- Notice the low recommendation rates for the last three years for the roles with the least difficulty (columns 3-4). You would think that it should be like the 2014 rate when 47% or nearly half of the candidates for those easy roles were recommended. Why is it so different now? One possible reason is that in the past 4 years, thousands of BDR (top of the funnel) roles were filled with recent college graduates and a much smaller percentage of them qualify for any sales role than experienced salespeople. It’s not their lack of skills; it’s their unsuitable Sales DNA and/or their unsuitable Desire and Commitment for sales success.
- The recommended rate for the most difficult roles has increased by 5% over the past 5 years and the biggest increase has occurred in 2018. With our help, companies have become more effective at targeting the caliber of salespeople that are required to perform in the most difficult roles. Their candidate pool is filled with many more top tier candidates than you would expect given the overall shortage of salespeople and the even more acute lack of great salespeople.
- Most companies seek salespeople for roles of moderate difficulty yet only 19% of the candidates are recommended. When the company lacks the required number of recommended candidates, they dip into the bucket of worthies, thereby doubling the size of the candidate pool from which they can interview. The problem is that with sales candidates in such short supply, companies who aren’t using OMG’s sales candidate assessments are actually hiring the other 60% who, as you should be aware by now, are all weak, score in the lowest 50 percentile, and under the best of circumstances, will not hit quota.
Most companies are unhappy that half of their salespeople suck but to a certain extent, they have accepted it as fact – the new normal. They look at the recommendation rates shown above and rationalize their situation by saying to themselves, “There aren’t many candidates out there and most of them won’t be recommended anyway so we’ll just keep doing what we’ve always done.” The definition of stupidity.
Sure, it takes patience and discipline to attract, assess, interview, select and on board salespeople who will succeed in their roles. But patience and discipline aren’t strangers to finance, manufacturing, operations, marketing, R & D, engineering, design, fulfillment, quality control, IT, IS, or most of the other functions and departments in a successful business. So isn’t it time that we stop fooling ourselves and continuing to believe that sales is different and we have to accept the hand we are dealt? That thinking causes executives to have Cause a Rationalization for Aggravating Performance. CRAP. Please read more about CRAP and sales.
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