Data Dome Blog: News and Events

We at Data Dome would like you to join us in welcoming the newest addition to our facilitation team: Babette Anderson.

Babs, a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst, has 30 years of experience in sales and operations leadership and corporate training management. She spent 11 years in the telecommunications industry in leadership roles including Verizon Wireless District Manager, Associate Director of Store Operations and Verizon Wireless Northeast Area Training Manager.

“I’m pleased to welcome Babs into the growing Data Dome family as a member of the DISC facilitation team,” said Art Schoeck, Founder and CEO of Data Dome. “Babette has the real world knowledge to show how the lessons from the training class apply to everyday situations.”

Babette’s infectious energy and high-performance track record managing and leading teams make the classroom experience fun, informative and engaging.

To find out more about Babette Anderson and the rest of the Data Dome team, please visit her bio on our About the Team page.

Just a quick post to announce that we have changed the dates for the February session of our Advanced DISC Certification workshop.

The February dates have changed from the 19th & 20th to the 21st & 22nd. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The January dates remain the same.

We at Data Dome would like you to join us in welcoming the newest addition to our facilitation team: Sara Cegelski.

Sara, a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst, has a 20+-year track record as a consultant, facilitator, speaker and instructional designer. She has facilitated training programs for numerous clients worldwide in corporate, educational and not-for-profit sectors, focusing on topics related to workplace communications, management and leadership.

“I’m delighted to welcome Sara into the Data Dome family as a member of the DISC facilitation team,” said Art Schoeck, Founder and CEO of Data Dome. “Sara has solid experience and an engaging, high-energy style that makes for memorable sessions.”

Sara’s areas of specialization include DISC behavioral style, performance management, supervisory skills, conflict management, customer service, team communications, ethical decision making, leadership development and train-the-trainer.

To find out more about Sara and the rest of the Data Dome team, please visit her bio on our About the Team page.

It’s that gift-giving time of year again, and a great time to use the insights provided by DISC to help you choose the perfect books as gifts for the people on your list. Show your appreciation and support with a book that can help a co-worker or employee to improve in key areas to communicate better and raise their team’s productivity. Give your spouse the knowledge and tools to improve their performance and reduce their stress by giving a book that directly addresses specific areas targeted for improvement.

We at Data Dome have organized a selection of practical, targeted books and grouped them according to the specific skills and behaviors they were written to address. We have a section for development-oriented books as well as an entire selection just for addressing sales skills and behaviors.

To find just the right book for your friend, spouse, co-worker, employee, or even yourself, just visit the Data Dome Bookstore. We’ve organized an extensive list of recommended readings based on the many varieties of report results that are provided by our best assessment tools. You will find books on Coaching and Development – both for Personal Development and Team Development, as well as a book list for Sales Skills and Knowledge. Simply go to either page and look for the link to the section that fits the diagnosis or area of improvement that is the best match for the area the recipient wants to improve. For example, in the Sales section we have recommendations for First Meetings/First Impressions, Overcoming Objections, Prospecting/ Pre-Qualifying, Closing and much more. Or venture into the Development section where you’ll find links to recommendations for topics as diverse as Low Assertiveness, High Self-Control, Dislike for Structure, or Sparking Creativity – in fact, our book recommendations cover the spectrum of Working, Relating, Thinking and Decision-Making.

All transactions are made through our associate account with Amazon so your buying experience and delivery options are safe, secure and reliable.

These books and our assessment tools are a valuable resource for coaching and mentoring, as well as for personal development. We at Data Dome wish you and yours a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season and a New Year filled with growth and improved productivity and communication.

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

Okay, make that 34 years ago in this galaxy right here… an iconic character was introduced to the world and he instantly became one of the most recognized and feared (and lampooned) villains in history. I’m of course talking about none other than Darth Vader.

In the original movie, a.k.a. Episode IV: A New Hope, the Lord of the Sith emerges as a character of pure menace, and also one of pure initiative. certainly Vader is not past using a little force, or even The Force, to get things done. Hmmm, where have we heard that sort of description before? Sounds a little like a DISC behavioral style, doesn’t it?

Forceful, decisive, goal-oriented, intimidating… where can we find these terms grouped together? On the DISC adjective chart, of course. Just look in the column marked High D. Yes Lord Vader is a High D – perhaps the king of the D’s. Want some examples:

Forceful – how about the opening scene where his ship overtakes and boards the rebel vessel? Or when he lifts one of the rebels off the ground with one hand to question him?

Decisive – Vader never hesitates when faced with a decision. From field promotions (and throat-crushing demotions) to dispatching the Emperor himself, Darth has never been one to shy away from making the tough calls.

Goal-oriented – When your replacement Death Star is falling behind in production who do you call? Emperor Palpatine knows who the galaxy’s top fixer is – good ol’ Darth is just the fellow to put things back on schedule.

Intimidating – 6’6″ tall, known to choke people to death for failure – even when they’re not on the same starship, a history of violent rages (we’re not saying that a high D means you’re violent, but D’s can get angry when they don’t get their way), handy with a light saber and one of the best fighter pilots in the galaxy. If that’s not enough to intimidate you then you’ve always got the creepy helmet and raspy aqualung breathing to keep you shaking in your boots. No, I don’t think that anyone liked to bring our Vader any bad news.

But even Darth Vader, Big D, that he may be, was not one dimensional in his behavior. Like all of us, he exhibited a range of behaviors that could have been charted on a DISC graph had the Empire had access to some quality DISC assessments. (Ever notice the resemblance between a DISC Wheel and an Imperial chart?)

So what would we find if we looked beyond Darth Vader’s D? Well without doubt a low I: When not leading a boarding party or giving orders he tended to stay in self-imposed isolation in his hyperbaric chamber. There is also that small incident of slaughtering an entire village of Sand People.

What about Vader’s C? He displayed many high C characteristics: he was a strict disciplinarian, demanded rigid adherence to the chain of command, and as the Emperor’s right hand man (even if that hand was artificial) was on a mission to preserve peace and order throughout the galaxy. On the other hand, Darth Vader was not shown to be a micro-manager as are many high C’s. He would set goals and timetables, and although he dealt really harshly with failure, he did give room for the admirals beneath him to take their own initiative and make their own mistakes. As a youth, while still known as Anakin, Darth bridled against the restrictions and discipline of the Jedi Council – something a high C wouldn’t do unless they had their own set of rules which they felt were superior. The times when Anakin breaks the rules he is reacting chaotically and emotionally, not methodically following an alternate rule set. Chances are the adult Darth Vader’s C would measure above the line, but not particularly high.

Finally, what about Vader’s S? There is some real tension here. Darth Vader exhibits some particularly High S tendencies – a reluctance to change or accept change, a tendency to suppress expression – suppress that is until it boils over in uncontrolled rage. He is generally unimpressed with new technology, trusting more in the old ways of the Force, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed….” Then there is also that “sad devotion to that ancient religion…” When the ways of the Dark Side of the force are questioned he lashes out and intones “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Few things succeed at provoking a strong response from a High S like Darth quite like questioning his world view.

Some people might be confused by the High D also exhibiting a High S, but as discussed previously in our post on Me-Me conflicts, it is important to keep in mind that the opposite of a High D is a Low D, not a High S.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this installment in our ongoing World According to DISC series, and no matter what corner of the galaxy you’re exploring, may the Force (and the DISC) be with you.

It is a question that has becoming more and more prevalent for business owners and sales managers, “Why isn’t my sales team performing like it used to?” Fingers get pointed here and there, people mutter about competition and the economy, but you start to suspect that the real truth is that some of the players on your team aren’t the performers that you thought they were. When the economy is strong or when a business has found a new and productive niche, it is easy for a sales team to hide its weaknesses. The opportunities are so plentiful that there is more order-taking going on than actual selling, and it is very difficult to distinguish who on your team is effectively applying and cultivating true selling skills and who is coasting on “low hanging fruit” that virtually anyone could close. Or consider the salesperson fortunate to have a plum territory that always yields enough results to meet quota., but might be an even richer vein to mine in the hands of a more capable individual – but who would know? And let’s face it, during the good times we don’t usual care to scrutinize these things so closely – we need bodies in suits out there closing the deals and if the numbers are there who cares how you get them?

And then, along comes a recession. In the last few years more businesses are seeing their sales teams underperform against expectations – realizing that their ranks are cluttered with order-takers who can’t find or close the deal in a tough economy. It starts to become clearer who is still able to bring in the bacon, but it can still be hard to tell who among the underperformers is truly a dud, and who can be salvaged.

When the economy sours a lot of the easy deals go away: the call-ins, the referral business, etc. Businesses see the fall-off in closure rates and some react by investing in expensive training and hiring motivational speakers to whip up the team’s enthusiasm, or take the “Glengarry Glenn Ross” approach to brow beat the sales team into better performance. However, these efforts can be wasted if invested in the wrong people: Anyone, practically, can take an order that has been called-in, but when those easy orders stop coming a real salesperson must have the skills and attitude to go out and prospect for new opportunities, listen to customers needs, develop the relationships, establish trust, qualify the opportunities and understand & execute the closing process. Knowing how to read the buyer and having the nimbleness to adjust accordingly become imperative.

So, if your sales are down is it just because the market is down or is it also due to the fact that your sales team isn’t as good as you thought it was? According to Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney of Caliper, “55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else.” This startling conclusion was reached while researching for their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer: The Five Qualities That Make Salespeople Great. The team reached this alarming statistic by comparing actual sales performance data with the results of hundreds of thousands of assessments.

How does your staff compare? Any behavioral style can be successful at selling if they have the right knowledge and attitude: they need the knowledge to know how to demonstrate, prospect, qualify, listen, read the buyers, etc., and the need the attitude to adjust their communication style to the needs of the situation. Without the right attitude the knowledge is wasted, without the knowledge the salesperson is underequipped to do the job. This is where advanced objective assessment tools can be so helpful. Sales-specific tools quantify the salesperson’s knowledge in key selling skills and give objective insights into the individual’s attitudes. These tools are capable of not only identifying areas for improvement, but can also direct you to resources that are applicable to the specific problem areas found. This makes it easy for the manager to supply the salesperson with the means of improvement. If they want to get better at their job they now have the tools to do so.

Salavageability of the underperforming salesperson is ultimately determined by the attitude of the salesperson – willingness to learn and focused effort to apply new skills can turn around performance issues and strengthen weaknesses, but as they say “you can lead a horse to water…” If you supply prescribed information to target knowledge improvement and training that is customized to the individual and that underperforming individual refuses to take advantage of those resources then, well, the decision becomes very easy: dump ‘em. Sinking resources into an individual without the attitude for improvement is wasted money and keeping a low, unsalvageable performer in a spot that could be occupied by a strong performer has a high opportunity cost. On the other hand, if the salesperson in question takes to the study and starts applying the new knowledge, the decision is again easy, in fact it may simply be self-correcting as the poor performer with the right attitude continues to attend to the identified weaknesses with the targeted resources for study and improvement. As skills and confidence grow, so will performance.

From a team development perspective the sales-potential assessment allows coaching and training expenditures to shift from broad-based generalized approaches to hyper-targeted surgical strikes on an individual’s problem areas – the one’s an individual is most likely to be motivated to work on since the training is highly applicable and the improvements are likely to come far quicker, than in a generalized “ground up” approach.

In tough economic times it is more important than ever before to separate the wheat from the chaff on your sales team. Objective assessment of skills and attitudes can help you prune the weakest links and salvage those with the attitude, if not yet all the skills, for sales success.

In a slide show recently published by the Harvard Business Review, researchers Lynette Ryals and Iain Davies present some fascinating and eye-opening findings regarding sales effectiveness. Their study based on observation of 800 sales professionals in actual live sales meetings led them to conclude that only 37% of sales professionals were consistently effective in achieving results.

Their findings categorized the study group into eight classifications of behavior patterns: Socializers, Aggressors, Narrators, Focusers, Storytellers, Consultants, Closers, Experts. According to the study only the last three, Experts, Closers and Consultants, were able to deliver consistent results. Together these three groups comprised just 37% of the sample.

Also of interest were some data points that debunked some “common knowledge” assumptions about what makes a good salesperson. Conventional wisdom and sales folklore point to the socializing sales professional and the hard-driving aggressor as the desirable sales personalities, yet in this study these two groups were the bottom performers. The aggressors could occasionally have a big win, but their performance on average was poor, while the socializers would get caught up in the small talk and not keep the sales pitch in focus.

The authors noted that “a disproportionate amount of training is allocated to presentation and rapport skills, as well as the actual sales pitch” and therefore these skills had become commodified across the field.

We, at Data Dome agree that much of the focus of sales training tends to overlook behavioral issues and instead focus on closing skills and process methodologies. However, as this Harvard study indicates, behaviors are more indicative of sales performance. Hiring salespeople is often an error prone process filled with subjective decisions that can bring disappointing results – just ask the sales managers who hired the Aggressors and Socializers in the study. This is one of the reasons why we encourage the use of behavioral and motivator focused tools to identify candidates with high sales potential. Objective assessments eliminate much of the guesswork whether they’re used as a selection aid during the hiring process or as a development aid to diagnose specific behavior and motivator weaknesses that may lower an individual’s sales success potential. These tools can also be valuable in recommending targeted training for awareness and improvement in these areas.

A recent DISC question from a reader arrived via our Ask the Expert form:

** I know 2 very different managers with exactly the same red score of about 45/100. One is angry and impatient yet lacks ambition, motivation and drive. The other one is highly driven but cool, v. hard to anger. So my question is, based on the fact that DISC has an algorithm, can we infer a high “drive” / motivation score for someone with a medium red score who just doesn’t get angry ? **

Art’s answer:
I want to first take this opportunity to discuss the format of this question before exploring an answer:

We often get questions like this, which are unfortunately vague regarding some of the details needed to provide a precise answer. The reader may not be aware if they have only been exposed to one version of DISC that there are in fact many publishers of DISC assessments – and not all of them present information the same way. This question refers to a specific red score of 45/100, but does not specify which DISC system they are using, nor which DISC category is represented by the color red. Although the some DISC publishers use the colors red, green, blue and yellow they don’t all use that palette – some use brown, red, blue and yellow, and some DISC consultants impose their own color branding on the DISC categories. Thus red may represent I in one company’s assessment report, but it represents D in another. Likewise, some DISC reporting algorithms only able to generate a dozen or so reports based on variations of the behavioral scores of an individual while other DISC systems can assign an individual to one of literally hundreds of report variations. For more information on some of the differences in DISC systems I recommend our article Good DISC vs. Bad DISC.

When submitting a question through our Ask the Expert form it will help if you can provide the following information along with your question:

• The name of the DISC publisher who produced your assessment
• The DISC distributor or consulting company who administered the assessment
• If you are asking about a specific profile please provide the complete score in all four areas as well as Natural and Adapted scores if provided.

Following these guidelines will make it possible to provide more accurate answers to your queries.

Now, on to the answer…
Regardless of the vagueness of the question that was submitted, there is a point that can be made based on information inferred from the narrative provided by the asker:

In the description of the two managers there are a couple of words used that give clues to information that was left out of the question – the words are “angry” describing the first manager and “highly driven” describing the second one. Although there isn’t really enough information here to know for certain, on the surface it appears that both managers have a strong D, but they are expressing that D in different ways.

If you are using a DISC publisher that can only provide a few possible reporting variations, you are going to get an over-generalized report. It will be stretched over too wide a variety of DISC combinations. For instance, there is a big difference between a very high D with a low C – someone with the force of a runaway train with no tracks (or rules) to guide that force – and a very high D with a high C – a far more controlled individual who is deliberate and less likely to show anger, etc.). Likewise, a very high D with a low S is far less patient and much quicker to anger than a high D with a high S who tends to suppress anger (until it comes to an explosive head). So, a DISC interpretation with fewer report variations is not going to give you as detailed an analysis as one whose algorithms produce many report variations, in fact the fewer the reports a system provides the higher likelihood of inaccurate results.

The other factor that is important to consider when two people share similar scores in one or more areas, but exhibit divergent behaviors, is what I call “Awareness & Attitude”. Is the high D aware of how they come across, and what is their attitude towards adjusting or adapting? Emotional intelligence profiles among other approaches address this factor, and it is very important in analyzing how we apply ourselves behaviorally. For example, consider the difference between a high D that wants everyone to change for them (a “my way or the highway” person) vs. a high D that realizes how counterproductive their high D can be in a team setting, and is willing to adapt/adjust to other styles to be more collaborative and less dictatorial.

A DISC report in itself reveals behavioral tendencies, not necessarily how one is applying those tendencies. And the more intense their tendencies are, the more important it is to understand their “Awareness and Attitude”.

What’s your question?

Data Dome’s resident expert is our founder, Art Schoeck. A member of TTI’s prestigious International Faculty, Art often receives questions through our Ask the Expert form. We try to answer questions here on this blog that are representative of common questions regarding DISC and other assessment tools.

Do you have a question about DISC? If so please submit it via the Ask the Expert form. Although it may not be possible to answer every question individually, we use the “Ask the Expert” category of this blog to answer the DISC-related questions most important to our readers.