Selling Skills Aren’t the Only Soft Skills Your People Need
Schneider Sales Management most often works with clients in the context of a comprehensive sales and service culture change effort. We’ve written often as to why these initiatives succeed or fail—the sales training effort, the effectiveness of coaching and feedback, the organization’s sales process, and the level of employee focus and accountability. We’ve also had numerous opportunities to observe as our client’s tackle major technology conversions, wholesale product line changes and mergers/acquisitions, and can attribute the success and failure of these efforts as well. The degree of success is often determined not by the core elements of the change initiative, but rather by how equipped the organization’s managers and employees are from a soft skills and project management standpoint. (more…)
If an untrained interviewer uses an unstructured interview format, then the probability of hiring the best applicant is less than 15%. Source: Michigan State University, 2002.
Decades of research on hiring practices and job performance has proven that the unstructured job interview used by 95% of all companies has about the same predictive validity or success rate as random selection. In spite of this clear evidence that unstructured interviews have little value in predicting on-the-job performance, organizations have been slow to change their candidate interviewing and selection practices. We should either save time by simply throwing darts at candidate photos to select our new hires or we should improve our processes to increase the correlation of hiring practices to job performance. (more…)
The Optimum Performance Profile site has been updated in response to client feedback. Administrators and candidates will find the interface more user-friendly and accurate. Visit www.SchneiderSales.net and see how you can hire better sales people.
As the 4th quarter kicks off and 2010 starts winding to a close, it’s time to start looking forward to 2011. As budget meetings are beginning for the New Year, it’s time to reconsider the investment in your human capital as a long term growth strategy for your organization. Since the economic downturn, most financial industry organizations have looked to cut budgetary spending across multiple business lines with employee learning and development often being one of the first reductions. (more…)
It’s a new year, a new decade and for many financial institutions it’s time to assess and address the status of their sales and service organization. While our focus is on consulting, training, coaching and metrics in the field of sales, service and sales management, the following article may be applied to almost any area of your organization. (more…)
Investments in technology routinely rank high on the priority list for most financial service providers, having dominated the industry’s agenda for the past 15 years. Enhanced MCIF systems, data warehouses, platform automation, call center systems, contact management applications, intranets, or interactive web sites are found on the current project list or shopping list of almost every financial institution. (more…)
