Is Sales Art or Science?

Let’s start at the beginning, zeroing in on the question “Is sales art or science?” Believe it or not, knowing the difference has a profound impact on how you approach recruiting. One common problem shared by many companies struggling to grow sales is that so few have developed objective, scientific metrics for evaluating success. Yes, they all look for bottom-line financial results. But many sales organizations and HR departments are clueless about how those results happen.

Take the example of Company A, who engaged us to test their salespeople and build a hiring template that would help them detect and measure the skills and aptitudes of their top performers. Their reps were territory managers. When we asked for corporate sales data, we discovered that Company A only tracks the sales of a territory, not the individual salesperson. It had never occurred to them to subtract the sales from previous territory reps to determine how well the current salesperson was actually doing. The situation was made even worse when we tried to explain the problem. As we talked about the behaviors that actually drive results, shoulders shrugged and eyes glazed over.

When we begin work with a client, we typically do a research study in which we compare SalesKey scores to the actual productivity of salespeople. That way we can correlate which specific behaviors differentiate top performers from mediocre ones. In a project for a major hospital chain, they had no metrics. A major credit card organization had no metrics. When asked how they evaluated productivity, the senior managers told us they didn’t. As it turned out, their turnover rates were so high that nobody stayed around long enough to develop success measures.

Thomas Dolby had a song on the charts some time back called “She Blinded Me with Science.” The lyrics probably confused a lot of us born in the first half of the twentieth century. We thought science was supposed to give us clarity. How could science blind anybody?