How to Succeed at Understanding Your Sales Capacity

How to Succeed at Understanding Your Sales Capacity Mike:

Hey, everybody, we are back with another How to Succeed podcast. This is How to Succeed in Understanding Your Sales Capacity, Your Capability and Competencies in Selling with our guest, Markku Kauppinen. He is CEO of Extended Disc North America. And he's been on the podcast before talking about the disc profiles and behavioral profiles. We have a new product here at Sandler in a collaboration with Extended Disc. It's called your Sales Capacity Assessment. We'll dive into all of that. and much more here. The podcast is brought to you by Sandler, the worldwide leader in sales management and customer service training. We've got over 200 locations now. If you need to find one, go to sandler.com. If you already have a coach, talk to your coach about the new sales capacity assessment. Markku, welcome to the show, or welcome back, I should say. Now, this isn't one big sales pitch. I want to really dive in and give them some things to think about, regardless of whether they ever take this assessment or not. So maybe we should start there. Why do people take assessments in general? And where is the best application for one of these if nobody's ever done one before?

Markku Kauppinen:

Well, Mike, thanks for having me back on your show again. Well, there are a couple of different applications. Certainly one big application for assessment is to make sure we avoid expensive hiring mistakes. I think every manager has made a couple of those. And what we want to do when it comes to hiring applications is to provide information about the applicant so they can make more confident decisions. So in the context of salespeople, we want to have people obviously who produce. What we see on a resume and what we see on LinkedIn and what we see in references and so forth doesn't always tell the true story and what we really want to identify with assessments, who the person really is, what are their natural behaviors, what are their sales competencies. So we know who's going to show up on the payroll. You know, we think that we are hiring a Bradley Cooper, but somebody like me shows up on the payroll six months later. So we don't want that to happen. Another big application is for training and development. And what the assessments do with those applications is it provides us with a really good starting point for development. If we don't know what to develop, it is really difficult to be successful in progressing in your success. And finally, of course, we can combine all the results into team applications, organizational assessments, but it all really starts from the individual assessments.

Mike:

I love all of that. Two things that I would highlight in there. Number one, I think whenever we use any kind of assessments for hiring, we always say that they're not really pass fail. This is sort of a preference thing. And one of the cool things about the new sales capacity assessment is that you have different profiles. You might need different things for a farmer than you do a hunter or somebody that has to do demand generation versus demand fulfillment and stuff. So I think it's always more information for the interview and it can give you some questions to ask. Like, Hey, it looks like maybe your natural tendencies aren't to do prospecting. How would you overcompensate that? Or how have you overcome that in the past in your career for a behavioral interview, rather than saying like, Oh, we're going to throw everybody out. That doesn't fit this profile. Is that fair?

Markku Kauppinen:

That's a fair statement, Mike. Depending on the assessment, some of our assessments measure individuals' hardwired behavioral style. And what that means in practice, it indicates and tells a story about the individuals, what behaviors are ones that are more natural for them. Let's say it's prospecting. They are hardwired for prospecting behaviors. I don't really believe that any salesperson truly loves prospecting, but But some people are hardwired in a way that they are more comfortable with it. It doesn't take as much energy and it kind of flows more naturally. On the competency side, we can measure where are they at the current level of competency. In this example with prospecting, those can be developed, but what the assessment indicates, where are we right now? And then we can, in a hiring situation, we can say, is this enough of a competency? We need a salesperson with good prospecting skills, and that identifies where they are right now. Again, that can be developed so we can do a measurement later and see where they are now. So we do both things. And obviously, you can use those if you want a more holistic view, you can look at them together. So hey, here we are with behaviors here with competencies. Now we can make a more solid decision.

Mike:

That's a really cool thing. If there's any similar clients listening this week, I think if you've already done the extended disc behavioral profile, do this new one and then you can combine the results and get like the super magnifying glass into what you're doing. And that was the second thing I wanted to mention here off the top was the development part for training purposes. I know we don't usually sell these to individuals, but I do think if there's individuals listening today, it's important to understand why you would want to assess yourself. because it's not like anybody is gonna get a perfect score here. You're not gonna get this back and see like all greens, I nailed everything, A plus in every possible one of the eight different sales profiles that you can compare against on benchmarks and all of the 16 competencies. So I think what you need to ask yourself when you're getting your assessment back or when you wanna do this for yourself is, How can I get independent, objective feedback on my preferences? You're filling out the form, so you can say whether you like prospecting or you like closing hard and fast or long and slow, and you can say. I don't think people really argue with the results too much, but sometimes I think people struggle with seeing their weaknesses, but this is really valuable information. You can then lean into your strengths, or you can train some of your weaknesses, and you can make more intelligent decisions rather than just going by, oh, I like that, or I don't like that.

Markku Kauppinen:

Very true. Yeah, very true. I mean, if we want to get better in anything in life, we need to know where we are right now. If you're an athlete, you know what your personal record is, and that's your current benchmark. Same thing with these assessments, they identify by talking about the competency assessment, where are you right now? And you as an individual salesperson, if you want to get better, you really need to understand what are the things that I need to develop. Sometimes we may overlook some of our strengths, we may actually be very good at certain competency, but for some reason, we think that we need to continue to develop that while there might be other sales competencies that really are going to have a greater impact for your success. And about the questionnaire, when people complete the questionnaire, they will not be able to game it. We really identify it. Where are you right now? And like I mentioned earlier, as you continue with your development path, hopefully with your coach, your center trainer, you can then measure later, let's say six months down the road and say, hey, let's see what kind of progress I have made. And maybe I need to also readjust. Maybe there's some other competencies now that are also very important that I need to pay some additional attention to. Because things change. And six months can, a lot of things can change in six months.

Mike:

I love that you brought up the retesting because we don't typically retest the disk behavioral styles because they're pretty innate. It takes a big monumental life change, midlife crisis, or some sort of change to really knock those, or a long period of time, right? Over decades, not months. But this one, you can retake every six months and you can see the progress you've been making in your Sandler training. I think that's super cool. Now, I want to do our official format here, start with attitude. And we've already talked about some ideal attitudes to have towards the profile. But one of the things that the profile pulls out is the attitude towards excuse making. And I think this is revolutionary for a lot of people. And sometimes one that can be a little hard to hear as well. Tell me about this excuse index and how you've seen people respond to this profile as you've rolled it out to hundreds of thousands of people.

Markku Kauppinen:

Well, As human beings, we make excuses every day. We sometimes make excuses about making excuses. So that's just part of a human condition. So what we measure with the sales capacity assessment is the current level excuse making. So if you're a sales manager, you probably hear excuses from your sales folks frequently. That's my experience when I talk to sales leaders that, hey, my team is making some excuses. But this tool actually quantifies the level of excuse making. It's very easy to interpret score from zero to 100. You want this score to be low. It's called a sales excuse index. Lower the index, the better it is. And by the way, Mike, North American average score is 35%. And that means in practice that an average salesperson only are selling about 65% of the time. Other 35% of the time, they are focusing on something else. Some of that may be necessary, administrative things and so on. But typically, it really tells us the person is procrastinating with the sales activities. People own, they own their score. They, when they look at it, say, hey, that's me. I've seen a few exceptions. But those exceptions are when somebody's scoring 80 or higher, meaning that they really are making a lot of excuses. And I think that's more of a habit that they have. They tend to make excuses probably about everything in their life, including the excuse index score.

Mike: I love that particular measurement, because if they're high on excuse making, they're going to use that something's wrong with the test as an excuse. They're not going to accept the results. So it becomes very ironic. Markku Kauppinen:

That is very, that is very rare. I think I can less than five cases that I remember somebody saying, I don't know if that's me. Typically people kind of smile and say, yeah, you got me. That, that is who I am and I need to work on that. And, um, that's really what we try to do. And, and you can also then create team reports. So you can kind of see as a sales leader, Hey, where are my team in terms of excuse making, you can look at one, one report and say, Hey, these are the folks that are really focusing on sales activities. These other ones, maybe I need to kind of hold them accountable a little bit more, make sure that we get those scores down as we go forward.

Mike:

Yeah, again, we talk about that a lot in prospecting because people have creative avoidance. They'll come up with any task other than to make a cold call to a stranger. But there's lots of things in sales that can creep up like that. So I think that's a big one to watch. But in your answer there, you mentioned the North American benchmark. So as we move to behaviors here, I wanted to ask you about how you benchmark these because this is also fascinating. To me, I always sort of love those standardized tests, mostly because I did pretty well on him, but it's nice to know that like nobody's perfect. But if my excuse index is lower than the national average, that's that feels pretty good to me, right? Or in any of these other, you know, competence that sees that we have. So you're measuring a lot of different things. Feel free in your answer to talk about any of these.

Markku Kauppinen:

Yeah. Benchmarking is really important part of the assessment suite. And, and sales leaders are really eager to know how does my sales team stack up against different benchmark? It could be North American benchmark, or you can create your own benchmarks against certain industry, et cetera, North America. That's right. That's right. And say, Hey, these are the people who are succeeding. Um, and, and you say, what are the competencies that are most important? Our tool measures 18 specific sales competencies. And some of them may be not that important in certain types of sales within one organization, or maybe they have different sales roles within the sales team. But what the managers, the leaders, are able to do is to focus on the competencies that are most important to develop. And then if you combine that with the behavioral assessment, we can also then see, hey, what are the behavioral tendencies of successful salespeople. So now you can be very specific on a couple of things. One is who to hire. Obviously, you want to look at the experience, education, and those kind of things. That kind of information, by the way, typically is much easier to quantify. You know where you went to school. You know what your grades were. You know how many years you've been in sales profession. That's easy to identify, but it's really difficult to really truly understand who you are hiring and the assessments help in that process. And then, of course, with development, we talked a little bit about that earlier. Once we have a starting point for development, we know where we are right now. But more importantly, we need to know what we need to develop first. What are the low hanging fruits? How are we going to get results quicker? Because two things happens. They're going to begin to succeed. The salesperson becomes motivated. everybody becomes motivated. And then you can fine tune your development as you go down the development path. But you can really focus on the areas that's going to have the greatest impact in the short term, and then begin to fine tune it. So it all works together. And benchmarking is just give you not only say, Hey, where is my arm, my salespeople right now? But how do they compare to people in the sales profession as well?

Mike: When we talk about these 18 different competencies, we obviously don't have time to run down all 18. I know you love the excuse index, but are there any particular competencies out of the 18 that stand out or that people find particularly interesting or helpful? Markku Kauppinen:

Yeah, I mean, it varies a little bit by different sales leaders and sales professionals and industries and type of products or service they're selling. But prospecting is, I would say prospecting qualifying, following the sales process, money concept. How do the people, how to have those conversations. And the other one that comes up frequently, Mike, is dealing with failure because that's just part of not only life, but definitely part of selling. So that's something that a lot of people want to focus on. How do I bounce back or how do my sales people bounce back? when things don't go as well as they would hope them to go.

Mike:

Last question for you here in this bucket. I wanted to ask you a little bit about, since we're in the behaviors, the difference between the behaviors and the competencies, because this is the capacity assessment. So that's different than a behavioral sort of preference. And then also, I'm wondering what you think about kind of like floor versus ceiling, or like you said, the can and will sell. So maybe some people can sell, but they won't actually do these behaviors, or they think they're great at these behaviors, but their skill level is low. Those are different questions, right? Can you talk a little bit about the difference?

Markku Kauppinen:

Yeah, the different tools have different questionnaires, and the competency assessment we call the sales capacity assessment, measures, again, what is the current competency level with these 18 sales competencies and also that index, sorry, that excuse index we talked about earlier. So we develop a baseline, where am I right now? It measures a little bit how important the person also considers these different competencies to be, but really it's the skill level they possess right now. And again, of course, those can be developed and should be developed if a person wants to be become more successful. The behavior looks at how am I hardwired for different activities. With our extended disc assessments, we can get into leadership, management, customer service. But the arena of sales, we look at how natural these 18 sales competencies are from a behavioral perspective. So we may have, let's say we want to develop a salesperson with prospecting. What When you combine those tools, we may find that the person has a natural comfort level of prospecting. They are hardwired to be fairly comfortable going after a new business, looking for that. But their competency level may be low. So now if we want to make sure that this person becomes more successful, we know what problem to work on. In this example, it would be, hey, they need some specific training on prospecting. And I know, Stanley, you have so much material on prospecting. So then you can focus on that. It could be the other way around. They have the competency, but it's simply they are not hardwired for that. And now we work on a different problem. helping them to modify their behaviors and work on some specific techniques they can really utilize to make sure that they become a little bit more comfortable with it, because now they have a clear path, action plan, what they can follow. Hey, this is what you need to do. Let's, let's allocate time for it. This is how it's going to be easier. And over time, it will become not quite muscle memory, but you getting closer to that, that end of the scale. If both are strong, obviously, ideal situation, if both are low, then we have a little bit of an uphill struggle or battle, if you will, to get there. But it's not impossible. It is more challenging.

Mike:

Yeah, I did want to focus on that a little bit because I think it's important for managers and salespeople that what you'll find with these eight different profile benchmarks is that typically you're not great at all of them, but you're also not horrible at all of them. So it could be just somebody is in the wrong position. You're asking them to be a hunter when they're really more naturally and competent at being a farmer. And so these profiles can really help you build out the team, especially when you compare that matrix. So as we move to the team bucket, I'd love to hear your thoughts on some stuff that we've been working here at Sandler of sort of doing group training on the team report level, but doing personalized learning in the LMS or in places where people can get individual coaching or accountability with their manager and sort of treating those appropriately. Like we want some essentials stuff. the foundations of Sandler, everybody on the team gets. Everybody in the organization should understand what our pains are, the problems that we're solving and stuff like that. And then each individual team, you might have an inside sales customer success team, or you might have an outbound BDR team, and those teams would get different training. And then each individual might have a particular weakness in the competency. And this is to me where our modern environment gets really interesting, right? We can take advantage of these different levels of training for the exact purpose that they were designed and best to solve. What are your thoughts on this these days?

Markku Kauppinen:

Yeah, I think in sales, there are certain fundamental skills that everybody should have. And obviously, we want to continue to develop those as well. But a couple of things, like you mentioned earlier, nobody's gonna get perfect scores. This is a journey. It's never going to end. If you want to get better at your profession, you continually have to develop. It's not like you finally reached the end of the day. It's kind of an end of a road. Hey, I'm perfect. So you need to continually work on your skills. But I think it's important if you're a sales leader or a sales professional, You want to know what to develop. You know the sales role. You know what the goals are. And now with the help of the assessments, you have the starting point for development. So it really helps you. Where do I spend my effort and my time and my energy to become more successful in sales? For some people, it might be qualifying. Another person, qualifying might be competency that they possess. Of course, they need to continue to develop that. They may have the behavioral styles that make it very natural for them. But what I love about Sandler is that you have these individual learning paths that you can take. And like with the modern technology, it's obviously so easy to just lock on to your system. And if I know that I need to work on qualifying, I will find the material there. I have my Sandler trainer to help me with that. And of course, if you're a sales leader, you're looking at your sales team, now you know what your sales folks need to do. And with the help of Sandler, they can find the individual learning paths. But overall, we can look at your team as well and say, here are the critical things we need to focus on first. Here are the things that we will develop next. So you have a clear, not only individual learning path for everyone, but you have a clear, clear roadmap for your sales team. And of course, finally, as you continue to grow and continue to hire new salespeople, you can be more confident in bringing good salespeople, effective salespeople and successful sales professional into your team. So it all ties together. And Sandler, of course, is as the materially incredible amount of content to help in that journey.

Mike:

I appreciate you saying that, but I am not going to return the favor. I'm going to end with a really hard question here, which is the classic like nature versus nurture debate or strengths versus weaknesses. Do you lean in and develop your strengths or do you try to shore up the weaknesses? As somebody that's seen a lot of people, again, hundreds of thousands or probably millions of dis profiles at this point that you've done, what would you say? Is it going back to you know, our innate abilities and stuff, and then separating out skills? Or do you have a thought here on how we approach our development?

Markku Kauppinen:

A couple of thoughts. One is that we just need to take an honest look who we are. I think that denial is a pretty strong human emotion for all of us. But if we want to get better, let's just start with the honest look who we are. What are our behavioral preferences? What are my skill level? And what's the starting point for development? I think it kind of depends when it comes to working on your strengths or development areas. Who we are tends to come into play there. Some people, they celebrate their strengths, and they really want to use those. And other people tend to look at their weaknesses and overfocus on those. But as an overall statement, Mike, I would say is that, that work on your development areas. and don't overuse your strengths.

Mike:

Yeah, any strength to an extreme can be a weakness and any weakness to an extreme is going to hurt you in your overall success. So, you know, trying to find a nice, competent middle ground is good. I think also what we found, and you mentioned it earlier a little bit, is that desire to succeed can override a lot of that stuff. So it depends on how bad you want it and what your why is. If you're doing some sort of life-saving activity, you better shore up your weaknesses, right? If you're going to maximize pleasure or something else in your career, maybe you lean into the strengths and you delegate some of the stuff that you don't like and things. It really depends on what you're optimizing your life and your career for, I think depends on how you answer that question.

Markku Kauppinen: Yeah, and absolutely. Of course, context has come into play. In certain situations, yes, we need to use our strengths. But other areas, other times, we may have to work on our development areas. So we just need to be flexible, not only with our behavior, but how we perceive what's happening and what type of skills and behaviors are needed at that time. Mike:

Once again, we're talking with Marku Kopanen, CEO of Extended Disc North America and a long time Sandler partner. I think it's been over 20 years now or so. And we had a really great time developing this profile with Extended Disc. We're really excited to roll it out. You can ask your Sandler trainer. If you don't have one, go to sandler.com, but now available all over. So grab it, multiple languages and really, A cool time to be alive that we have all of these different technologies, measurements, and it's so easy and fast to take. There's a lot of questions, but they're really fast preference questions between a couple of items. And I think you're going to like the results and find them helpful. But before I let you go, Marku, I wanted to get to know you a little bit better. You've been on the podcast before, but I think this is an interesting question, especially somebody like you that's been around for a while and had a lot of success, but also a lot of challenges. You guys had a hurricane and lost some power in your home headquarters here recently. How do you define success at this point in your career?

Markku Kauppinen:

Good question, Mike. My definition of success, I think, it's probably true for everybody, but it kind of changes over time. But right now, what it is, I want to make sure and that I don't confuse activity with achievement. So I want to really make sure that we focus on the right things. And really, when it comes to business, focusing on what our customers are telling us, what are their challenges. Sometimes it's easy when you're developing a different types of product, get fall in love with them, frankly, they become part of your extended family. But you really need to focus on what the customers are needing and really proactively looking at what are the kind of challenges they are not only facing today, but what they are thinking about down the road tomorrow. And that's really become a big part of my personal role. And I think it's what I, it's probably been the most enjoyable part of my career, really, working with our clients and seeing them become more and more successful.

Mike: I think I've asked you this one before, but I love asking this question. What was the hardest thing you had to get over in your career in order to be successful? Was there a particularly hard lesson learned or one of your weaknesses that you really had to shore up in order to get over the hump? Markku Kauppinen:

I mean, those I think have changed over time too. I've been doing this almost 30 years, I think for any entrepreneur, it's the first few years that are the most challenging. And fortunately, I have this behavioral trait that is innate to who I am. I'm very persistent. I'm not like a Ferrari that can go from zero to 60 in three seconds or less. I'm more like a freight train that leaves the station slow. But once you get moving, you just go with a steady pace. And that's kind of how I looked at business and life in general. It's more of a long-term game. I enjoy short-term successes, of course, but I look at business from a long-term perspective, and I'm very happy that I've been able to keep that since the very beginning.

Mike: Do you have a favorite quote, motto, or mantra? Markku Kauppinen:

I think it's the one I just kind of mentioned earlier, and that is that don't confuse activity with achievement. So sometimes we get very busy and it's easy to get distracted by the busyness of working. But you really need to reflect and look back and say, hey, what are the things that are most critical to focus on now? Being busy doesn't mean you become successful doing the right things consistently. I think it's really important. Mike:

Marku, great stuff as always. It's been an awesome discussion. Thanks for taking the time to develop this profile with us, roll it out around the world, and even join us here to talk about it for a little bit. So I appreciate the time. Again, check out Sandler.com or go to your local training center. We just launched brand new websites, 200 of them. around the world. So go check those out. You'll find information about our new assessments there and contact information for local office near you. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast with somebody that you think needs to hear it. Your hiring manager or a sales manager that wants to get more information on their team. And until next time, whatever you are, be a good one. That's what I always say. Have a great week, everybody.