Just recently I’ve been involved in a number of planning sessions with the senior team of a technology company. Every so often as one of the senior executives would describe the challenges in her division, questioning whether the right people with the right skills were in place to get the job done, someone would pipe up and say "But, let’s take the personalities out of it and start with a blank sheet of paper."
It got me to wondering if you could really ‘take the personalities out of it‘. Is that even possible? Personality is that combination of characteristics or qualities that make up a person’s individualistic and distinctive character. Surely having the right quality in your people is what makes up the characteristics of your company. Character or personality is the foundation on which a company’s culture is built.
This gets me to thinking about the optimum mix of aptitude, attitude and application, the value of personal motivation being driven by the right balance of recompense, recognition and rightful impatience – the desire to excel at what you do, in a self-directed fashion, all the while pursuing mastery of your craft. These elements make up the personality of the sales professionals who achieve for their companies – because they achieve for themselves. They are good at what they do, and they want to get better.
At The TAS Group, we’re in the business of optimizing the performance of our customers’ sales organizations. We’re pretty good at what we do. According to Aberdeen Research, our customers achieve 20% more revenue than our competitors. However, to achieve those results, we rely on our customers to have the right personalities in place and we try to shape their development and advance their progression.
When building a sales organization, I don’t believe you can take the personalities out of it. But I do believe that you can develop the right characteristics for optimum results with a framework to learn and apply the necessary skills or sales methodologies coupled with a repeatable sales process and an infrastructure to measure and coach performance.
But that’s just me. What do you think?
