Maya: Yes. So, I’ve been a professional salesperson since completing university and I always wanted to be a salesperson. And part of my journey was to learn about the psychology of the human being. Because having a business degree to start with wasn’t enough. So, I then became a sales trainer. And I was so passionate about the whole process of selling that I wanted to teach other people how to do it. And the greatest frustration, the greatest objection, I’ve had to my sales training was the fact that no matter how well we train people, the majority aren’t going to make it. So, I finally decided, “Well, let’s work it out”. Why is that? It is true in the business world. Why is it that the majority don’t make it?
Steve: Yes, some certain traits that you’ve gone through and identified that actually tell us that they’re going to be a good salesperson or not.
Maya: Yes. So, we’ve identified in research of existing high-performance sales staff that there are 75 attributes.
Steve: Wow!
Maya: That each individual needs to possess in order to be suited to the profession of selling. And so we’ve developed a test which searches for those 75.
Steve: Now you’ve called it the SIP Program. What’s the full name of that?
Maya: It’s the Sales Inventory Profile. It’s about the inventory or the components that are required for selling. People say that sales reps should be chatty or sociable or likeable. And maybe that’s true and maybe that’s not. But there are at least 72 other things that they should be as well. So, it’s a whole inventory. It’s like a warehouse of things that they need to possess.
Steve: Okay now, what you do is you help businesses identify, first of all, what type of salesperson they need for their roles. And then also the different types of salespersons that are out there and then put them together as a good fit. Now that’s going to save a lot of time and a lot of money.
Maya: That’s right. So, the first thing that people get wrong is misunderstanding what they need. So, salespeople do have two different styles, broadly speaking. There’s the ‘hunter’ who will initiate and go into the market and search for new business. That’s a very different personality type to the ‘farmer’ who’s able to; nurture, think in terms of strategy, plan and rehearse their processes and re-engage over and over and over again with the same people on a similar topic. Your average hunter, who will get new business, will get bored to death doing that and then they start to make mistakes. So you need to understand what sort of person you need, first of all, get to the right one.