The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [46]
For large or medium-sized companies: List up to three jobs for which you should be hiring right now even if that requires replacing someone who is not performing at the superstar level. Next to each job, write down what it would mean to your business to have a superstar in that position. Give your best estimate of the monetary value of hiring that superstar. Now list what you could afford to pay him if he performed. We’ll return to this throughout the chapter.
Example
I had a client who sold Internet Web listings to plastic surgeons. For example, if you are considering breast augmentation, you can go to www.breastimplants411.com (breast implant info) and look at hundreds of before-and-after photos and then choose a plastic surgeon in your area to talk to about it. This Web listing company was started by a top producer. When we met, he was doing all the selling himself. Since he was a superb salesperson, he resisted hiring other salespeople for a number of reasons:
1. He didn’t want to give up the commission he could be making himself.
2. He had no experience hiring others and wasn’t sure how to proceed or structure it.
3. He thought hiring salespeople would cost him more money than they would be worth to him.
We did the math. If he paid just 20 percent commission to the salesperson, he would get to keep 80 percent of the revenue. Plus, if the salesperson sold as many accounts as he did each month, the salesperson could earn a six-figure income.
Based on that, we put an ad in the paper using the highest possible figure as bait. It’s amazing how so many companies put the average income a salesperson can make in their ads. That’s how you get average salespeople. Put the highest possible number that a top person can make in your ads. More on this later.
Within a few months, this entrepreneur had five salespeople working for him and it increased the company’s revenue nearly fivefold. What’s more, the owner himself went from working in the business to working on the business. He has since built a number of highly successful companies and has forever altered his thinking about hiring superstars.
What Makes a Superstar?
The type of people I’m talking about are those you can put in a bad situation with poor tools, no training, and bad resources and still, within a few months, they begin to outperform your best people or build your company in ways you never dreamed possible. Hiring someone like this is not about luck. It’s about understanding the personality characteristics that fit the job for which you are hiring and having the tools to identify the candidates that possess those characteristics.
Personality profiling is the key to finding superstars. Many companies offer tests to determine psychological profiles. Only now they don’t call it psychological profiling. The correct term is behavioral assessment or personality profiling. For the purpose of having one term, I will refer to this method of understanding a person’s psyche as a personality profile.
Just as an example, let’s focus on one of the most developed, validated, and popular methods, DISC personality profile. DISC is based on the studies done by Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marston in 1928 and has been developed and perfected by dozens of companies over the years. DISC stands for four aspects of the personality: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. DISC tests use word association to mea sure the intensity of each characteristic in the tested candidate.
Dominance is a personality trait that has to do with the strength of your ego. It is a mea sure of your personal power, your desire to control situations, and how well you assert yourself in every interaction. Candidates who exhibit