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Transforming Your Sales Force for the 21st Century The book, written for sales managers and executives in the distribution industry, provides a blue print for executives to transform their sales forces into highly directable, effective, focused performers. more info
The Persistent Myth-Locally
Customized Assessments
Copyright 2004
All too frequently, you hear HR departments talking of developing an assessment of some sort customized to their own business and its unique characteristics and needs. When this topic is under serious discussion, unless they are Fortune 1000 material, you can count on several things:
They can't afford the process of developing, validating, testing reliability, and testing for discrimination on a local level.
Their time, money, and energies could almost certainly be better applied somewhere else.
If they are able to afford the process, and have the necessary expertise, and expend the effort-they are likely to discover they have re-invented the wheel!
Those Fortune 1000 companies who could afford the process and put together the expertise and perhaps deliver the numbers of employees and candidates to provide validation-what do they usually do? They nearly always rely on the expertise, reach, and delivery systems of the acknowledged leaders in the assessment field! (They didn't reach the 1000 by reinventing wheels.)
The process of creating a valid, reliable, and legally defensible assessment is a science, not an art. The hurdles are high, and providing the necessary numbers of test subjects (from real working environments) is a challenge, even to large companies. So, what are we to do? We're firmly convinced that our business is unique, and we wish to use assessments that will predict behavior and success on our jobs, in our settings?
Find assessments that are designed for the purpose you plan to accomplish, that are validated for that goal, that are legally defensible, and that have built-in, validated customization processes that allow benchmarking or profiling of the characteristics unique to your situation. Look for case studies that demonstrate success in a variety of settings. This strategy will save you time, money, and grief, and still provide the customized approach you were seeking all along!
Dave Kahle offers a variety of resources that can help your business stay competitive in changing times. To learn you can reach Dave by phone at 800-331-1287 or send him an email request.
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Distribution companies, by their nature, should be sales-oriented companies. But, most distributors don't do sales very well. That's the premise behind this new book.
The book, written for sales managers and executives in the distribution industry, provides a blue print for executives to transform their sales forces into highly directable, effective, focused performers.
The book begins with an analysis of current conditions that pressure the distributor to revise the way he/she thinks about his sales force. Kahle then paints a picture of the distributor sales force of the future. The sales force will be:
more specialized
more directable
more flexible
more professional
more productive.
His advice begins with "See it as a system," a concept that is based on one of the key principles for the book, "When you change the structure, you change the behavior of the people who work within that structure."
