Baseball Players Make Lousy Soccer Players (Requires 30 Seconds to Read)

In the sprit of the FIFA games that we are probably all watching, we thought we would pick on baseball players using a soccer analogy. No country expects to be competitive by building a national soccer team made up of a random group of athletes from different sports. To state what is probably obvious, it wouldn’t work because the players would lack the following:

1. the right skills
2. the right training and conditioning
3. passion for a sport that is not their primary sport

A soccer team like this wouldn’t win many games and no amount of conditioning, training, leadership or incentives would make a difference.  If this is obvious, why do so many managers use this approach when building and developing sales teams?

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Most companies fail because they don’t hire the right people for the job or try to get reps to do things they are not cut out to do (i.e. hunt for new business).
 
When sales leaders look to increase sales, they will usually overlook this fact and think first of new campaigns and internal incentives to drive more results from the existing team. Often these will have, at best, an incremental impact because the wrong talent is on the sales team in the first place.
 
How do you know if you have the right team members? Beyond the most obvious indicator, whether they are at target or not, other factors are important:
 
1. Did you evaluate your selling environment and pick people who have sold in similar selling environments?
 
2. Do you have farmers in hunter roles, transactional sales types in solutions sales roles, channel reps in direct roles, or reps from big companies trying to master selling in a small company?
 
3. Did you select reps that have the same personality traits and competencies as your perennial top performers?
 
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

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