Benchmarking your new employees against current employees is a common practice. But, what if your current team isn’t performing well enough to take your company to the next level? Hiring an “A” team is the most important thing business owners and managers do, after all, a good team can make even sub-par coaches win a championship. But if you are using average salespeople to set the bar for benchmarking, you may be perpetuating mediocrity.
If you are looking at your team for benchmarking, you want to know things like:
- Do they have desire and commitment at higher levels than the average salesperson
- Is their need for approval at such a high level that it can get in the way of their sales success
- Are they making excuses for their lack of success?
- How do they rank against other sales organizations?
- How “unified” is our sales process?
- How many of our people have the Hunter skill sets? Closer skill sets? Farmer skill sets?
Depending on your answers to these questions, you may NOT want to benchmark against your existing salespeople. You may choose instead to benchmark candidates against a larger set of existing salespeople who have been studied previously.
You certainly want to evaluate your existing people to determine what needs to be done to grow the sales organization, but be careful when using your existing people as the benchmark.
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