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.

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Become a DISC Certified Professional Behavioral Strategist:

Announcing March and April dates for our Intensive Two-Day Workshop: Advanced DISC Certification Training

The Advanced Experiential DISC Certification is a behaviorally-based communication workshop. Participants will learn how to communicate using the DISC language as a way of understanding themselves and others. The workshop incorporates a behavioral assessment to give a more complete understanding of what DISC is and how to use it to interact with others and to appreciate others’ behavioral styles.

Each class is limited to eight people to ensure personal attention and optimal participation and interaction.

To find out more and reserve your spot visit our Advanced DISC Certification page: http://datadome.com/certification_workshop.php

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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.

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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.

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Become a DISC Certified Professional Behavioral Strategist:

Announcing January and February dates for our Intensive Two-Day Workshop: Advanced DISC Certification Training

This professional program gives you the opportunity to learn DISC from the instructor who has been twice recognized as TTI International Trainer of the Year, Arthur Schoeck.

The Advanced Experiential DISC Certification is a behaviorally-based communication workshop. Participants will learn how to communicate using the DISC language as a way of understanding themselves and others. The workshop incorporates a behavioral assessment to give a more complete understanding of what DISC is and how to use it to interact with others and to appreciate others’ behavioral styles.

Each class is limited to eight people to ensure personal attention and optimal participation and interaction.

To find out more and reserve your spot visit our Advanced DISC Certification page: http://datadome.com/certification_workshop.php

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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.

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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.

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To read the article visit the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

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How do these hiring mistakes happen? How can a candidate look so good, so right for the role, and yet end up being such a poor match? Well certainly, every hiring situation is unique, however there are trends and research that can help us understand the weaknesses of the interview process and some of the common pitfalls of communication biases.

As we pointed out in our earlier post Hiring for Cultural Fit – Look Beyond the Résumé statistical studies have shown that “decisions based on interviews alone are accurate only 14% of the time. That means we have the chance to be wrong 86% of the time in the hiring of top performing individuals.” Michigan State University Study, John Hunter and Rhonda Hunter, “Validity and Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance”, Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 96, No. 1, 1984, p. 90 (links to pdf)

In other words the interview process alone only gets the hiring recommendation right one out of seven times – not a great average. Without the use of other hiring tools to derive objective data it can be easy to be dazzled by a strong surface presentation – a confident manner, neat professional appearance, firm handshake, eye contact, etc. However are these attributes truly predictive of success for the job at hand? Most people feel comfortable with people with whom they share similar behavioral profiles, they also tend to see certain profiles as aspirational – a candidate who shares a similar behavioral style or projects one that the hiring manager believes themselves to be will have an advantage in the interview process similar to the salesperson who is able to establish instant rapport with a prospect who natural feels more comfortable and trusting of someone whose behavior patterns mimic their own. This can also be true of projected attributes for a given role. For example, an executive candidate may project the demeanor of leadership along with the refined, polished manner and eloquence expected of a leader, but may not necessarily have the behavioral style suited to the demands of that particular organization – the surface “paint job” may impress the board, but a slick “luxury car” appearance won’t help you if what your organization needs is a leader who performs with the behavioral metaphor of a tough, hard-driving off-road vehicle, or a practical, economically-minded mini-van.

The hiring manager’s own effective behaviors, or projected behavioral assumptions for the role, may not be the effective behaviors needed for success in the position being applied for: As an example a department leader who is both a people person and very decisive may need to fill a slot for an analytical role that requires high compliance and a comfort with working in an environment with low people interaction. Although a candidate that shares the high people orientation and decisiveness (and perhaps an equivalent aesthetic sensibility) may seem like an appealing hire, once placed in the performance environment the very attributes that made the candidate seem familiar, attractive and credible would become impediments to optimal performance. The disparity would inevitably lead to some form of disruption whether it be stress/anxiety on the part of the hire, poor performance of job duties, or some other team disruption caused by the mismatched assignment.

The use of objective tools can be indispensable in identifying the aptitude of a candidate for a given role. However, pairing this approach with identifying not just a functional job profile, but a behavioral profile for success will allow the interview process to have an effective “check and balance.” There are tools specifically designed to streamline the process of creating a behavior-based job profile so that you can make sure the candidate selected is closely matched for behavioral alignment, and therefore job success. Using assessment tools to both understand the behaviors needed for the position and the behaviors displayed by the candidate can help you choose a new employee who has what you need “under the hood” no matter whether the exterior looks like a Lexus or a Yugo or anything in between.

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As discussed in our previous articles, “Sales Hiring Mistakes” and “Sales: What Makes a Great Salesperson (for You)?“, businesses that can sell well tend to do well – so it is not surprising that there is a lot of interest in making the sales process more predictable. Yet try as they might, salespeople and sales managers are often puzzled as to why some deals seem to go like clockwork while others feel like endless uphill struggles. They blame the market, they blame the people, they look to the 80/20 rule and see that 20% of the people bring in 80% of the profit, but can’t determine how to reliably duplicate the effective ones.

Communication is often the cause at the root of sales successes and failures. The fact is it is generally easier to sell to someone who shares the same communication preferences, that has a similar behavioral style, as you do. Comfortable communication is an important factor in establishing the trust and credibility needed to create a sale. By default we all tend to approach sales communication from the old golden rule “treat others as you would like to be treated,” however that old expression overlooks the idea that “others” may not want to be treated, in behavior or communication, in the way that makes you yourself feel the most comfortable.

DISC opens the door for us to understand that the behaviors or communication modes that feel natural to one person may cause stress to another. With this insight we can amend the golden rule to say “treat others as they wish to be treated” and use this idea to build a better foundation for sales success. Teaching salespeople to recognize their own behavioral styles and those of the clients they interact with gives them the opportunity to adapt to a mode of communication better suited to the client’s need. As the salesperson’s skill in recognizing and adapting to the styles of others increases so will their ability to build trust and credibility in relationships that were previously difficult and puzzling. Although the salesperson’s natural behavioral style will remain their same they will learn when and how to adapt for better results.

Recognizing that people have different natural behavioral styles also helps us understand a mistake that is unfortunately quite commonly made by businesses: they take their best performing salesperson and promote him or her to sales manager. Consider that the track record of the person in question indicates that the behaviors demanded to be a top sales performer are well-aligned with their natural behavioral style. Does a sales manager perform the same behaviors? What would indicate that the roles are interchangeable? As an analogy would a pro football team promote someone to quarterback because they were a great receiver? Not likely – the skills, the reflexes, the behaviors wouldn’t fit.

Let’s examine a scenario from a DISC perspective to further illustrate the point. At Company X the top performing sales people tend to be people skilled at keeping people happy and emotionally vested while driving for quick decisions and buy-in that keep the process moving forward rather than slipping into stasis. Meanwhile the successful sales manager at Company X must assert authority and accountability to the team, following a strictly defined process to assure fairness in hiring, firing, and compensation systems while also tracking the endlessly detailed expense reimbursement process. In the language of DISC that successful sales person is exhibiting high I (Influence) and high D (Dominance) behaviors while the sales manager’s role requires a low I and a high C (Compliance) – essentially opposite attributes. An individual might be able to adjust temporarily to fit the requirements, but quickly the stress and energy drain of maintaining that adjustment so strongly away from the individual’s natural behavioral preferences will cause the situation to either erode or explode. Reverting to natural behaviors the ex-salesperson now manager in question starts to try to make the salespeople she is responsible for as happy as she liked to make the customers she used to interact with, she grows restless handling the details and uncomfortable enforcing the policy and procedures because her C isn’t naturally high. Simply put, the former star receiver ends up being a lousy quarterback through no fault of her own.

At Data Dome we specialize in using the science of DISC behavioral analysis to unlock the keys to better performance, improved team dynamics and creating the best fits for your organization to thrive. Contact us to find out more about training and tools that can improve sales performance while helping you understand the success criteria for different roles in your organization.

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