Recruiting, Hiring, And Managing Millennials On Your Selling Team

If you’re a Business Owner, Founder CEO, or Sales Leader who has never thought about Emotional Intelligence or why it even matters, now might be the time to change.

Why? Because, you’re probably wasting time, energy, and money hiring, training, and coaching sales reps (and other employees) who may be good enough, but they’ll never be great. High emotional quotient scores correlate directly to success of the individual and the companies where they work. So, if you’re not measuring EQ – and the other competencies required by the roles for which you’re hiring – your setting yourself up for mediocrity at best.

If you’re building a business and hiring or managing a selling team, you’re no doubt already managing millennials. And if you’re managing millennial salespeople, you’ve already realized that they are vastly different from the generations who came before them – and nowhere is this more true than in sales.

Millennial salespeople are typically confident, upbeat, outspoken, and open to change. They are also more collaborative than competitive. Many value work-life balance and stability over high but highly variable compensation. They are well educated and desire to learn more. But they are also under a lot of stress. Indeed, the American Psychological Association recently found that millennials suffer from the highest levels of stress of any generation due to concerns about the nation, the future, work, money, and personal debt.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that millennials are also highly aware of emotional intelligence and its importance to their personal growth and happiness. According to a 2017 study of millennials by the Levo Institute, about 80% of survey respondents indicated emotional intelligence is something they actively focus on as they develop their careers. And 87% revealed a strong connection between their motivation to help the company succeed and the emotional intelligence of the company’s leaders.

So, what exactly is emotional intelligence?

Essentially, emotional intelligence (EI) is our ability to detect and recognize our own feelings and the feelings of others and respond to them in a rational way. It’s an awareness of the world around us, as well as the world inside our own heads. Emotional quotient (EQ) is the measure of one’s emotional intelligence. Modern competency-based assessment tools, which use psychometric testing to measure our behaviors, provide a method for measuring EQ which wasn’t available in the past.

In Success Magazine, Rhett Power explains that Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., a well-known writer and researcher on leadership, says success comes down to one’s emotional intelligence. EI is what drives a person to excellence. Personal qualities such as perseverance, self-control and skill in getting along with others contribute to the direct relationship between the EI of a company’s staff and the company’s success.

• Employees with a high level of EI have self-awareness that helps them understand co-workers and meet deadlines.
• When people have high EI, they are not bothered by client criticism; they remain focused on outcomes, rather than feeling offended.
• If two job candidates have similar IQs, the one with the higher EQ will likely be a better fit for the company.

While EI is comprised of a set of behaviors and competencies that can be measured, worked on and improved, Business Owners and Sales Leaders who hire salespeople who already score highly in those competencies will find those reps will ramp faster, hold themselves to a higher standard, and achieve greater overall success than candidates who don’t.

To find those candidates you’ll need to incorporate pre-hire competency assessments into your hiring process. While large companies have used such assessments for years, the tools are now simple enough to administer, the reports are easy enough to interpret, and they are affordable enough for companies of any size to invest in their use, that their popularity is growing rapidly.

Once you start receiving assessment reports, you’ll want to look for high scores in the following areas. These are the behaviors that contribute to high EQ scores:

However, you’ll also want to consider certain behavioral scores in the context of the requirements of the candidate’s specific role. For example, while a high score in empathy contributes to a high EQ, too much empathy in a salesperson can weaken their ability to ask tough questions when qualifying prospects or hold their ground on pricing.

As such, it’s important to understand that EI by itself is not a holistic measure of a person or predictive of their success in a specific role. For example, while EI goes a long way to defining core competencies required for workplace success in general, sales people must also possess competency in the areas of assertiveness, closure, creativeness, listening, presentation, and time management.

Therefore, the greatest value to you as a hiring manager will come from selecting a pre-hire assessment tool that provides predictive analytics specific to the function for which you are hiring. Such tools measure a broad range of behaviors, including those that encompass EQ and those that define the competencies required in the roles you are looking to fill. The tool should incorporate a range of job models that define the required competencies and success profiles that define the level or degree to which each competency is required to be successful in that specific role. For example a Consultative Salesperson requires different competencies and in different degrees than an Account Manager, a Sales Development Rep, or a Customer Success Manager.

Bottom line – because in sales it’s always about the bottom line – if you’re not using pre-hire assessments to screen candidates for high EQ scores and the functional competencies that will make them successful on your team, you risk wasting energy, time, and money hiring, training, and coaching sales reps who may be good enough but they will never be great.

If you are interested in learning whether and how pre-hire assessments can help your organization, Silicon Valley Sales Group is ready to help. Our expertise is helping companies accelerate revenue growth by building high performance sales teams and developing their talent with Sandler training. For more information, feel free to contact us.