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Topgrading for Sales: A Review
By Ian Brodie | July 18, 2008
The folks at the Topgrading team (http://www.topgradingforsales.com/) kindly sent me a review copy of their latest book: Topgrading for Sales – so here’s the review.
A quick caveat: Topgrading focuses primarily on recruitment – and I’m far from an expert in that area. In fact, in my 15+ years working in consulting organisations I managed to studiously avoid the corporate recruitment process whenever possible, And when I was hired by others, it was always as a “done deal” result of headhunting rather than happening through a structured recruitment process. So this review is from the perspective of someone who is coming at it with a fresh pair of eyes.
Philosophy
The first interesting thing about Topgrading for Sales is its simple philosophy. The core concept of Topgrading is that you can and should hire only “A Players” – the top 25% of the population. Topgrading is very stark here; there’s no hiring of nearly-A’s or B+’s and hoping they will make the grade. Yes – try to coach your existing team if they’re not A Players yet, But when it comes to hiring – aim for the top.
There’s an unwritten assumption behind this, of course. It assumes it’s possible to do this. Theoretically, if everyone was Topgrading, there wouldn’t be enough A Players to go around. But my experience is that very few firms are really thorough in how they go about hiring – and certainly not as thorough as the Topgrading process. So in practice you don’t have to worry about a shortage of A Players – especially if you follow the first key piece of advice they give.
Maintaining an A Player “bench”
The first piece of advice in Topgrading which I’d not come across before is to maintain an A Player “bench”. Rather than do what most companies do – ignore the job candidate marketplace until you really need someone - their recommendation is to maintain regular contacts with a “bench” of high performers you would like to hire, and referrers who are able to put you in contact with high performers. This approach makes a lot of sense to me – rather than starting from scratch each time you want to hire you have an active pipeline of high quality candidates already at your fingertips. And if you’ve been keeping in contact with them regularly it will help you sell your organisation to them.
Rigorous Selection Process
The next differentiator of the Topgrading approach is the rigour with which the hiring process is carried out. For example, rather than relying on the candidate’s CV/resume (which is likely nowadays to have been significantly massaged by one of the many career coaches and CV advisors available), the Topgrading approach is to ask candidates to fill in a detailed Career History form – including compensation details, exact dates for each job, the name of previous bosses (hinting that they will be contacted) etc.
The process also includes a detailed “Topgrading Interview” in addition to the normal competency-based interviews (which most people now know about and how to prepare for). This interview is a rigorous career history review – talking about specific accountabilities, achievements and learnings.
The next key step is to get the candidate to set up a call for the interviewer with each of their previous bosses for the last few years. Now, of course, you can’t force the candidate to get you these calls. But the authors’ experience is that the A Players will be happy to set them up – knowing they will get good feedback.
At each stage of the process, of course, there is a filtering and narrowing down of candidates with the final decision being made after the calls with previous managers,
Overall
As you’ll have guessed from the review so far, I rate the book pretty highly. There were a number of new ideas for me – and they reflected my own personal experience of what seems to work and what doesn’t. And I really buy-in to the philosophy of taking recruitment seriously enough and rigorously enough to ensure you are only hiring A Players.
The book is pretty slim – 113 pages – which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a quick and easy read – but in areas I felt I would need more in order to actually implement the ideas. Over half the pages in the book are forms and checklists which is really helpful. But there’s little information on building the skills needed for successful hiring. For example, there isn’t really anything about interviewing skills, and the coaching chapter really only focuses on the timetable for coaching rather than on how to actually do it well. I think that anyone who buys-in to the Topgrading philosophy should take recruitment seriously enough to invest in books and other resources to make sure they are an A Player at all the skills needed to recruit A Players. In this respect Topgrading for Sales is an excellent overarching philosophy and framework for the way you should recrti sales people - and a starting point for further building your skills at doing so.
Ian
Topics: Recommendations |
July 20th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Hi Ian,
I have to say, you’ve done a great review, nice job
There’s a wonderful saying, I don’t know where I heard it, that goes along the lines of “First class people recruit first class staff, second rate people recruit third-rate staff”.
The principle is that people who aren’t any good are often scared of recruiting people better than themselves. So they avoid that buy getting complete slackers and dead-heads!
I’ve seen this play out in big business, but more scarily, in a very small consultancy too. The owner/manager was scared to recruit a guy with better technical skills than he had himself. It took some effort to coach him round.
When he understood how this would just set his feet in concrete of having to fix things all the time, rather than grow his business, he woke up. His business is doing very well now, glad to say!
I saw a great article today, not sure where, that was entitled “Hire Slow, Fire Fast”. Best advice for any recruitment I’ve ever seen. Cost of a wrong hire is about 3-6 months salary plus on-costs. Take the time to get it right, if it doesn’t work out after that, get rid of them fast.
Costs too much, wastes too much time.
Cheers,
Lee
July 20th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Ian,
I too have read this book and agree it is a good listing tool for mapping out the hiring process. The lack of deep dive is perhaps a way to get you to use their other resources and buy their training.
One final note: The book could be a bit shorter if they took the self promotion out of it. I wish they did not try to “sell” on how great the process is. The process speaks for itself.
Karl
July 21st, 2008 at 3:34 am
Ian,
Having a very serious recruiting background I am going to have to add this to my must read list. I already keep a bench of “players” ready to come on board in the event of a vacancy, but it looks like this book has a lot of great ideas for the serious recruiting professional.
Thanks for the excellent review!
-Brad
July 21st, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I’ve just finished the book and thought it a valuable read in that I have been shown an area that I perhaps took a little for granted. I mean, surely, the idea is that you hire the best people for the job…but then I didn’t realise to what extent you can refine the process…much like sales really.
With regards to your question on whether there would be enough “A” players to go around if everyone Topgraded, surely in a darwinian approach to this question, if everyone Topgraded then sales people by process of elimination would become mostly “A” people. Ah, if only that utopian dream were possible…
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I thank you for the review, Ian. I have been wondering what this book is all about. Based upon your recommendation, I’m going to read it.
Skip Anderson
July 31st, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Ian:
Nice review. We at Sales Benchmark Index are happy you enjoyed it. (Greg Alexander is our CEO.)
Cheers,
Nathan
August 4th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Ian
Just finished reading Nesh’s review and now I turn to your site and another review of the book. I also have a copy of the book and your comments about a quick and easy read are appealing… It seems the book is getting good reviews.