Caliper Workshop - Developing A Winning Sales Team

Top performance of employees at work is of vital importance to every organization. This can be achieved by understanding the motivational traits of individuals that make up the work force.

With this in mind, Caliper Singapore recently conducted a Sales Team Management workshop in Singapore for companies operating in the South East Asian region. The event was very well attended by Country Managers, Sales Directors, and Senior Managers from MNCs and local SMEs.

The workshop addressed issues related to sales coaching and the effectiveness of sales activities through the use of the Caliper Profile^™. This tool was created in 1960 by Caliper’s founder and CEO, Dr Herb Greenberg, to help companies improve their sales performance. It was aimed to enable Sales Managers understand their team members’ personality traits and thereby align the individuals towards achieving peak performance.

Dr Greenberg wrote the book “How to hire and develop your next top performer”, a New York Times best seller. He said “Lots of people think they can sell. In many cases, lots of people can sell some things, successfully, for a short period. However, those sales people who know their strengths and their weaknesses and find sales opportunities that allow them to play to those strengths have an advantage. Those people who have the personalities and the techniques matched to the kind of sales they need to work at typically produce the best results.

Knowing where you are not as strong is important too. For some people, the knowledge gained through education and training can help them mitigate some of their inherent weaknesses.

Knowing whether or not our strengths truly provide us with what we need to tackle the game of sales day to day, week by week, over months and years of a career can help us better use those strengths we have. We can also recognize where we need to learn other methods, strategies or techniques. Or perhaps, some people need to come to grips with the realization that certain types of sales really don't match who they are as people.”

Caliper’s Sales Team Management workshop provided a solid six phase model of the sales process. It was designed to help the managers recognize the individual’s strengths and weaknesses at every step of each phase. Sales team leaders were provided with explanations, examples and lots of practice to learn the behaviors that prove most successful at maximizing individuals’ sales traits.

The workshop focused on how sales team managers can use the information to coach their own salespeople. Knowing their motivations and evaluating them on each of the essential behaviors in the sales process would enable the leaders to coach each person on an individual basis.

Mr Daniel Tan, Regional Manager for Caliper said: “The workshop is effective in helping to translate knowledge into action. It shows you the steps involved and provides a framework of how to do it for each person who works for you.

In the workshop, participants were exposed to the personalities of top sales people. They learnt how to coach to their people’s strengths and how to address some of their weaknesses. Participants also used the Caliper Profile to evaluate the people they have on each of the important behaviors needed to sell products and services successfully. After the workshop, participants were very excited to apply the model they learnt. They saw themselves coaching their staff on an ongoing basis and using skills acquired in the workshop.”

Caliper is a 45 year old management consulting firm and owns the scientifically validated psychometric tool called the Caliper Profile. The Caliper Profile provides a very accurate way of understanding the dynamics of an individual, team or organization. It has been used by more than 29,000 organizations for predicting and managing work-based behaviors and performance. Caliper’s strengths include being able to help companies identify, develop and retain top talents in Sales, Service and Leadership positions.

Over the years, Caliper has profiled more than 2.5 millions individuals. Top executives from business and academia who have used or completed the Caliper Profile assessment have given very good reviews of the value of the Caliper Profile.

Mr Ng Boon Hwang, Director for Career & Attachment Office at Nanyang Technological University, who attended a recent Caliper Consultant workshop said: “I have attended many career profiling tool workshops and this is the most comprehensive, so far. The many interpretation profiling exercises really helped in the deeper understanding of the various scales in the competencies clusters such as Persuasiveness, Interpersonal Behavior, Problem Solving/Decision Making, Personal Organization/Time Management etc. I like the customized reports that are done by the Caliper consultants. This greatly differentiates Caliper from other tools … where the reports are automatically churned out from the computer…. The ability to package Caliper into Team Building, Succession Planning, Management Potential, etc is going to enhance the reach and application of Caliper.”