Hiring sales superstars are essential for building the Ultimate Sales Machine© to accelerate growth, but what exactly makes a superstar so unique? While knowledge and training are important, sales superstars are a rare breed because it comes down to personality which can’t be changed.

Let’s see why personality profiling is crucial for the hiring process and what traits make a superstar so it’ll be easier for you to find a top-producing salesperson for your business.

The Importance of Personality Profile

Without personality profiling, it’ll be an uphill battle finding sales superstars. Personality profiling (aka ‘behavioral assessment’) is a method of understanding a person’s psyche. By understanding the personality characteristics that are most effective for a sales position, you’ll be better able to identify candidates that possess those characteristics.

Not only can hiring a sales superstar accelerate growth, it can save you money too. According to Business.com, “The U.S. Department of Labor claims a bad hire can cost your business 30% of your employee’s first-year earnings; other HR agencies estimate the cost to be higher, ranging from $240,000 to $850,000 per employee.”

Personality Characteristics

Over the years, many companies have developed and refined the DISC personality profile to test potential hires. The DISC personality profile is based on studies done by Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marson in 1928, and it tests candidates by using word association to measure the intensity of personality characteristics.

‘DISC’ stands for four aspects of the personality:

• Dominance: Strength of ego (i.e. aggressiveness)
• Influence: Social interactions and communication
• Steadiness: Patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
• Compliance: Relation to structure and organization

While there are a variety of personality profiling tests out there, this is the model that we’ll be using to identify sales superstars.

Essential Traits of Sales Superstars

A superstar won’t just have a high level of one trait; it’s a combination of different intensities of each trait. However, there are two traits in particular that all sales superstars have in common.

High Dominance

The dominance personality trait has to do with strength of ego. It’s a measure of personal power, desire to control situations, and assertion in every interaction.

Candidates that are high-dominance are a good thing because it means they’ll have the drive and ambition to close as many sales as possible. Additionally, having a strong ego allows a salesperson to not take repeated or harsh rejections personally.

High Influence

The influence personality trait measures sociability. It describes how test candidates interact in social situations as well as how well and how much they communicate.

Salespeople that are high-influence will be naturally empathetic and gregarious. They’re able to put themselves in other people’s shoes and understand their viewpoints. Additionally, they’re energetic, fast workers who perform well on teams.

Accelerate Growth By Hiring Superstars

We have put together 16 minutes of training on how to hire Sales Superstars to supercharge your business. These are things you can start using right now! Things like the purpose of the prescreen and how to get it down to as little as 5-10 minutes and how to come out ahead in negations.

Check it out here! 

The gamification market size in 2020 had a global value of $9.1 billion and is predicted to register an impressive growth rate of 27.4%, reaching $30.7 billion by 2025 (MarketsandMarkets, 2020).

Contests and incentives push people to become more creative and productive at work.

 Gamification doesn’t always have to be a fancy online tool. You can easily create contests and incentives for staff. For example, a framing business owner noticed that his best framer was doing two or three times what the other framers were doing. So, he took the number that the top framer was doing and he challenged the rest of the framers to beat his performance. He told them that anybody who hits that number in a day with no damage to any of the products gets a bonus for that day.

 The benchmarked performance of the top performer at their level drives employees to compete intrinsically with themselves by setting goals for themselves.

 Exercise:

1. What are your top sales person’s sales results right now?
2. How much better would your revenue be if you brought others to that level?
3. What are your KPIs?
4. Have you made your BHAG’s? (big hairy audacious goals)
5. Do you currently have a contest or regular measurement to have everyone hit that KPI goal? If so how effective is it currently?

If you don’t, brainstorm a contest right now that’s more than what they’re achieving with a prize for everyone else that hits this goal. This is your opportunity to start moving from where you are to where you want to be.

The urge to do well is what really drives performance. 

High productivity can be a sign of a healthy competitive workplace, as employees try to show they can undo each other’s work more efficiently. The achievement of other employees becomes yardsticks that serve as reference points for other employees to continually improve themselves. 

People respect what you inspect, this is how you show them what you expect. 

What happens to the employee/team who loses the contest?

Contests within a workplace can have disadvantages as well. Hence, it is important to organize and structure them carefully and strategically. Each contest should have clear goals and serve as a targeted goal to improve your employees’ productivity and your business in general.

 It is vital to create a no-fear culture as you employ this strategy at work. While it is a proven effective way to motivate employees, competition may cause additional stress, anxiety, and poor team morale.  

 Use it to engage and challenge employees, but do not forget to give the lower performing team members a chance to redeem themselves and make up for the loss by encouraging them and making them feel that you believe in them.

 As a conclusion

 If you’re not measuring effectiveness, your organization’s productivity could be lower than it should be and your goals might be further away than they need to be or closer than you realize. So, identify your KPI’s, create performance benchmarks, institute contests, and put the numbers up. Then see what happens in your company or department.

ACTION

If you’d like some help with identifying the numbers you should be focused on, and diagnosing the effectiveness of your company, you can learn more about our Opportunity Assessment.

My “Oh sh*t” moment started to dawn on me as I opened the document and continued to scroll across the P&L.

Looking at all the different companies my father ran, I started to realize I didn’t even know what half of them were.

Flash forward to today, eight years later…

You’d better believe after living in that black hole of misinformation for years, I learned from my mistakes.

POP QUIZ: ANSWER ME THESE TWO QUESTIONS

• How many leads do you generate on average a week?

• What percentage of your leads turn into a sale?

If 88% of executives hate their CRM system, you know it’s probably also true that those marvelous dashboards we all want aren’t giving the proper data.

However, that is only a symptom of the main issue that 92% of businesses don’t even have a sales process. So how can you track something you lack a system for?

“A way to achieve goals quickly is to measure effectiveness every step of the way. If you are constantly measuring, then you can adjust.” Chet Holmes

This last year was one for the record books. A pandemic that swept the world and left us all questioning what will be the future.

That’s why I made a tough decision. Something that my company had never done in its 30 years of business.

Most people know Henry Ford as the founder of Ford Motor Company and the originator of the assembly line.

 But Ford was also a master motivator. 

 One day he walked onto the factory floor carrying a can of paint.

 He marched to the middle of the room and proceeded to paint a large number 6 right on the floor. 

 When the night workers came in, they asked what it meant.

Ford told them that it was the number of cars the day crew built. 

 The next morning he came in and learned the night crew had built seven cars. 

 He then painted a 7 over the 6 that had been there. 

 When the day crew asked about it, he told them that that was how many cars the night crew had built. 

 By playing the day crew off against the night crew, he was able to substantially increase productivity for his factory.

 Gamifications like this are a great way to inspire and increase effectiveness in sales or any other areas of your business.

 This works in any industry. 

 Yet few companies take advantage of this natural human tendency that plays such a large role in today’s culture.  

 How do you come up with out-of-the-box ideas like this?

 The best way I know is CHI’s proprietary Business Opportunity Assessment, a powerful diagnostic tool that examines every system in your business.

 Until now, it was only available as part of our $36,000 consulting package.

 However, as a special promotion, we’re now making it available separately in a self-guided format for just $49. 

 CEOs who have gone through the Opportunity Assessment tell us that it truly opened their eyes to what is really happening in their business.

 The diagnostic tool contains sets of incisive questions to draw out information you probably haven’t considered. 

 But be warned. You might find some of the questions challenging or uncomfortable. 

 This is by design.

 Breakthroughs come when you’re out of your comfort zone. 

 But you won’t be alone.

 If you need help, you can schedule a no-obligation complimentary consultation to ask questions.

 You’re guaranteed to uncover untapped profit opportunities hidden in plain sight within your business. 

 You are also sure to unmask problem areas you need to shore up.

 Honestly, at $49 this is a no-brainer.

 If you go through the CHI Opportunity Assessment and don’t feel you received 100x the value, I INSIST you reach out to us for an immediate refund.

 That’s how sure I am this will help you. 

 Best regards,
Amanda Holmes

 P.S. Henry Ford once received a letter from notorious bank robber Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie & Clyde fame) praising Ford vehicles as great getaway cars. 

 Honestly, it might feel a bit like stealing when you receive so much value for just $49, but go ahead. I urge you to try the CHI Opportunity Assessment and see for yourself.

Stories create a lasting impression

I know you want to create a lasting impression on your potential customers.

But, with the clutter factor of millions of pieces of data bombarding them, how will they even remember or notice your efforts? Research suggests that out of the 11 million bits of information sent to our brain, only 50 bits are processed. So, our goal is to make sure our marketing is relevant enough to be included in that .00045% of information that the average human brain can remember.

This means that if something isn’t that important, our mind automatically deletes or distorts them from our memory. You’ve probably experienced how easy it is for us to forget even the most important of things. While we might have a hard time recalling what a colleague discussed during a recent company meeting, it’s interesting how we can still remember the plot of a movie we saw several years ago.

This is how powerful storytelling can be when utilized properly – it unconsciously leaves a lasting impression on our brain whether we like it or not!

Ads perform 2x better when incorporated with a story

It’s always worth remembering that customers have something in common – they are all humans and they have a wide range of emotions. Research also suggests that out of 1,400 advertising campaigns, those with purely emotional content performed twice as well as others with only rational content.

 Case study: How Kari Used Her Research Backed Story to Win Free Marketing on Fox 7 News

Notice how Kari didn’t have to pay for these FOUR spots on Fox 9 News. Instead, she used the power of market research to tell a very relevant story about what Minneapolis home owners were experiencing right now. It helped to sell out the stock of her product and she didn’t even pitch! All she did was educate and tell a story about the effects of having rats in your house and how they can cause things as serious as house fires!

She took a story from her Core Story and made it relevant for the newscaster so that she gave Kari all four TV spots!

Turning stories into sales 

Storytelling can be displayed in many different mediums. It can be through the form of an article, blog posts, a 2-minute animation, podcasts, Instagram stories, LinkedIn Posts, and even through VR! Whatever medium you choose, what’s important is how you can deliver high-quality messages that are relatable for your ideal prospects.

While storytelling is proven to be effective in marketing, it isn’t always easy to come up with content capable of connecting you to the audience on a deeper level and relevant enough to be shared across different platforms. This is where Empire Research Group has been highly trained over the last 30 years to create the most compelling stories to overcome some of companies’ biggest problems like objections to price, lack of appointments generated, and closing more sales.

Learn more about how Empire Research Group is utilizing the power of story, backed by market data to build your next automated sales funnel to help you create your Ultimate Sales Machine!

Here’s some big takeaways to learn from Tom Schaff on choosing your Dream Buyers:

• When looking for your Dream Buyers, if you’re looking for the ones that have the problem that you solve, you’ll be too late. Ask yourself: what’s the problem we solve, what’s the situation that creates that problem? Therefore, you must look at your Dream Buyers thinking of the antecedent events that cause the need. When you can find the sign that says someone’s going to buy they just don’t know it yet, then you’re being smart.
• Most companies ask the wrong question, they ask:
  • Who do I want to work with, instead of who can I create the most value for?
  • Who’s harmed the most because I’m not here?
• When you can get your list of who you can make the most difference for, weirdly enough, they’ll be waiting for you to show up. That tends to be your best dream clients, when they need you more than you need them. Then you can have even greater success.
• Don’t just look at raw numbers and say here’s a hundred for my Dream Buyers. That’s a list. If you’re going to do that, call the Z’s nobody ever gets to them.
• Dream Buyer Strategy is not a prize to be won, it’s a fit to be made. It’s a marriage to be made.
• Why go after a hundred equally when there’s ten you can make a difference for.

Last but not least, some golden nuggets to keep in mind as you continue your journey:

• Once you’ve hunted whales and like it, you’ll never hunt anything but whales again.
• You can get in front of anyone if you have a reason.
• The word salesperson is an interesting one, we often leave the “person” out of the sale.
• Other people go to work, I go to play.

Highlights:

3:51 How to choose your Dream Buyers.
6:24 How Covid crashed his business and had to start a whole new company overnight. Went from zero to seven figures within 45 days using this Dream Buyer Strategy.
13:23 How to find your Dream job.
18:33 Field of Dreams – Deploying his Celebrity Dream Buyers right now which includes a six foot cardboard cutout of Dwayne Johnson.
25:54 Clever direct mail piece you’ve NEVER thought of, and work like a DREAM.
30:15 Tom’s realization that business can be fun and funny and where it came from.
32:32 Tom’s failed comic career turned into his best kept secret for cold calling technique that landed the biggest executives in the Fortune 500.
39:17 Picking your Dream Buyers isn’t about what you want, it’s about who wants you. Story about college when Tom didn’t know how to sell and yet became a top producer anticipating the pain of his clientele before they had their problem.
46:50 Don’t just pick a list based on a name, what works better is to think. Here’s an example of the Inuit tribe that tracked Whales.
49:09 Stop calling the VP of Sales that doesn’t have ability to buy pencils, time to call the decision maker who has authority to purchase.
54:54 a story of a client that had 960 clients, Tom suggested they fire all of them and only go after 4…
58:45 The word salesperson is an interesting one, we often leave the “person” out of the sale.”
59:34 The best thing you can be is YOU.

 If you’ve watched this interview and been inspired to know step by step how to win your best buyers, click here to get our newly adapted Dream Buyer Strategy course!