Is your salesman bad for the product?

Fully engaged sales people are the answer to turning buyers into repeat customers. Profiling tools allow the right ‘behaviours’ and ‘preferences’ to be hired in the first place.

The new paradigm of selling is to identify customer needs and try to solve them with your company's products, rather than simply trying to force feed your existing products down a customer's throat.

In collaboration with DBM, a major provider of strategic human-resource solutions, we will discuss a short case history of a company that took this road to success.

The organisation is a major luxury-goods company that manufactures and markets premium perfumes. Successful marketing of premium products relies first and foremost on a good product, and also on packaging and advertising.

Most consumer-product companies are good at creating excellent products, appropriately packaging them and developing intriguing and compelling marketing programmes.

But the sale is made in the "last seven yards" when the consumer reaches the shelf and is faced with a bewildering array of competitive choices. For the luxury marketer, that is where the salesman becomes most important.

Have you ever walked away from making a purchase because, although you wanted to buy the product, the salesman was inept or not knowledgeable? On the other hand, have you ever bought a product simply because the salesman did such a great job in convincing you to buy? We all have experienced both.

This luxury company realised they were losing sales because their sales force was not doing their job correctly at the point of purchase. With the help of DBM, they traced this back to their hiring procedures. Simply stated, they had none. They were hiring girls with no rigid criteria and, sometimes, for no other reason than that the girl was attractive to the interviewer.

DBM created a profile of the perfect sales person for this company. Using this predefined selection criteria, they revamped their sales force, hiring people who understood how to sell and were strong advocates for the company's products.

This organisation developed an extensive training programme and a compensation scheme to motivate their sales force.

Finally, DBM helped this company survey its customer needs, to ensure that the sales force knew and understood the people they were trying to convince to buy.

The result - an immediate boost in duty-free sales.

Companies spend a considerable amount of money building a quality brand image only to find that the actual purchase experience falls far short of that image. The resulting perception not only leads to lost sales but eventually the loss of a customer for ever.

This problem is also often accompanied by high staff turnover at the point of sale, resulting in significant costs in replacing and training staff.

What can be done here? Fully engaged employees are the only way to solve the problem and such  employees are those who completely fit the job and enjoy what they do every day.

So, how do we find employees who will be fully engaged?

The answer lies in our natural behaviours and preferences - the ones we are born with. These are hard to train and nearly impossible to change; so why not hire those behaviours and preferences in the first place?

DBM helped the luxury-goods company deal with this challenge. A good starting point was working with their existing employees, where the company was able to identify a sample group of proven performers in each country.

Using a profiling tool, a best-practice behavioural and preferences profile was developed and implemented for all point-of-sale employees across Asia-Pacific. The profile tool was supported with in-depth interviews, questions and a verification guide, where the critical behaviours were highlighted.

Thus, all offices of this company, throughout Asia, were given a clear guide on the type of employee to hire - what was the optimal personality profile to build the best customer sales-point experience.

The results have been astonishing: employee turnover has fallen by half, employee engagement is up and the company is reporting that conversion rate on customer visits is up. The payback in implementing the process was less than six months on the employee turnover and training costs alone.

This article was prepared with the help of Leigh Scott-Kemmis, chairman of DBM Thailand. Leigh can be reached at leigh@dbm.co.th. Eric Rosenkranz can be contacted at er@ethree-asia.com. Part of this story was published on June 27.

At a glance

--- Profiling tools help select the right person for the right job, resulting in a fully engaged staff.

--- Predefined selection criteria identify the kind of behaviours and preferences that would be helpful on the job. This needs to be backed with training and an understanding of the customer.

--- This approach leads to higher sales and lower staff turnover, reducing the costs involved in replacing and training staff.