How to Hire Staff Who Can Sell

Tom Dunn, thePoint
January 14, 2005

Financial institutions don't do a very good job selling products and services because often they simply don't have the right people in the right places, sales expert Jim Schneider, president of Schneider Sales Management, told an industry audience at a recent BAI Retail Delivery Conference.

Schneider explained that a recent BAI study found that the financial services industry isn't delivering new accounts and cross sales at necessary levels, nor do industry people themselves believe their front-line staffs have the sales experience or skills to be successful.

"The problems with our current selling practices can be summed up in three points," he said:

• Sales roles in financial institutions aren't well defined, so institutions have a hard time placing people in the right sales role.
• Hiring criteria and financial institutions' poor reputation as sales organizations limit the applicant pool.
• Interviewing of sales candidates is often so haphazard and unfocused that its predicative validity is non-existent.

To this list, Schneider also added factors such as over-reliance on previous experience and the fact that line-managers aren't held accountable for recruiting.

"Among existing sales people, about 50% shouldn't be in sales, about 25% should be in sales but are in the wrong job roles, and about 25% are just right," he said, noting that a core competency of any successful sales person is emotional intelligence, embodied in such traits as empathy, optimism, and social confidence. "Behavioral competency and ‘fit' with various sales, service, and leadership job roles is the key predictor of superior performance," he noted.

Schneider said there were five basic job roles that described most sales and service positions:

• Service (front-line staff)
• Consultative selling (personal banker)
• Competitive selling (mortgage origination, insurance)
• Complex selling (trust officer, commercial accounts)
• Supervisory

Each of these selling roles requires a few "core" competencies, Schneider explained, and these competencies drive whether that person will succeed in the role.

"Demonstration of a competency is the best predictor of a person's ability to do a specific selling role," he noted, saying that to achieve a high level of predictive validity in the selection of sales personnel, "it's necessary to use a variety of integrated assessment tools focused on identifying core competencies." And what constitutes a good selection/interview process? Schneider believes the process must include:

• A clear job definition
• Recruiting experienced candidates
• Screening for performance
• Testing competencies
• Targeted interviewing
• A consistent scorecard for selection
• Rigorous assessment during orientation

"The payoffs for a systematic hiring system are numerous," Schneider said, "including higher sales revenue per full-time employee, reduced turnover, higher client satisfaction, less risk during downsizing, and more options for your business strategy." Tom Dunn is the editor of The Point, published by CUNA & Affiliates at www.thepoint.cuna.org. Contact Dunn at tdunn@cuna.coop or 608-231-4002. Reprinted with permission.