|
Assessment of personnel through acquisition
A major software company was about to acquire a smaller organisation that specialised in advanced telecommunications with a revolutionary product offering. The major reason for the acquisition is that it would open up a whole new revenue stream and provide an established base for future growth and enhancement.
The company to be acquired was turning over £67M and had a total field force of some 200 people in sales and support.
The acquiring organisation had been using Knowledge Assessment for its field personnel for some time and had come to rely upon its accuracy for both recruitment and training needs, so the Sales Director decided to have the new company's sales people take SCA as a starting point.
The Sales Director had found by experience that a candidate for recruitment should score no lower than 55% overall but needed to have Good-Very Good (65%+) score in some key categories, namely Qualification, Sales Cycle Control, Closing and Identification of Needs.
When the SCA results of the new sales force were returned, the Sales Director found the following overall scores:
 |
17% of the new sales force scored 64% or more
|
|
59% scored between 45% and 51%
|
|
24% scored less than 40%
|
This meant that over 80% of the sales force being provided by the company to be acquired were below the standard required. The detailed analysis of the results accompanying the output from SCA showed that in too many cases, there would be an uphill struggle to bring the knowledge levels up to the correct threshold.
Upon further investigation, evidence emerged that this sales force largely consisted of order-takers mainly because of the huge demand for the product. This was all very well but what would happen if the phone stopped ringing? The Sales Director was very concerned that less than of one fifth of the sales force he was due to inherit would be capable of managing a difficult trading period if that were to occur.
He decided to use the Training Needs Analysis produced by SCA and salvage the sales people most likely to benefit from an intensive re-training programme and replace the remainder with new people.
Had he not used SCA in this manner, the new venture might well have resulted in mediocre to poor performance and cost a great deal to put right later on in terms of lost opportunity.
Back to Case Histories menu
|
