Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top SalesRepresentatives - Hardcover

Smart Ph.D., Bradford D.; Alexander, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591842069 ISBN 13: 9781591842064

Publisher: Portfolio, 2008

Synopsis

A concise extension of the business classic Topgrading, targeted to sales managers

Brad Smart?s Topgrading has sold more than 150,000 copies since 1999, making it the definitive book for executives who want to hire, coach, and retain top talent. Now Smart has teamed up with Greg Alexander, who used Topgrading to radically improve his sales force at EMC.

In Topgrading for Sales, they have boiled down the key Topgrading ideas to a pithy 112 pages while focusing on the unique needs of sales managers and sales directors.

Great sales forces don?t just depend on strategies? they depend on hiring the best possible reps. But surveys show that about half of all hires and promotions put an underqualified person in the wrong job. No wonder the average tenure for sales managers is only nineteen months.

Topgrading for Sales takes the guesswork out of hiring by teaching readers how to interview systematically for A-level talent instead of relying on hunches and prejudices. It also shows how to coach B-level reps to turn them into A-players and how to weed out C-players before they do too much damage.

About this title

About the Author

Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D., is the president of Smart & Associates, Inc., based in the Chicago area. A well-known industrial psychologist and consultant with nearly thirty-five years in practice, he has worked with dozens of major companies, including General Electric, Bank of America, and John Deere.

Reviews

Building on the success of his 1999 topgrading process to hire, coach, and keep the best people, author-psychologist-consultant Smart teams up with Alexander (of Sales Benchmark Index) to introduce a hiring method geared to sales reps. Why such a specific topic? Consider these statistics: the average tenure of a sales manager is 19 months, and 40 percent of all sales reps fail year after year after year. Thus, the reason for topgrading’s 10 meticulous steps becomes crystal clear. All of these steps are supported by forms and structure, from the scorecard to the reference-check guide. All are based on sound human- resources practices and policies, including a validation of the interview questions by a top-notch labor relations–employment law firm. Although some text seems to be deliberately designed to sell additional products to readers, Topgrading  itself presents valuable information for anyone in the business of people management. --Barbara Jacobs

Edition details

• Publisher: Portfolio
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591842069
• ISBN 13: 9781591842064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128