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.
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.
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.
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!”
