In This Issue

Client Highlight
3M

Technical Corner
A Purposeful Manner

HR Corner
To Reduce Turnover, Know What Causes It

Product Focus
Customer Service Profile™

Sales Tip of the Month
Make VoiceMail Your Pal

Case Study
Profile Sales Indicator™ at a Midwest Staffing Agency

Client Highlight 3M Trainer Finds Solutions with Profiles Tools

A bid for help from managers who wanted to coach their sales representatives more effectively led Gene Nichols, a 3M trainer in St. Paul, Minn., to take a closer look at the Profiles tools his company was using. He found assessments that could give managers specific information and that could be changed to fit his company’s needs.

Nichols, a sales veteran with varied experience, is the education and development manager for the medical division of 3M, a diversified technology company with a worldwide presence. When he took over in his current role four years ago, the previous manager was already using Profiles assessment tools.

“We’d been using Profiles for seven or eight years, and my job was to develop training programs and training managers,” he said. “Our managers were asking for a way to give tools to our field managers to coach salespeople. They asked me, ‘How do I continue to coach? What input can you give me?’”

Nichols uses two testing processes—one to ensure his division is hiring the right people, and another to measure and benchmark sales representatives to make sure the company is developing them. He uses ProfileXT’s measurement of thinking styles, behavior traits and occupational interests. He also uses the Profiles Sales Indicator™ tool.

10% -Good, but limited information: Skills Experience Education		90% -Essence of the Total Person: Thinking Style Behavioral Traits Occupational Interests Generates Job Match

“Both are very important for us,” Nichols said. “Our sales representatives must be able to speak well and do calculations and contracts. So we look at all of those—the learning index, verbal skills, verbal reasoning, numeric ability and numeric reasoning. We look at whether they have an enterprising nature and how interested they are in servicing others. We look at their financial/administrative skills, technical ability, mechanical skill and creativity. Those are our interest scales.”

Managers also look at ProfileXT’s behavior scales. “Very important are energy level, assertiveness, sociability, manageability, attitude, decisiveness, level of accommodation and independence.” All sales representatives and sales managers go through the process, and the company uses benchmarks for each. “If we are looking at a representative who is becoming a manager, our leadership team sees how closely they match other managers and what coaching they need,” Nichols said. “We make sure the managers we bring in look and feel like the managers who are doing a superb job.”

The company has benchmarked its sales representatives across the country. “When we first started this, upper management and regional leaders asked our sales managers to name the sales representatives they felt excelled in the job they were asked to do,” Nichols said.

He now has three key groups of people and rebalances the benchmarks against those groups. “Nancy has been very helpful in getting the program set as it is today,” Nichols said.

Ness, the owner of Profiles in Eden Prairie, has been affiliated with Profiles International since 1991 and enjoys learning about the different companies as she helps them with their assessment and training needs. “We have really evolved with the technology available to us,” she said. “Everything’s online, which makes it easy to deliver the product. It’s been really exciting and fun.”

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For example, the ProfileXT™ helps determine which candidate will best perform a particular job. How can it tell that? The employer, using appropriate measures, identifies top performers, or those employees working at the highest level. The employer shares the ranking with us. We then build a Job Match Pattern that will identify top performers over those challenged by the position. To keep the assessment fresh and relevant, this benchmark is updated as more information becomes available.

The ProfileXT™ assesses an employee’s behavioral traits, interests and thinking style to reflect the person within. Answers to these measures in part determine work fit. Think of the analogy of the square peg in the round hole. To make the square peg fit in a round slot, we have to shave the corners. If the peg is more curved than square, perhaps we have to shave off less to make it fit in the round shape. However, if the peg is already round, it fits perfectly in the hole with no shaving or honing needed.

Our assessments seek this kind of fit. It is common sense that employees who fit well into their jobs exhibit a higher level of job satisfaction. They come to work more often, change jobs less frequently and perform superbly overall. They are able to be successful doing what comes naturally to them.

Managers using assessment tools correctly already know the shape of the holes they need to fill. They only need a peg to fit it well. Profiles helps clients understand how to do that.

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His company, however, was not immune to the turnover that plagues so many businesses. Additionally, his company was small, so turnover affected everyone in some way. Staff members had to assume someone else’s duties in addition to their own or were moved temporarily to another area, often one they did not know so well. People worked overtime to finish jobs left undone by the missing employee. Stress was often high, and no one kept employees in the loop about the search for new workers.

Seeking a reason for the turnover, Robert blamed it on the pay structure. People simply wanted more money, he reasoned. He took pains to review and revise pay policies, but even when he paid employees more, turnover did not decrease significantly. More puzzling, turnover often was lower in the areas where he expected it to be high and higher in areas where the pay and professionalism were the highest and required stability.

With turnover costs soaring - estimates vary from a low of $10,000 per employee to a high of $50,000 per employee - Robert needed to dig deeper for the answer. If he had done so, he might have found many reasons why people were leaving his company:

• Staff members who saw no way to advance in their jobs
   
• Workers who did not know or agree with company values
• Employees who left because others did (Turnover often has that domino effect.)

Employers also need to know why good workers are leaving, and for that they need to delve deeper than the common exit interview in which departing employees generally don’t want to burn their bridges. What if they had problems with a key manager who appears one way to the people she manages and another way to her bosses? What if the top boss is doing something that repels key workers, and he doesn’t even know it?

Assessment tools can help reduce turnover and positively affect other key areas as well. Hunches work in some areas, but when dealing with something as costly in time and human capital as turnover, the facts offer better solutions.

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Thanks to the checkout clerk’s careless, unconcerned and often impatient attitude, most visits turn into unpleasant experiences. The clerk is probably a nice person – who is just in the wrong job.

How many people in your company are in the wrong jobs? It is disconcerting to think that the person you have placed at the front desk, the employee your customers see first, might be driving them away! With so much competition in the marketplace, you certainly don’t need obstacles impeding customers when they enter your doors.

So how can you find out what kind of service your customers are getting?

Good customer service begins with people who are naturally inclined to serving others. Profiles’ Customer Service Profile™ provides the information to help employers identify these people. The Customer Service Profile™ will:

• Give you information to create a plan that fits your customer service needs
   
• Develop customized patterns for job matching by department
   
• Establish a comprehensive customer service philosophy that will extend throughout your organization
   
• Help you build a reputation for excellent customer service

In addition to the general version suitable for any industry, the Customer Service Profile™ is also available in four custom versions – healthcare, hospitality, retail and financial services.

Why let an employee in the wrong job drive your customers away? Instead, check out the Customer Service Profile™ and other Profiles assessments.

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Make VoiceMail Your Pal
How often do you get to speak to the decision-maker in person? Some studies say up to 70 percent of business phone calls go to VoiceMail. Clearly, it’s time to make this time- and money-saving device your friend. Here’s how: Craft your 30-second elevator speech in writing. Use a friendly tone of voice and your client’s name. Practice your message, then read the speech as if you are saying it in person. Imagine grasping the client’s hand and looking him or her in the eye. Be sure to include your contact information – email and phone number - speaking clearly and distinctly. Visualize your client writing the number from your message. Then say, “Please call me, and I will also follow up.” Then do it.

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Participants
Thirteen of the organization’s recruiters participated in the study. Using sales dollars, the company classified employees as either top performers (six) or bottom performers (seven). The six top performers generated an average of $107,011 in sales dollars. The seven bottom performers generated an average of $40,977 in sales dollars.

Job Match Pattern
With the Profiles Sales Indicator™, we developed a job match pattern for a recruiter position using a concurrent study format. In January 2006, a sample of current recruiters served as the basis to formulate the job match pattern. The company now uses this pattern as the benchmark to predict recruiter performance based on Profiles Sales Indicator™ pattern match.

Performance Grouping
Based on the information gathered from the employer, we built a pattern that described the qualities of the existing top performers.

Details
1. Average sales dollars generated by those who matched the job match pattern at 79 percent – $97,730.

2. Average sales dollars generated by those who did not match the job match pattern at 79 percent – $48,932.14.