War For Talent
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What Does The War For Talent Mean For Professional Services?

25th May 2022 No Comments

The idea of a “war for talent” has been around for a long time and was itself based on the classic law of supply and demand popularised more than 200 years ago by the economist Adam Smith. It describes how, all else being equal, the price of goods or services tends to increase when the supply of that commodity decreases (making it rarer) or when the demand for it increases (making it more sought after) and vice versa. In the case of the talent war, the commodity is people.

Despite the pandemic, professional services has proven to be a growth industry. The MCA Industry Report 2021 suggests that the growth rate for management consulting in the UK was 4.5% in 2020.  Total consulting income is estimated to be £12.5 billion. Some individual firms reported even more impressive results. Deloitte saw an increase in global revenue of 5.5%, while EY boosted revenue by 7.3% to $40 billion globally. Much of that growth has been centred around expansion into new service lines in particular those focusing on technology, data and ESG.

This drive for growth has led firms to fight it out for the top talent, which in turn has driven up salaries. Newly qualified lawyers can now expect a starting salary of £100k+, while partners in some Big 4 firms have seen their pay increase to in excess of £1million. In this febrile market employees have the advantage. They know that they are sought after and, in many cases, they are able to name their terms.

The risks to employers are many. In the race to recruit, there is a danger that corners are cut in order to be the first to make the candidate an offer. In Professional Services, experienced hires tend to be recruited with an expectation that they will contribute to the revenue growth of the firm. Given that they also need to exhibit deep subject matter expertise in their specialist area, and will often need to be effective people leaders, there is a requirement for individuals to draw upon a broad range of capabilities if they are to excel in their roles.

Recruiting the right talent

To prevent a severe case of buyer’s remorse, it is critical that firms maintain a rigorous approach to recruitment that is able to assess all aspects of a candidate’s performance and potential. It may be tempting to circumvent the process in order bring people in more quickly but consider the impact of getting it wrong. Direct costs are estimated by the US Department of Labour to be 30% of salary. But factor in the indirect costs such as loss of opportunities not converted, impact upon team morale and performance, and these costs quickly escalate.

To be able to accurately evaluate these different skillsets is challenging and requires a multi-faceted approach to recruitment. Robust psychometric tools used in conjunction with in-depth profiling / debrief sessions facilitated by an expert help to “lift the hood” and consider the capabilities and attributes that are not apparent from an interview alone.

What we see time and again when working with Professional Services firms is a tendency to focus on technical and leadership capability alone. If a new hire has a sales / growth target it is also critical to assess B2B sales capability. Research tells us that in order to make the best recruitment decisions we should:

  • Clearly identify the criteria associated with success in the role
  • Use trained and skilled interviewers
  • Use structured interviews and objective assessment tools

Cutting corners introduces bias and poor decisions, in turn bringing too much risk for firms.

Retaining Talent: What Does The Evidence Tell Us?

So, what can managers within professional services firms do to retain their existing talent to support their goals around sustainable growth?

Robust research from pre-pandemic times suggests the following recommendations:

  • Ensure that you offer employees autonomy and involvement in decision-making
  • Deliver on your promises and treat people fairly
  • Create a positive team atmosphere
  • Provide clarity of expectations
  • Provide feedback
  • Seek to offer rewards beyond just pay: benefits, training and career growth are all important.

Considering how to support and retain more diverse groups of employees is also key to the sustainable success of the business.

In summary, now is the time to review and reinforce people practices, to ensure that the right new hires are selected and that precious internal talent is nurtured.

 

Sarah Clapperton is a Director at Bloojam Consulting and a Chartered Business Psychologist, with 20 years’ experience working in selection and development. She specialises in working with leaders and senior salespeople.

Bloojam Consulting offers a range of robust recruitment and development tools and interventions, including its unique Acuity for Strategic Sales suite of psychometric assessment and development tools.

Blogs Business Consulting Professional Services Sales Development Sales Leadership Sales Recruitment Sales Training

Is Coaching Salespeople Worth The Investment? What The Research Tells Us.

17th December 2021 No Comments

In the first blog of the series, we explored the features that make sales training succeed.  In our second blog, we look at the value in coaching (and mentoring) your sales team.

Does coaching improve performance in general? The answer is a resounding “yes”. Definitive research reviews by Theeboom et al (2013) and Jones et al (2016) have found that coaching is an effective change methodology (Grant & O’Connor, 2019).  In particular, coaching has a large impact in terms of performance improvement.  Jones et al (2015) argue that this is likely to be because coaching involves many characteristics that we already know from research will enhance performance. These are:

  • Coaches apply goal-setting
  • Goals generally feature work-based activities, promoting experiential forms of learning
  • and thereby directly encourage transfer of learning to work behaviour

Jones et al’s (2015) research overview found that it makes no difference to outcomes whether the coaching sessions are delivered face-to-face, online or by telephone.  Their findings also suggest that internal coaches can deliver stronger outcomes than external coaches. However, research also tells us that the strength and quality of the coach-coachee relationship is a key ingredient to the success of the coaching process (De Haan et al, 2016).  For example, empathy, positive regard and autonomy support are important characteristics of the relationship (Grant & O’Connor, 2019).  So, while it may be ideal for organisations to develop a culture of coaching internally, due care should be taken in terms of training managers to be effective coaches and ensuring they have the relevant skills and characteristics that support quality relationships with their coachees.

Evidence of Impact of Coaching on Sales Performance

The purpose of sales coaching is to equip salespeople with the right knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) to achieve role and organisation-related objectives and goals. It can be delivered by a Sales Manager or an external coach.  Similar to executive coaching, the aim is to improve performance through a series of conversations, feedback provision and activities (Badrinarayanan et al, 2015).  Mentoring on the other hand tends to not have a focus on the development of KSAs and performance per se, but is the “exchange between a senior experienced person and a less experienced, more junior protégé” with a focus on career goals (Bradford et al, 2017).

Sales coaching is an under-researched area, but Badrinarayanan et al’s (2015) overview finds that it is an effective element of training and development programmes and that “professional sales coaching plays an important role in the development of salespeople…”

Sager et al (2014) found that salespeople are more satisfied with both selling skills and product knowledge training when it is supported by role models. Furthermore, sales organisations can assist salespeople by providing role models and mentors during initial sales training. Participants are more likely to be satisfied with training if role models continuously and consistently demonstrate correct and expected selling behaviours. Bradford et al’s (2017) found that a combination of external training and on-the-job training are more related to performance enhancement than are internal training courses.  They also recommend the use of internal mentoring, especially where the mentoring relationship gives the opportunity to shadow, observe and mimic the behaviour of the more senior colleague.  These researchers suggest that developmental support from line managers is important to realise the full potential of sales coaching.

In summary, the research tells us that coaching and mentoring play very important, but distinct roles in the embedding of sales capabilities. Coaching embeds learning by setting goals that feature work-based activities and encourage learning transfer. In this relationship, the coachee benefits by taking ownership for converting the ‘theory’ of sales training into a set of clear goals, supported by a tangible set of practical actions that will embed the desired behavioural change. On the other hand, mentoring allows the mentor to reinforce the expected sales behaviours and the mentee to observe and imitate these.

Key findings:

  • Evidence that coaching can improve individual performance is strong
  • Coaching embeds learning by setting goals that feature work-based activities and encourage learning transfer
  • Quality of coaching support is critical to the success of the coaching relationship
  • Participants report increased satisfaction with sales training when it is supported by mentors who role-model the expected behaviours

Bloojam are business psychologists who take an evidence-based approach to selecting and developing salespeople, leaders and sales leaders.  See our website to learn more about our approach to developing sales capability in your workforce.

 

Badrinarayanan, V., Dixon, A., West, V.L. & Zank, G.M. (2015) Professional sales coaching: an integrative review and research agenda. European Journal of Marketing, 49, 7/8, 1087-1113.

Bradford, S.K., Rutherford, B.N. & Friend, S.B. (2017) The impact of training, mentoring and coaching on personal learning in a sales environment. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 15, 1.

De Haan, E., Grant, A.M., Burger, YD. & Eriksson, P.O. (2016) A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of working relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189-207

Grant, A.M. & O’Connor S. (2019) A brief primer for those new to coaching research and evidence-based practice. The Coaching Psychologist, 15(1) 3-10

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y.R.F. (2015) The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89, 249-277.

Sager, J.K., Dubinsky, A.J, Wilson, P.H. & Shao, C. (2014) Factors influencing the impact of sales training: Test of a model. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 6(1), 1.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B. & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2013): Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology: Dedicated to furthering research and promoting good practice. (September 2013)

Blogs Business Consulting Professional Services Sales Development Sales Leadership Uncategorised

4 Stats That Show How B2B Buyers Suffer From Information Overload (And Why The Salesperson Is As Critical As Ever)

25th June 2021 No Comments

Consider these stats:

  • In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, published the first website (info.cern.ch). Ten years later there were over 29 million websites and today there are over 1.8 billion.
  • Google, when launched in 1998, processed around 10,000 searches a day. It now receives around 2.5 billionqueries a day.
  • Last year there were over 600 million active blogs. 70 million new blogposts are published each month on WordPress. Nearly 80% of the Fortune 500 uses a corporate blog to communicate to their customers.
  • There are 57 million companies on LinkedIn. 2 million posts, articles and videos are published on the platform every day.

It’s all a far cry from the pre-internet days when information was scarce and a client’s ability to compare one supplier against another was limited. Today the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that there is now too much information out there. The result is information overload for buyers. Buyers report that two-thirds of their buying journey is spent on gathering, processing and deconflicting information.

In addition, the word “buyers” is no longer correct. Buying groups are increasingly common in B2B sales. Research from Forrester shows that 63% of purchases involve four or more people, each of whom is likely to represent a different department and to play a different role in client decision-making.  With numerous stakeholders involved on the buyer side, each independently uncovering information from different sources, it is easy to see how buyers find it difficult to find agreement between themselves about how to proceed.

It falls to the salesperson (consultant, account manager) to help clients to make sense of the information they have uncovered, to help them to deconflict contradictory evidence, to challenge their thinking and to coalesce them around a solution.  Doing so enables the salesperson to demonstrate their knowledge, to establish credibility and to create that trusted partner relationship that creates the right environment for a sale to proceed.

Jim Bloomfield is a Director of Bloojam Consulting with 20 years’ experience of using business psychology to develop salespeople and leaders. He is a member of the Association of Business Psychology (ABP) and the British Psychological Society (BPS) and has successfully helped some of Britain’s best-known businesses exceed their sales goals.