Breaking the 80/20 Rule with Job Matching

By Vicki Wilson

I'd like to share an idea with you to help increase your sales and improve the retention of your best salespeople. Profiles International, Inc. has surveyed over a thousand companies and research shows 85% said too few salespeople reached their expectations and 80% reported high turnover in their sales departments. They also claim that nine of ten companies surveyed say that 80% of their sales come from between 20 to 25 percent of their salespeople. I'd have to say that while these statistics are somewhat discouraging, there are good reasons for them being true.

In the book How to Hire & Develop Your Next Top Performer, the authors explain the 80/20 rule as follows:

55% of the people we hire should not be in sales at all. They have been miscast.
25% have what it takes to succeed in sales, but they are selling the wrong product or service.
That leaves the 20% who are producing the bulk of all sales; thus validating the 80/20 Rule.

When you think about it, this really clearly explains why the 80/20 Rule works the way it does. So, how do people who can't sell get hired and why do people who can sell wind up trying to sell the wrong product or service?

According to an article in USA Today, 63% of all hiring decisions are made in the first 4.3 minutes of the interview. A second study shows that over 70% of these decisions prove to be bad hiring decisions. The number one reason that these hiring mistakes are made is hiring with gut feelings, if you feel good about a candidate, you hire them.

In his 1998 book Hire with Your Head, Lou Adler says that "First Impressions based on emotions, biases, chemistry, personality, and stereotyping cause more hiring mistakes than any other single factor." Author and consultant Dr. Herbert M. Greenberg has identified four more reasons hiring mistakes are made: hiring people who remind us of ourselves, stealing a competitor's employees in the belief that they have a better hiring system than you do, hiring based on experience when sometimes 10 years of experience is one year's bad experience repeated ten times, and hiring based on education when education is a poor predictor of on-the-job success.

Despite the repeated failure of our "traditional" hiring beliefs, they persist. We have to question why we continue to cling to these antiquated hiring practices.

Dr. Greenberg says it's because of these four great employment myths:

You can be anything you want to be,
If you work hard enough, you will succeed,
There is nothing you can't achieve,
If I can do it, you can do it.

This self-deception costs companies thousands, even millions of dollars that they invest in would-be salespeople who simply do not belong in sales because they do not fit.

Here's my idea on how you can save money and eliminate your frustration of trying to get people to sell - when they can't possibly succeed. It's a strategy for hiring smart called Job Matching, getting real, usable information about your candidates.

The Profiles Sales Indicator, a modern job match tool, gives you a look below the surface and shows the degree to which a person has the five key qualities of successful salespeople. It also predicts their performance in seven critical sales behaviors; things like call-reluctance, prospecting, and closing sales. It's like having an x-ray machine that lets you see whether the people you may hire have what it takes to do the things that successful salespeople do. With a tool like this, you can hire more people who will perform like your top salespeople.

A study published by Harvard Business Review concluded that Job Match more accurately predicts job success than any of these commonly accepted factors, such as education or experience. Matching sales people to fit the sales job they do builds productivity and job-satisfaction and diminishes negative factors such as stress, tension, conflict, miscommunication, and costly employee turnover.

Willow Creek Consultants specializes in employee retention and development.