by Joe DiDonato
Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, Inc.
People will read this blog post title and say, “Wait… What?” But it’s true, and once you hear the details, it will help spark your own ideas on how to use these new voice platforms.
The problem that we are trying to solve is daunting: Finding new pools of candidates to draw from to fill the demand for consultative sales professionals in the high-tech marketplace. It’s a new breed of sales professionals that not only have a deep understanding of the technology being deployed but also possess the interpersonal traits of successful sales professionals.
According to Walter Rogers, Baker Communications’ CEO, “There is a real shortage of candidates moving into these new career positions. Many of our high-tech clients add thousands of new salespeople each year. Finding people that possess both the technical and soft skills necessary for success can be a daunting task.” He went on further to say, that many of these jobs go unfilled each year.
So now you begin to see the dilemma. A software or cloud-storage sales professional is as uniquely different as a divorce lawyer is to a corporate real estate attorney. The problem of where to find new candidates is plaguing many large software and technology players who are adding 1000’s of new sales professionals each year.
Of course, the obvious solution is to recruit a competitor’s sales person, but that brings other problems. If there’s nothing preventing you from making that hire, then you might be looking at a very high salary, in a career where salaries are already pretty high. Or the candidate may not have actually “made the grade” at that competitor’s shop.
How high can those salaries get? Business Insider published an article in 2016 proclaiming, These superstar execs made more than $5 million selling business software last year.
Then there’s the other side of the equation. The failure rate of sales reps jumping into this selling arena pushes turnover up over 25% in most of these companies.
With this as a backdrop, the Alexa platform combined with the Sales Assessment & Candidate Analyzer that we offer moved to the forefront of our thinking. Alexa is one of the most widely deployed platforms in the voice market. It can be deployed on the many Echo towers available, on Alexa enabled devices in your car, and it even runs on the Firestick that plugs into your home televisions.
So that gave birth to the idea, “Hey, I bet there’s a lot of technical people in other company roles that might be pretty good at the selling game – with a little sales training.” And with that, we launched 6 free Alexa courses designed to be a primer for new sellers. Each course takes less than an hour, and they cover the following topics:
Links to all six of the courses offered, as well as their simple enabling instructions, can be found on BCI’s website at https://www.bakercommunications.com/audio/.
So now, armed with these courses, people that are in customer support, pre-sales, customer installations and other roles that require a strong technical knowledge can learn some of the selling techniques needed. Those can range from the actual conducting of a consultative selling campaign to entering into complicated contract negotiations with Purchasing to get a deal closed and booked.
But’s that’s still only half the answer.
From the technical candidate’s point of view, one of the most difficult decisions they have to make is whether they can successfully make the transition to a consultative selling role. The combination of these courses, combined with the assessment, will help each person answer the question, “Do I have the necessary skills and attributes to make the career shift?”
To answer this question, the candidate is able to utilize a trial version of a generic self-assessment that has a very high predictability index. It’s called the “Sales Assessment & Candidate Analyzer.” This assessment takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. This free, sales hiring assessment, predicts sales success with a 95% predictive validity rate. The science is based on sales-specific data collected from almost 2 million sales professionals around the world., and it’s the largest repository of sales-specific data in the world. Historical data shows that 91% of the recommended and hired candidates have reached the top half of their sales team within 12 months. Conversely, seventy-five percent (75%) of those hired – but who were “not recommended” – failed within six months.
In essence, this gave the sales candidate some pretty convincing data to make – or not make – the shift to this new career. In short, the Alexa voice technology which is widely available, helped prepare the sales candidates for the potential shift. But the ‘convincer’ for both the potential sales team, and the individual, rested with a very rich sales data repository.
Maybe not everyone who takes the Alexa skill training will end up making the shift to a career as a sales professional, but making it universally available, just might end up filling some of those unfilled slots in these high-tech companies. Who knows, maybe someday someone will say, “Alexa helped me find my new career.”
Maybe this will work for other professions as well? The answer to that is up to the rest of the training community. Are more of these assessment type tests available outside the sales community? You bet there is. Just Google “pre-employment assessments.”
