Larry’s problem was that he had been extremely successful in the sales field
(leading the nation in sales for seven consecutive years with his company)
and was consequently promoted to a regional management position. It
pained him to see people squander away their talents, skill, and training in
mediocre accomplishments. From this vantage point, he began to see a pat-
tern in unfulfilled potential that became a vexing riddle to him.
Like every company, Larry’s firm had a battery of written tests (per-
sonality, sales aptitude, honesty, etc.) they would give to applicants to screen
for the “right stuff.” Larry noted that these instruments were far from bul-
letproof and, in fact, when compared later with an individual’s actual pro-
duction in the field, showed a predictability rate of somewhere between 50
and 75 percent. This meant that somewhere between one-fourth to one-
half of the prime candidates had failed to produce as the written and in-
terview indicators predicted they would.
The next layer of frustration in his sale management efforts were
those individuals who possessed more than enough raw talents and skills
to succeed and were, in fact, somewhat successful, but who clearly were
not optimizing their talents. These people could be described as above
average and even good in their production levels, but they all possessed
the tools to be great. They were clearly underachieving, considering their
talents and potential.
Larry’s interest, as illustrated in Figure 4.1, was to discover and articu-
late the factors responsible for propelling people of equal talents to supe-
rior levels of production. Why are some people of equal talents consistently
great while others are consistently good? What features separate the con-
sistently good from the consistently average?
Larry was convinced that the interviewing and training processes could
improve, so he began looking for the attributes that caused individuals to
escalate beyond their peers. In his search for these attributes, he began to
look beyond pat answers like “superior work ethic,” “driven,” and “moti-
vated.” What exactly were these people driven and motivated by? What was
their work ethic rooted in? Were other important intangibles overlooked
because of the industry’s collective assumptions of the ingredients that
make a successful sales professional? Larry’s haunting suspicion was that if
they did not get better at identifying the intangibles, they would continue
to make the same recruiting, training, and managing mistakes.
This was the problem Larry presented, and I could only hope he would
have the imagination necessary to listen to the odd vantage point I hoped
to introduce.
Critical Mass for Sales Success 35