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Determining Best of Breed
The CEO of a company selling business systems asked the HR Director to work in collaboration with the Sales Director to look at the performance characteristics of their top salespeople.
Together they devised a questionnaire and established a series of group and individual interviews to see if there were any common theme that could be identified to support the consistently high performance of about 12 out of a total of 72 salespeople.
The questionnaire contained 11 questions on subjects such as Activity ratios, Use of Sales meetings, Strategic training requirements, Personal motivation, Overcoming bottlenecks in selling and Productivity improvement issues.
The questionnaires were completed, the interviews were carried out both at individual and group level but the results were inconclusive.
The Sales Director then decided to use Knowledge Assessment (SCA) on not only the top 12 performers but the whole of the salesforce.
What emerged was very interesting. The Sales Director examined the results which clearly showed three streams of capability.
The top 12 people had met or exceeded requirements in all ten of the categories covered by the assessment. 42 0f the remaining salespeople managed to meet requirements in five to eight categories but the last 18 scored three or less. In the case of the last group, some had clearly been recruitment errors; others had been inherited. The middle 42 clearly needed a carefully planed selective training programme but the top 12 represented the standard against which all future recruitment should be carried out - against Best of Breed.
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