Kinsey Management blog
ales managers are responsible for a host of intertwining sales and interpersonal roles. The balance of obligations varies in different organizations, changing markets, and evolving sales teams. PerceptionPredict strives to innovate strategies that help any sales manager excel at all of their many tasks, exceed their goals, and champion sales teams towards success.
Market discipline starts at the top: the leadership team must define the mission (why do customers buy from us versus the competition), vision (what needs to be done to deliver the value proposition), and strategic intent of the organization. Only then can processes, infrastructure, and assets be aligned.
Maybe you’re preparing to return to the office and manage your first hybrid team. Or perhaps you’re an expert at leading distributed teams by now. Either way, the Team Discovery™ tool within PI Design will help you enhance hybrid team dynamics and mitigate hybrid team struggles—so you can sail confidently into the future of work, and your team can thrive in this new environment.
The year 2020 forever changed the way people think about work as the world learned how productivity
can be maintained and even enhanced when the workforce is remote. Remote work allows employers and
employees alike greater flexibility, from opening up the talent pool, to gaining more time in the week with the
absence of a commute. The popularity of remote work is here to stay, leading to an increase of managers
overseeing hybrid teams; a mix of people in an office and working remotely. As some employees return to
the office, the idea of managing a hybrid team can feel like a daunting task. The good news is that it doesn’t
have to be.
Sales hiring continues to evolve thanks to new emerging technologies such as predictive analytics that can predict and quantify actual sales performance pre-hire. Historically, individual sales leaders had to rely on gut feel and intuition in order to understand what traits and attributes contributed to selling success on their teams. With modern tools now combining both new and well-proven technologies, sales leaders and recruiters can move away from generalized lists of what makes a successful salesperson to a hyper-localized, job and company-specific list of the attributes driving sales success. When combined with data insights, a company can now predict pre-hire exactly how someone will perform.
Answer the questions below to assess if your human capital is powering or hindering your ability to execute. Are your managers fully aware of the motivational needs of their team members? Is your organization fully able to attract and retain your top talent? Are your development, learning, and training programs fully aligned with your business strategy? Is knowledge widely shared across the organization? If you answered “No” at least once, your talent is disrupting your execution and the success of your business strategy is at risk.
Hiring bias stems from cognitive bias, or mental errors in processing information. Sometimes these errors arise from memories and experiences inaccurately shaping perceptions of reality. Biases also result from our brains’ unconscious tendencies to pay disproportionate attention to certain details while overlooking others.
Are your activities and structure consistent with your strategy and positioning? Consider the questions below. If you answer “no” at least once, you would be well-served to scrutinize the major activities being performed by your employees and weigh them against your strategy. If employees were asked, would they say that they spend their daily efforts only on tasks that are critical? Is your strategy a clear guide to help employees prioritize their daily activities and priorities? Do all employees clearly see the connection between their work and customer value?Is individual decision-making systematically encouraged?
It works on any team. Introducing the only tool that lets you see and improve any team’s chance of success. Assess your team’s strategic goals
In the fictional movie, The Internship, interviewers made the determination that the candidates would be successful in an internship role based on their response to the interview question. As a movie scenario, this is funny, but sadly this is just a situation of art reflecting life. In fact, the internet is littered with examples of real life interview questions that mirror the fictional Google scenario above. The problem, as Lazlo Block (former CHRO of Google) emphatically states in this Inc article, “They don’t predict anything!”
A set of well-chosen metrics allows employees to understand exactly how their activities are going to be tracked and how their output will be aggregated into successful execution. In other words, good metrics will foster the right behaviors to execute. Depending on your strategic intent, these behaviors may lead your organization to innovate (by fostering collaboration), to reduce costs (by systematically rooting out inefficient processes) or to deliver outstanding service (by measuring client satisfaction for example).
Sales leaders need to take the luck out of scaling financial growth. By using predictive psychometrics and real sales KPI’s, sales leaders are beginning to replicate sales success and create sustainable competitive advantages.
Execution excellence starts at the top. It is the leadership team’s responsibility to set the foundation of execution by formulating a clear market positioning, communicating it to all employees with credibility, deliberately and thoughtfully managing the changes required to maintain excellence in operations, and being self-aware enough to understand their own strengths and gaps to deliver against their strategic goals.
The economic recovery in 2021 will put a premium on execution. Why? Because the operating environment will be more stable and predictable. 2020 was the year of big strategic changes; in 2021, you just need to execute well.
However, how do we even know how well our organizations are currently executing? Financials cannot give the full picture since they don’t tell us how much better we could perform.
We are a PI Certified Partner because we have a passion for execution – after all, you can only execute through your people. However, there is more to execution than human capital.
We recently became a Line-of-SightSM Certified Partner to help our clients execute better. Line-of-SightSM looks beyond talent to help you assess the five Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and yes, Human Capital.
We are launching a series of short tips on execution. Every week we will discuss how you can improve each of these five KSEs.
An Archer’s Mindset would not accept as normal 77% of the arrows not hitting the bullseye of high-performance. Why have executives accepted this inefficiency in the deployment of sales talent when they would be unwilling to do so in any other part of their business?
This is a great blog by our friend Dr. Greg Barnett. In an attempt to create better, more inclusive hiring practices, we want to share his ideas regarding bias in the hiring process. Understanding the Primacy and Regency Effects (and using great HRTech like PerceptionPredict), will help hire better, find talent, and grow revenues. ~Brandon Kinsey
On the football field, we called rising under pressure being a “gamer”. We had a word when it didn’t happen either. It was called “Choking”. It’s one of the worst things you can tell your performers…..It’s devastating.
In just a matter of days, many companies were finding the need to immediately implement a remote work force as a result of the COVID-19
But what if there was a way to infuse joy into the workplace that focused on harnessing an individual’s value and contributions that truly connected them to the organization’s purpose while at the same time, allowing senior leadership to focus on productivity and overall performance? There is: Optimizing employee talent and making your individual team members feel valued uncovers the sweet spot between company performance and employee happiness.
Never underestimate the power of saying “thank you”. When you practice Talent Optimization, a people focused strategy that compliments the business, building cultures and workplaces that are engaged is easier and sustainable.