A recreational vehicle dealer with a long history of
steady growth and success, had positioned itself to take
advantage of the explosive growth of the RV market over
the past three years. The dealer’s primary challenge:
identifying salespeople likely to excel in their three
stores. The company’s high visibility and reputation for
excellence makes it an employer of choice in its
markets. The company has a good applicant flow and it
can afford to be selective.
An analysis of the company’s sales data, however,
shows it suffers from the pervasive 80-20 rule of sales:
their top producers are outselling their bottom
producers by over 500 percent!
At the same time, turnover is unacceptably high in
the sales force, with many new salespeople failing
within six months of hire. In an industry where a dealer
may spend over $1,000.00 just to provide the opportunity
for a salesperson to spend time with a qualified buyer,
the lost opportunity cost at this failure rate is
enormous.
To begin the process of improving their selection
procedure, a differential study of top and bottom
producers was conducted. Salespeople were selected and
grouped for inclusion based on total gross profit
production during the past calendar year.
Each person selected completed two assessments: the
Profile Sales Indicator™ (PSI) and the Profile XT™ (PXT).
Two patterns were constructed for each assessment, one
using the top three producers, and another for the
bottom three. The chart on page three shows the
resulting patterns, each plotted on a single chart.
Inspecting the charts, something immediately becomes
apparent. The two groups share many similar
characteristics. They are nearly identical on the
Thinking Style scales. They are similar on the
Assertiveness, Manageability, Accommodation,
Independence, and Objective Judgment scales. Both groups
include the Enterprising and Mechanical interests in
their top three selections.
Their differences, however, are apparent in the
remainder of the scales. Most striking is the difference
in their patterns on the Energy scales on both measures,
and the Decisiveness scale on the PXT (red arrows in the
charts on page two). The most successful salespeople
have very high Energy scales (in the upper 16 percent of
the working population), and there is no overlap between
the groups. There is a similarly distinct separation
between the groups on the Decisiveness scale, with top
performers averaging a 10 on decisiveness!
Somewhat less of a contrast, but still a clearly
differentiating trend, is visible on the dimensions of
Sociability, Attitude, and Occupational Interests (brown
arrows on the chart).
Match Scores (to the Top Performer group) were
generated for members of both groups on both measures.
On the PSI, there was a clear break in the match
distribution between those over and those under 80
percent. Average gross profit produced by those over 80
percent was 255 percent of those under 80 percent match.
On the PXT, average match scores of the top half of
the participants was 89 percent. Average match for the
bottom half was 78 percent. The top half again produced
over two-and-a-half times the bottom half’s output.
As the dealership goes forward, these assessments and
patterns will become part of the selection process for
sales positions. The potential payoffs are enormous. If,
by using the assessments in a selection funnel model,
the company can select and retain 30 percent more top
producers among their new hires, the consequence will be
a 732 percent return on their investment — all dollars
going straight to bottom-line profit. If they can
eliminate their bottom producers, replacing them with
middle and top producers equally, gross profit will rise
by 21 percent! The annual return on investment would be
well over 2,000 percent.
Because turnover may be the result of many factors
independent of production (integrity, for example), use
of these two measures together with an honesty-integrity
prescreener is recommended in the complete selection
funnel. If someone has low integrity, or poor work
ethic, it is probably not important how well they match
the PSI and PXT patterns—they will not last long here.
