1. Define the sales job requirements in behavioral terms by looking at top performers inside the company or in similar environments. What behavioral characteristics do the top performers have in terms of Dominance, Extroversion, Pace/Patience, Conformity, Energy Level, Energy Style, and Fact/Feeling Orientation.
2. Assess the behavioral style of the sales manager in terms of dominance, extroversion, pace (rate of motion) and conformity to structure and details.
3. Using best hiring practices, get a potential employee pool down to two to four candidates.
4. Assess the pool of two to four candidates against the top performance metrics using personality profiling software.
5. Have independent third-party interviewers verify the data with the candidates to link career choices with behavioral patterns and to assess evidence of behavior that matches up with your top performer profiles.
6. Have the independent interviewers counsel the sales managers on how well candidates:
• Match up to composite top performer profile
• Match up to specific top performers already within the organization
• Relate to the behavioral style of the sales manager
• Show evidence of the behaviors of the top performer metrics
7. Rank order the candidates on the basis of the best fit with the top performer profile.
8. Make hiring decision and offers.

Here are some of the key benefits of following the behavior profiling and matching approach:

• By profiling existing team members, improves communication and team building with the entire sales team
• Improves retention, allowing managers to spend less time in the hiring process
• Reduces a sales managers learning curve for getting to know candidates
• Bridges the "getting to know you gap" with new hires and reduces the potential manager mistakes that drive away good sales people
• Helps sales managers better predict the optimum way to train their sales team
• Helps sales managers better predict the optimum approach to manage and motivate their sales team

Look first to the people you have that touch your customers on a regular basis, and see what they do to make the customers experience with you special and valuable. You'll see a vast difference in the people that truly have their head in the game, and the others that are going through the motions.

Is there a level of customer service that defines the reason why your customers continue to do business with you? There was in my Dad's Army and Navy store. Let me share a story with you to illustrate. Mrs. Kavanaugh walks into the store and announces to no one in particular that she wants to buy a shirt for her son Billy. There are three people working in the store: my Dad, a college student by the name of John, and myself. All three of us knew the following:

• the size shirt Billy wore
• the colors and patterns he liked and didn't like
• the shirts that we had in stock that Billy already owned

As a result any of us were capable of helping her pick out a new shirt for Billy, and off she went, new shirt in hand, and if we did our job, some socks and underwear as well. (Trust me, if John and I didn't suggest socks and underwear, we would hear about it after the customer left the store.) We had hundreds and hundreds of families that were customers, and any of us could have told you that information about every family member.

Suppose some high falutin' consulting company did a survey on the customers of the Army and Navy store. How many would have mentioned that aspect of customer service as the reason why they did 100% of their men's and boy's shopping in our store? Not many, because it was such a natural part of the way our customers did business that they didn't even recognize it as being special. Think they would get that at the Macy's five miles down the road? I don't think so.

Was there ever a "let's memorize our customers purchases and define our customer service" strategy? Never. So how did it happen? We could do it because our heads were really in the game. We weren't going through the motions. We were living that store, hook, line, and sinker (no, we didn't sell fishing gear)

So, business is different now, you say. Is it really? At OPUS, we can't tell you what size shirt your son may wear, but we do know the personality profile of the salesperson you hired three years ago, and we can tell you how that person matches up to your profile. We can also tell you what we talked about when we reviewed the profile some three, or, who knows, maybe 10 years ago. Do our clients appreciate that level of service? Absolutely. They keep coming back to our store just because of that, and because Macy's doesn't offer profiling services.

I miss my Dad terribly, but I never forget the lessons he taught me about running a business.

Think you're an optimist? Maybe you are. Maybe not. Are there benefits to looking at life's circumstances from the perspective of an optimist? Absolutely. There are also some benefits of having a pessimistic outlook on situations. Seligman's book has some excellent exercises to test your own optimism and pessimism, and he also provides specific guidance as to how to look at things in a more positive light. This book was originally published in 1990, yet remains as valuable today as it was 15 years ago. You'll find this book interesting from a personal standpoint, and excellent for your perspective on business.