Over the years I have learned one powerful lesson, the quality of the people around you is the single biggest factor impacting your success. While I believe this is true for all areas of business, I know it is critical to one’s success in my field of expertise – sales. I remember it like it was yesterday, I was on a plane flying back from a business meeting and I was frustrated with the lack of overall results our sales team was having. As the leader of this group, I felt personally responsible for our lack luster results. As I mentally reviewed the individuals on my team I acknowledged that I had a mix of A, B and C players. The A player was driving the majority of the revenue and the B and C players were delivering very average sales numbers. It was the old 80/20 rule – 80% of the sales come from 20% of your people. So I thought to myself, what would the results of my team look like if I had all A players?

The answer to this question could change the way I look at my team and my business I thought. But how could I consistently hire A players? After doing lots of research, I eventually landed on the Topgrading process by Brad Smart & Associates. Brad’s firm pioneered their methodology several decades ago with Jack Welch at GE. Of course, if Topgrading is good enough for Jack Welch then certainly it has to be good enough for me! I became fixated on the Topgrading process. I scoured their website (www.topgrading.com) for insight and articles, I purchased several of their books and I even got a DVD to watch some of their experts conduct interviews. Their methodology is powerful. Here is a brief overview of how it works:

Since most resumes are simply a one-page document that outline a candidate’s strengths but hide their inadequacies, I started using a 4-page Career History Form via Brad Smart & Associates. Then, I conducted one or two phone interviews using a specific set of questions as outlined by Topgrading. In many cases, I ended up disqualifying candidates before even making it to a sit-down interview. One of the keys to all of this is explaining to prospective employees right from the start that you will be asking them to set up reference calls for you with current and/or previous bosses. This definitely can change the answers to some questions you ask candidates, since there is a risk that you might expose some of their information later in the interviewing process. However, this comment around reference checks is not just a threat , you do actually follow-up on these conversations before you hire a candidate. Additionally, another powerful step in the process is the face-to-face interview. There are two critical components to this interview which are likely new to outsiders of the program. First, all interviews are conducted by two people from your company. One person is tasked with asking the questions and the other is tasked with listening and writing down the answers. This minimizes the risk of missing something important that the candidate says (or does not say for that matter). The other key to this sit-down interview is the chronological nature of the questions. All of these questions are outlined when you read the Topgrading book and these help you stay on track. It is great to be able to stick with a specific process which leads to consistently interviewing people with the same process. This really seems to take a lot of the emotion and bias out of hiring decisions. (Am I the only one who had previously hired people just on a gut instinct?)

The Topgrading process works, plain and simple. Once I started implementing this process into my sales organization, we went from about 25% success in hiring top performers to about 75%. That is a remarkable improvement. And, this better success in finding top talent has clearly led to greater sales results. Two points of caution though. First, Topgrading takes time and requires you to be patient and to stick with the program. Any deviation from the process or rushing steps can lead to poor hiring. Secondly, outside recruiters can become very frustrated with working with you. They often send many candidates my way with very few of them to be hired. The Topgrading process definitely challenges many recruiting firms, especially if they are paid on a contingency basis. I always explain this process to them in advance of partnering up but I still find this to be an issue for some of them. Even though this process is time and labor intensive, it does pay off. If you are looking to improve the results of your sales team and reduce rep turnover, then I highly suggest you spend some time learning about Topgrading. It could change the way you run your business!