Advantage Success Case: Johnson Controls
What You Need: Attract and grow sales stars.
Sales people are a unique breed – that we understand inside and out. We help you get the right sales people into the right roles, able to execute faster and committed to staying longer.
Issues You’re Facing
- No process for attracting the best sales talent
- Can’t assess which sales people should be promoted
- Legal constraints around hiring are murky, uncertainty about how to interview
- No on-boarding and continuing development process that will make new hires stay
How We Can Help
- Attract and retain top sales talent
- Improve accuracy of sales talent selection, alignment, and development
- Employ validated sales assessment instruments
- Deploy talent and build sales teams more effectively
- Help sales people improve productivity and proficiency
- Validate the skills and behaviors required for success in all sales roles
ADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS: HR Chally Talent Audit
Johnson Controls Uses HR Chally to Cut Turnover Costs and Integrate a New Sales Force
HR Chally assessments predict which sales reps will be more productive earlier in their careers.
Challenge
With more than 40,000 employees working in 125 countries, Johnson Controls is a building-automation services industry leader. The North American division faced high sales turnover costs that were damaging sales performance and revenue growth.
The company needed tools that could help reduce sales turnover – and those tools also had to be valid, reliable, and meet all legal requirements. It also wanted to increase sales proficiency.
Success Solution
Advantage Partner Chuck Quakenbush brought the high-performing sales assessment approach of Thought Leader HR Chally. This methodology met all of the Johnson Controls criteria. It was also supported by a robust database and could help predict sales performance — not just describe an applicant’s personality.
Making good use of benchmark data from Chally’s industry-wide database, profiles of each sales position were created. These profiles matched core skills of high performers. Knowing the behaviors of industry high performers in a given position helped Johnson Controls managers hire the right person for the right position – because the managers could better predict how those who were internally or externally recruited would perform.
When the VP of Services Sales and Marketing needed to integrate a large group of sales reps from an acquisition, he also used the Chally approach to conduct a Talent Audit—a sales person assessment—of both the legacy Johnson Controls reps and the newly acquired sales team. “It told us what things to look for, where to go deeper in the interview, and where there might be weaknesses,” he explained. “If there are weaknesses, that helps with the coaching and development path.”
Turnover is a major sales management issue for most companies and integrating sales people from an acquisition only increases the challenge. “What’s exciting is that the predictive nature of Chally assessments means that you can now turn those challenges into opportunities — whether by improving candidate selection, helping managers better develop their current people, integrating new staff after acquisition, or a host of other key talent management decisions,” says Quakenbush. “The result is people who can be more productive, faster. And that’s what will create a real, sustainable impact on the bottom line.”