money and hampers their ability to grow.

Consider the costs of hiring salespeople who fail to perform. Whether it's the expense of the new hire's salary, the cost of recruiting them, or the hidden cost of lost deals or damaged opinion of your organization, the inefficiencies compound quickly.

What accounts for this variation and the enormous costs of it? It's a foundational issue—organizations simply don't know what makes one person sell more than another. When organizations set their sights on improving their sales capacity, they seek to select the best candidates. But, when they don't know what makes one person sell and another person incapable, they are essentially shooting in the dark.

In "The Mystique of Super-Salesmanship," Robert N. McMurry observed:

"A very high proportion of those engaged in selling cannot sell….If American sales efficiency is to be maximized and the appalling waste of money and manpower which exists today is to be minimized, a constructive analysis must be made of what selling really is and how its effectiveness can be enhanced….We must look a good deal further—into the mysteries of personality and psychology—if we want real answers."

The' mysteries of personality and psychology' that McMurry identified as the key to maximizing sales efficiency are no longer un-quantifiable—they have been made actionable with recent advances in technology and psychology. Psychometric voice-based personality assessment is the key to unlocking the mysteries of what makes one salesperson excel and another fail.

Until now, the large-scale efficient and accurate psychometric assessment of all an organization's employees and customers has been limited by cost and technology. VoiceSignals has leveraged recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral Science to remove these barriers and enable organizations to see all their employees' and customers' personality traits and behavioral tendencies in real-time.

By using our People Intelligence Platform (PIP®), organizations can identify the personality traits associated with their top-performing salespeople and select those key traits in prospective new hires or train to increase the behaviors related to those traits in their existing sales teams.

Intelligence into the personality traits of an organization's employees—on an individual and population level—ultimately enables organizations to make more accurate, timely, and effective decisions that increase profits for the organization.

Our technology has introduced large-scale predictive behavioral intelligence to the race. Will your organization identify and develop the high-performing salespeople it needs to close more business, capture more market, and out-compete the competition?

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