The Power of Assessments to Scale Your Team | Ep 48

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:26:50.030

This is episode 48, and on it I cover the power of assessments and how I use them to dial in teams to unlock growth that lasts. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. Excited to dig in with you today and go over assessments. It's an interesting topic. There's a lot of tools out there that are really popular.

We've got the old school stuff like Myers Briggs. Really popular over the last few years was the Enneagram test. Had a client, Jeff and Beth McCord. They're kind of the gurus of Enneagram.

From a Christian perspective, there's Colby, which is great. From an entrepreneurial type team perspective, there's Disk. There's Colton Clifton, Strengths finder.

I like that there are a lot of offshoots of each of them. Like in Disk, there's the Culture Index. Predictive Index, I think is another one. Genius. What was the genius one?

I just found that one recently, but working genius. So there's all these types and like so many tools, when I used to do a lot of marketing, people would say, oh, what's the best CRM?

And my answer is whichever one will get used. So there's a lot of opinions about each of these.

I find that if you can get a tool that you can learn and you can master, most of them are really good. I use one called Intermetrics. It is a combination of disk plus what are called your values or motivators. And I'll talk about all this in detail.

And then the last section is the Hartman values profile, which to me is kind of like the secret sauce, and I'll tell you why in a second.

But I find that assessments bypass my desire to see the potential in people and just fall in love with them and want to help them achieve their highest and best in business. I am not a personal development or coach that is going to unlock employees.

My job is to find the best employees possible, whether for myself or for my clients, and then help them thrive and knock it out of the park over and over and over. That's my philosophy on business. Do not find diamonds in the rough and try to polish them into their most brilliant form.

Because most of the time you find lumps of coal and it's huge, huge opportunity cost getting the wrong people on your team. So I got introduced to the Intermetrics through a good friend and mentor of mine, Tom Schoff.

He's a sales Trainer, and he has assessed hundreds of thousands of people over the years. And in my journey, he showed me the power of the three sections of the Intermetrix.

And it is what I use now to do my assessments for sales recruiting and any kind of recruiting, but also team development and understanding who's on your team.

And I've got lots of case studies I'll talk about today that are, I think, are really interesting of how this can be used in a number of different ways. But I'm mostly gonna talk about sales recruiting because that's what I'm using it for right now. So when I first got introduced to it was in 2009.

And since then I've probably assessed, I don't know, four or five thousand people.

And like most people that utilize tools or see patterns over and over and over, when I look at the results of the intermetrics assessment, I feel like Neo looking at the matrix, I can just see all the code going by.

And in a split second, I can get an idea of how somebody's wired, what their personality's like and what their potential is for your organization just from looking at that assessment. So let's walk through the three parts and what jumps out.

And I'll use some case study examples of how we've used this to supercharge recruiting and supercharge team optimization. Because getting the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins said in Good to great is the most important thing.

And making sure they're in the right seats and that they're thriving is how organizations grow. And I think in the age of AI talent, of staff is going to be a bigger lever than ever before.

And so getting the right people on your team and making sure that they are the most talented for their role is really critical. So in disc, it's an acronym for Decisive, Interactive, Interpersonal, Structured. I think it's structured or systems.

I think of a lot of times, and then cautious. I call it Completer. So you'll see I bend it to the definitions that work best for me.

When you take that first section, that is the disc, it gives you two scores for each trait. It says, what's your natural style? How would you behave?

As I say, if you had $10 million in the bank and nothing to do every day, what would your behavior be like if you could be your true, authentic self? And then there's the adapted style, which is how are you bending to fit into the world today?

Kind of like a snapshot, like a balance sheet of your behavior. And what that shows us is how do you like to behave?

And then how are you fitting into your role, into your world, so that you can get along and make do?

And one thing that I look at is I want to see how much is the delta between each score of your natural and adapted, because that's a source of stress.

It's really important for your existing staff because if your existing staff are hardwired to like routine, like structure, like following through, don't like change, but you're chaos on a stick. And they're having to be extroverted or decisive and they can't get much routine and structure and they're dealing with change all the time.

All of that is a source of stress and they will eventually burn out because we can only bend so much before we break.

So when I'm looking at a sales team, I want to see that for the typical sales profile of somebody that has to go out and open new doors and follow up with existing clients and dig deeper with their book of business, I want to see that they're more decisive, they're higher on the D and they're more extroverted, they're higher on the I. And that is a combination. That's classic sales profile.

Now, you may have a sales team like, I've got a client right now where they don't have classic, extroverted, decisive, direct salespeople. They have more technicians that are empathetic and like structure and they're detailed and in their world, they're a pest control company.

Those salespeople air quote salespeople, they're more technicians, don't have to be traditional salespeople because the prospects are falling in their lap and they have a bleeding neck. They've got an ant infestation or they've got rats in the attic, or they've got something that caused them to reach out and they need a solution now.

And so as long as that company shows up and is kind and explains things and it has fair pricing and is reliable, they'll get the business. All those guys have like a 70% close rate. So they don't need to be traditional salespeople.

They're more of what I would call customer support plus and that they are friendly, they build trust and they take the orders and they don't need to close much. Now, I will say if they had more closing ability, the company would probably grow faster. But that's not what the client needs.

That's not what the company needs in their growth stages. So when we look at the changes between their natural and adapted that's really important to see.

Are you forcing people to do things that they're not naturally wired for? And that is on management to know. The next thing that I look at is who are the successful people in that role and what are their profiles.

So I did this first with one of my clients that's written about in my book, Yamabian Horn Engineering. And they had five main roles. I think it was a land surveyor, project engineer, a senior engineer. I can't think of all the roles, but a draftsman.

And what we did was they had 22 staff at the time and we assessed all of them based on their role. We took the top two performers and said, what do they have in common?

And lo and behold, every time the top two performers had almost identical profiles. So that became the rubric that we looked at for new recruits. Because if it's already working, let's just stick with that profile.

Now you may say, well, now you're missing out on others that could have worked but may not have that exact profile. And that's true, but I'm not in research mode. I'm in solving mode when I'm doing recruiting.

And so what we did was we came up with a profile for each of those five roles. And as they recruited, applicants would take the assessment and if they were close enough to that ideal profile, they'd move forward.

And we ended up growing them from 22 staff to 38 staff in about a year and a half and had 100% success rate with all the recruits because we were matching them to the profile of the successful in that role.

And so when we assess your sales team, we just want to see what's going on, who's performing, what are their traits, and how do we find more like them. So that's disc. Next we move on to the values motivators. And this measures seven factors that are common in most areas of motivation in employment.

And so the ones that matter are economic and individualistic. When you're dealing with sales, because we need people that are money motivated, it doesn't mean that they're greedy necessarily.

It doesn't mean that they're going to sell out their grandmother or rip somebody off just to make a buck. But they have to be focused on winning and getting rewarded for that winning. And their biggest, easiest reward is financial.

And so I find that anybody who has a low economic just is not a great salesperson. They may be good at everything except closing. They may build a lot of trust.

They may be really friendly, but if they don't Have a high economic, they're not going to close. And then the individualistic is a trait that measures their ability to work, be on their own, be unique, speak up, speak their mind, persuade.

And those are traits that just about every good salesperson has. On the individualistic side, a couple things that I look for are in altruism.

Altruism is a fantastic trait and motivates a lot of people's behavior to do good for others and put others needs before your own. It is the basis of most religious texts, is to be altruistic, care for others, and it's a fantastic trait in society.

Unfortunately, in business, it's not the greatest trait because we end up oftentimes putting the needs of the prospect or the client above the needs of the company. And so you can get an imbalanced situations where you're bending too far, you're sacrificing too much, you're taking the short end of the stick.

And so if a prospect or salesperson has high altruism and low economic traits and motivators, then they end up overvaluing the prospect's excuses and they don't close even if it's in the client's best interest. So those are some traits that I look at. The next one is regulatory. It's a motivator value.

And what regulatory says is how much structure do they need? How much do they need things to be black and white? And as you can imagine, in most small businesses, things are not black and white.

And so we end up in a situation where people with high regulatory tend to feel stressed or tend to dig their heels in when they're in small businesses because the owner's changing things and you may feel like you're relatively stable compared to your peers. You only change things once a month or once a quarter. But people with high regulatory never want things to change. They want it to be black and white.

They want everything to be spelled out.

And in sales, especially in small businesses, you need a sales rep that can be flexible, that can adapt on the fly, that can come up with a solution to get a great client over the line, even if it's not quite within the scope of what your sweet spot is, but it's still a great client. And so if the regulatory is too high, I tend to find they just don't fit. So that's the second section on the motivators.

And again, I've had companies where they have people with lower economic traits, lower economic motivations, and they still close, fine, but they're leaving money on the table. It's an opportunity cost. They're. That comes into play when you've got low economic sales staff.

And if you find in operations, having high economic managers is really important, high economically motivated managers, because it shows they're resourceful and they care about the bottom line.

And they know that perfection isn't the goal, but the balance of good quality with managing the bottom line is how a company stays solvent and sustainable and can continue growing. So then we move on to the third section, the Hartman values profile. And I've always just said this is your raw horsepower.

It measures three external factors and three internal factors. And the external factors are empathy. So our ability to read others, understand their situation, put ourselves in their shoes.

Practical thinking, which is like book smarts, the ability to learn and pick up things. And then systems judgment, which is the ability to be strategic, create order out of chaos, connect the dots.

And I would say for most employees, the systems judgment is really along the lines of how effective are they at prioritizing?

So when we look at those three traits, empathy and practical thinking are really important in sales because we want to read others, we want to be able to read the room. We want to understand how they're perceiving us. We want. We want to know what their pains are.

We want to understand them sometimes better than they understand them. And people with high empathy are great at that. The next is practical thinking. And I just say it's always easier to work with smart people.

They get up to speed faster. You don't have to explain yourself as much.

They come up with better solutions a lot of times, or they'll brainstorm with you, even though that's more of a systems judgment skill. But I find that intelligent people are pleasant to work with. Now, it can get too high where they're overly intelligent.

I'll talk about an example in a second where that becomes a liability. But when somebody's intelligent and they have high empathy, they're just a joy to work with. And they're really skilled in sales.

Now, systems judgment is kind of like a nice to have.

I find that those with high systems judgment are incredibly brilliant because they can connect the dots, they see the patterns, they come up with solutions that you may not have come up with. But it's not critical that they have high systems judgment if they're going to be a sales performer. Now all these are scored on a scale of 1 to 10.

And I find that 8 or above is where we want to be in each of these systems judgment. I'll go down to like 7, 7.2, 7.3 if the others are strong. But anything 8 or above is great.

But if you get up into the nine or above range, you're into really rare error.

And the problem with dealing with somebody that's that smart is oftentimes they get bored and oftentimes they can challenge you in ways that you've never been challenged before. And they're not wrong.

And so if you are one of those owners that doesn't like to be challenged or you don't like others coming up with solutions for you, or saying pointing out the holes in all of your flawed logic, working with somebody who's a 9, 9, 9 or an 858-59- somewhere around there is gonna be really, really tough for you.

And you have to have growth opportunities because people that are that talented, where their cumulative scores are 26 or above, they want to grow, they want to expand.

They've got so much horsepower and so much potential that if they're not advancing, they're feeling like they're being held back and they're going to bounce. So that is the challenge of working with people that are too talented, too sharp. So that's the external part.

Then we go to the internal and it's just a mirror essentially of those three, but looking internal. So the first is self esteem. How confident are they? How much do they believe in themselves?

Now this is really critical because when I first took this in 2009, I scored really well on the external, but my self esteem was like a 4.2. It was in the tank. And as Tom pointed out to me, he's like, man, you got a cruise ship of potential, but you got holes in your hole everywhere.

Because of my self esteem, I was on the heels of bankruptcy. I was dealing with a lot of stuff. I was young.

And the problem with people with low self esteem is that they're driving down the road with one foot on the brake. And that's been me early in my career. And the challenge is that people with low self esteem are always worried about what they're doing.

They're second guessing themselves, they're questioning, did they say the right thing. They're hesitant, they overthink things. They have arguments in their head that never become reality. And it's really unfortunate.

I had a client, I'm doing a recruiting job for the other day and there's a candidate. The guy checked off every box. He was decisive, he was extroverted, he was money motivated.

He'd been in his current job for nine years and his previous One for eight years, he was top performer in both, but his self esteem was really low and it was crippling. In the interview, it was so obvious that I just couldn't let the client work with him. I was like, this is going to be such a liability.

And we passed on him. And it was unfortunate because he checked the boxes and he looked really great from the outside.

But I know that that insecurity for this client would become a major, major issue and he'd have to be reassuring this guy all the time, which is not what my client needed.

And so when we see that, it's like having an MRI into their head and being able to see, gosh, they've got all this potential, but they're being held back by this insecurity. So that's the first number and the most important on the internal. The next two are really important for existing staff.

The second one is called role awareness. And this says, how confident are they in their role in the organization or in their life?

How confident are they that they're doing the right thing or that they know what to do and that they're good at it or rewarded for it?

And that's really important because you want people on your team to know that they're in the right role, what they're supposed to do and how to win at it. And if their role awareness is low, like below a six, then you're not helping them thrive and find their sweet spot.

You may be changing the moving the goalposts on them, changing their role. You may not just even be reinforcing them at all.

And so that's really important for existing teams to see, like what is the role awareness of the people that have been on our team for a while? And you'll probably find that the poorer performers, their role awareness is lower.

And so it becomes an indicator of a weakness in management, in alignment and all these things. And then the final piece is self direction and that's measuring where their life is headed, how confident are they, how positive do they feel?

And again, if they're working for you and they've been with you a long time, their self direction should be fantastic because they should know, I've got a great job here, this company's growing, I've got lots of opportunities, I feel optimistic about where we're going.

And so again, if role awareness and self direction are low, then you've got a big liability on your hands that you're dealing with because you're not supporting them or helping them or you're keeping the wrong person on the team because you're too nervous or insecure to try to replace them. And so as we go through these assessments, we start to see patterns arise.

And like I've got a client right now, he was frustrated, they're doing about 3 million. And he was frustrated that his staff wasn't taking more charge, that his managers weren't leading more.

Well, lo and behold, they all have low decisive traits. So they aren't ever going to make up their mind. They're never going to push him, they're never going to be proactive and it's crippling him.

And so we're starting to replace them. The one good thing is everybody on the team has high economic. So he runs a very profitable organization and they care about the bottom line.

But he's at that inflection point around 3 million, where you've got to level up, you've got to get real managers that can make real decisions so that you're not the bottleneck.

And everybody waiting on you at 5 million and twiddling their thumbs and you yo yoing between 3 and 6 million back and forth, back and forth, because you can't get any momentum because there's no leadership to help take that decision load off of your plate. And I find that decisiveness is a phenomenal executive function. Like the best executives are so decisive.

And I follow Dr. Julie Girner on Twitter and she talks about her highest level executive. Clients make rapid decisions. They're just instantaneous.

And my buddy Jon Kronstadt, he ran Kajabi for a number of years, grew it from 6 million to 100 million in five years.

And their investment group told him recently that he and Kenny, his partner in that, were the most decisive executive team founders that they'd ever worked with. And the proof is in the pudding and their growth.

So if you are dealing with staff that aren't making decisions in management that aren't taking the load off for you, at least getting 80% of the big stuff off of your plate, then you'll never get past the $5 million plateau.

Another client, Ben Gorellic, when he first came to me back in 2014, he had his mountain guide school and he thought he needed operations manuals, he thought he needed to document everything because his staff just wasn't getting things done. And so we assessed everybody and what we found was the people that he had put in management had no management skill whatsoever.

And we found one of the gals on his team, she was just kind of a, a rover utility player. And we Put her as operations manager and everything got better instantly. And guess what?

He never needed to create operations manuals because he got the right people in the right place and things unlocked from there.

And he got all this time back because he wasn't having to run around and wipe everybody's nose and play cop and switchboard operator and telling everybody what to do every day. So when you get clarity on your team, I really like the analogy of an mri.

You're looking right inside their brain of how are they wired, what do they like, what motivates them, what demotivates them, and what's their potential upside of how much room do they have to grow with you?

Because I had a contact the other day, he was telling me that he has a field technician that he's had for 10 years, and the guy is a great field technician and. But he just won't manage. And I said, well, I find oftentimes great field technicians aren't great managers.

And I said, why would you tell a fish to go climb a tree? Just have him be a great field technician and find a better manager.

And this contact is a very idealistic, humanitarian type entrepreneur, and he just sees the potential in everybody. But he's been wasting his time trying to force this technician into management.

So when we get this clarity, we then can make decisions about, okay, what really is the potential here? Where are we at in the inflection point of growth, what role do we need and who's already doing well that we can model after?

And if we don't have anybody that's doing well, what profile do we want to hire for?

Based on my history of looking at all the different roles, and I'll have another episode coming out soon talking about, like, the four main sales profiles that I see over and over and over, and which business models need which traits and what to look for in those candidates.

But knowing what's under the hood, what's going on between the ears, is the fastest shortcut to getting the right people on the right in the right seats.

And so for those of you that are listening to this and you get all the way here to this 25 minute mark, I am happy to do a sales assessment for you for free. I used to charge $5,000 for these, and I find that it is the fastest path to getting you unstuck.

And so I'm happy to do them for free for listeners of this podcast because I know that I can get you unstuck 10 times faster than if I charge you for it. And the secret selfish motivation on the backside is nine times out of ten we're going to need to replace somebody and I'll recruit them for you.

So it is a Trojan horse offer to get in and see under the hood and get you clarity on who to replace, but just reach out to me. Joshottleneckbreakthrough.com mention this episode and we'll get you set up with a free sales team assessment.

And if you've got a small team, maybe less than five salespeople and you've got a company under 15 or 20 people, I'm happy to do the assessment for everybody for free because you just need that clarity before you get too far ahead of yourself with the wrong people on the team. So hope that's useful.

Joshottleneckbreakthrough.com and I will look forward to assessing your sales teams and leveraging them up because getting the right people in like you can see on all the testimonial videos on my website and the episodes that I've had before.

I think Tony de Quick is my favorite because we replaced a mediocre salesperson with a superstar and growth just got unlocked and I can't wait to keep adding to his team over time as growth continues to happen. And Matt Kaufman same thing. We just kept upgrading staff in the sales team and the results were just record setting months.

So you have no reason to not getting results like that. The tools are here.

I'm doing it for free to get you the assessment to show you the clarity and the results that will come after that are going to be something that you're going to kick yourself and wish you had done sooner. So hope that's useful. Hope you have a great day. Look forward to talking to you on the next episode.

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