Over the past 41 years, The Self Management Group (SMG) has amassed a global normative database of over 25 million candidates who have applied for competitive sales positions. This unparalleled database has yielded incredible insight into both the psychographic and demographic factors that are predictive of successful salespeople. The current blog series is intended to highlight the 6 most predictive demographic factors and provide empirical support of their direct relationship with actual on-the-job sales performance and retention.
The data utilized in these analyses is global in nature, and includes competitive sales positions across a variety of industries. It is also longitudinal in nature (includes the past 10 years) ensuring no temporal or geographical biases are present.
This will be the first of 7 blog installments, with the final post culminating in the aggregate predictive power of all six of these critical attributes combined.
Each week we will introduce you to another demographic attribute, highlight its importance, and demonstrate its predictive power.
PREDICTIVE TRAIT #1: WARM REFERRED
One of the most unequivicol findings in SMG’s 41 years of validation research is that warm referral sources produce significantly higher quality candidates and sales hires when compared with cold sources. Thus, any best practices recruitment strategy needs to include a warm source component and requires that recruiters actively engage candidates and their social network to build strategic relationships (e.g., Centers of Influences, Nominators, Employee Referral Programs etc…)
Irrespective of any other factors, sales hires that came from warm referral sources perform 36% higher than the company average, whereas those sales hires that came from cold channels perform on average 15% below the company sales average at the end of Year 1.
Clients as a Warm Source
Current clients are a recruitment source that a lot of organizations overlook, yet have been shown to be extremely predictive as well.
While previous / current clients typically make up a relatively small number of an organization’s annual recruits, their average on-the-job production speaks volumes when compared to other types of recruits (warm and cold).
Stay tuned for next weeks installment where we will unveil the second predictive demographic trait…