Page 58 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

order to graduate from training, new hires would need to be certified on the
“discovery” stage. They would be provided with a scenario in which a
prospective customer had made it to the discovery stage of the sales process, and
the trainee would be asked to conduct the discovery call. They would role-play
the scenario with one of our sales trainers.

After the role-play, the sales trainer would fill out a certification evaluation
specific to the relevant stage. There were specific behaviors we were looking to
observe in the “discovery” role-play, such as the new hire's ability to start the
conversation with open-ended questions, listen to the prospect and dig deeper
into areas of interest, and address the various aspects of our qualifying matrix.
The certification rubric clearly defined what each of these behaviors were and
what kinds of performances would merit scores of 1, 5, 7, or 10. The sales
trainer wouldn't just say, “Good job here, bad job here.” There was a quantifiable
result that came from the certification process. In fairness to the trainees, we
would share the certification structure in advance of the exercise so that
expectations were clearly established.

“Exams and certifications add predictability to the sales training formula.
They also provide the platform to learn from and iterate on the formula.”

It was critical that the evaluator of the role-play, in this case the sales trainer, was
not the trainee's hiring manager. Because hiring managers were accountable for
the decisions to hire individual trainees, conflicts of interest would arise if the
hirers were then asked to grade the hires. Fortunately, the sales trainers didn't
have these biases. The sales trainers' responsibility was to make sure that the
company understood accurately the performance of each of the new hires
coming out of training. By avoiding any conflicts of interest, hiring managers
were strongly incented to engage with new hires early in training and work hard
with them to ace the certifications. The new hires' evaluation performance was a
reflection not only of their own talent but also of the hiring managers' ability to
find and develop talent.

Figure 5.3 shows an example certification for the “discovery” stage of the sales
process.