Part II: Are You Fanatical About Top-Grading Your Team?

If you haven’t read the first post in this series, then you can do so here: Part I: Are You Obsessed with Behaviors that Actually Drive Sales?

If there is but one sales leadership discipline that defines success, it would most certainly be the ability to hire great talent. The right person can help you launch your success to new heights, while the wrong person can almost single-handedly scuttle your hard work and effort.

Is your hiring practice strategic, thorough and consistent?

Suppose you are a symphony conductor in a large city. Your first task is to find the best available musicians in the world. The job of recruiting top talent is critical…and often flawed.

In fact, there is one thing you will want to have on hand if you are auditioning classical musicians: a curtain.

Symphonies around the world have taken to the practice of auditioning musicians based solely on performance presentation, and they do that by having the musicians play from behind a curtain. This removes any potential unknown biases that may be lurking.

One important result of this practice: the percent of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in the nation increased from 6 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 1993. Given the low turnover found in most symphony orchestras, the increase in female musicians is significant.

Which leads me to an important question for sales leaders: are you really looking for the top talent, or are you allowing your own biases to stand in the way? Be careful how you answer.

Sales managers who are truly obsessed with building the very best teams in the planet need a massive paradigm shift. They can no longer afford to find someone who shows up on time, occasionally lands a sale and probably won’t get us into legal trouble. The bar must be raised to astronomical levels, and that requires a new level of thinking.

So what about you? Are you obsessed with top-grading to the best? Or are your own standards getting in the way of compiling a truly world-class sales team?

I say it often — Your standards are not what you desire. Your standards are what you expect.

At this year’s Sales Leadership Summit, we’re going to unpack exactly what it looks like to become FANATICAL about top-grading your team. At the Summit, I will teach you a proven process for assessing the strength of your sales team and for profiling, recruiting and hiring the top talent you need to outperform the market in sales rates, customer satisfaction and profits.