When is it time to tune-up or turn-in an underperformer:
A Manager's Tool Kit to Sales Personlity Tests

By Ira S Wolfe and Marilyn Walker

Once upon a time there was a manager named Dick. Dick employed two salespeople, Tom and Harry. With apologies to Aesop, what follows is our sales fable of Tom, Dick and Harry.

Tom had an ambitious sales goal: personal revenues of $750,000, a 20 percent increase over last year. His strategy was simple: to make more sales to his current customers and add one new customer per month to his account base.

Tom’s cohort was Harry. Harry was also responsible in a neighboring territory to grow his sales by a similar amount and to extend his territory. Like Tom, Harry had set the following “stretch” goals: make more sales, get more customers.

Harry was what everybody called a “go-getter.” He was always on the run, juggling phone calls and e-mails between meetings. Harry was ALWAYS busy, doing something His customers said he “blew in like the wind” and then just as quickly was gone. Harry simply didn’t waste time – or so he thought. He moved quickly from saying hello to getting down to business. “Let’s just get to the point” described Harry to a “T.”

Unfortunately, Harry often scheduled one meeting on top of another, forcing him to reschedule appointments several times per week. When speaking with one customer, Harry was already thinking about his next appointment. Back in the home office, nobody ever really knew where Harry was although everyone knew he was either in a meeting or on his way to see another client. No one could ever accuse Harry of sitting still.

Tom, on the other hand, was a different story. For every action Tom took, he had a purpose. Tom simply didn’t rush anything. Life was far too important to rush through, and that’s exactly how Tom approached his work: deliberate, methodical, steady. His co-workers fondly described him as the “tortoise,” comparing him to Harry the hare. Tom’s favorite saying was, “Yes, but slow and steady wins the race!”

Unlike Harry, everyone knew where Tom was every minute of every day – it was right on his calendar. Tom was habitually on time and always allowed enough time to make sure his customers felt they had his undivided attention. Tom stated quite simply, “my clients are too important to overlook or rush.”

Dick, Tom’s and Harry’s boss, was a bit confused by the disparity between his salespersons’ approaches and subsequent performance.

Tom’s performance was exceptional: He had been awarded the President’s Award several years in a row– and received his maximum bonus for being the top performing salesperson two years running. Dick thought, “if only we could figure out how to light a fire under Tom, he’d be unbeatable.

Harry’s performance was a different story. He always fell far short of his quota and never earned any additional bonus. This confused Harry too! Harry thought he should be the number one salesperson! He complained continuously that Tom had the better customers and the better territory. For all the time and effort and long hours that Harry expended, it just didn’t make sense to him or Dick that he wasn’t producing better results.

Dick had shared his frustration about Harry during his monthly meeting with a group of fellow CEO colleagues when it was his turn to put a problem he had on the table for his peers to discuss and help solve.

It didn’t take long before one of the members suggested that Dick use something called a DISC assessment to help him figure out why Tom was accomplishing so much more than Harry. According to Dick’s source the DISC report would give him a third-party description of what made Harry tick. Dick liked the idea very much and decided to have both salespeople take the assessment.

The results came back quickly but much to Dick’s dismay, he was just as confused as he was before they took the “test.”

Harry’s DISC report described him as relentless, driven, goal-oriented and strong-minded. Exactly what Dick – and the rest of the world – already knew. “Duh,” he thought. “I didn’t have to pay anyone to test Harry to tell me that!” Dick just couldn’t understand why Harry wasn’t performing if he had all the traits the company was looking for.

Tom’s results on the other hand indicated that Dick hired the wrong guy! Again, it pointed out exactly how everyone already described Tom’s behavior – systematic, consistent, unhurried and reliable. “He seems boring when I read this report,” Dick said. “If he wasn’t blowing the socks off our sales numbers each year, I’d fire him!” The information in the reports was right on but still didn’t explain why Harry was selling and Tom wasn’t.

Poor Dick.

Dick made the right decision to assess his sales team. What Dick didn’t do was choose the right battery of tests. While DISC is an outstanding predictor of observable behavior, it cannot predict job success. Quite simply, DISC predicts how an individual might approach selling (or managing or communicating or working on team and more) but there is much more to selling than looking like you can sell! Dick fell into a classic trap that many managers do – they hire people who look like they can sell but they don’t probe deep enough to see if they will be motivated to sell and if they have the ability to sell. Just because somebody appears charismatic and communicates persuasively, doesn’t mean they can charm anyone or even sell heat to the Eskimos in winter. What DISC tells us is that he or she looks like other salespeople who were successful.

What Dick and his colleagues did not know is that they needed to pop open the hood and check out Harry’s and Tom’s engines – their personality and abilities. Behaviors, you see, only describe the model of the car and its color. To see the engine that powers Harry and Tom requires that you look under the hood.

Just as the engine means more to a car’s performance than the body, personality is more relevant and predictive of job success than behavior style (DISC) – or type for those of you using Myers-Briggs to hire sales people. Personality will predict how a candidate will respond to competition, solve problems, make decisions, think innovatively, collaborate with others as well as to the degree they can be self-sufficient. Personality also determines how a candidate will prospect, negotiate, and even build rapport with co-workers and customers. And regardless of all the thinking and relationship building skills a candidate brings to a sale, he needs staying power. Sales is a tough business with lots of ups and downs. Resilience and self-control along with the ability to take a no without becoming dejected are highly desirable sales traits predicted only through personality tests, not DISC style assessments.

Of course, a discussion about the sales “engine” driving top performing sales people wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t talk about horsepower. Another critical element that predicts sales success is cognitive skills, sometimes called general abilities or general reasoning skills. Cognitive skills play a crucial role in consultative sales that challenges a salesperson to keep with fast-changing market trends and an ability to think effectively “on their feet.” The more dynamic the sale and competitive the market, the more important cognitive skills will be.

And finally, the salesperson with his slick looking “body” and “high performance engine” will go nowhere without fuel in the tank. The fuel that drives sales performance is what we call motivators and values. Without knowing what motivates the candidate, the right personality and behavioral style will be meaningless.

Hiring a sales person based on their behavior style (DISC results) is like buying a car based on the model and color of the car without checking under the hood to know what kind of engine it has and what fuel it uses.

Dick finally figured it out. Tom was the high performance "vehicle" he wanted in his fleet. Dick decided the next step was popping the hood on both Tom and Harry. After looking at their personality traits and abilities and comparing the differences, Dick will decide if it’s time to “tune-up” or turn in Harry for a new model.