Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives | 
| Authors: Ph.d., Bradford D. Smart, Greg Alexander
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $3.74
You Save: $21.21 (85%)
New (43) Used (11) from $3.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 31459
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.8 x 0.8
ISBN: 1591842069
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.311
EAN: 9781591842064
Publication Date: June 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A concise extension of the business classic Topgrading, targeted to sales managers
Brad Smarts Topgrading has sold more than 150,000 copies since 1999, making it the definitive book for executives who want to hire, coach, and retain top talent. Now Smart has teamed up with Greg Alexander, who used Topgrading to radically improve his sales force at EMC.
In Topgrading for Sales, they have boiled down the key Topgrading ideas to a pithy 112 pages while focusing on the unique needs of sales managers and sales directors.
Great sales forces dont just depend on strategies they depend on hiring the best possible reps. But surveys show that about half of all hires and promotions put an underqualified person in the wrong job. No wonder the average tenure for sales managers is only nineteen months.
Topgrading for Sales takes the guesswork out of hiring by teaching readers how to interview systematically for A-level talent instead of relying on hunches and prejudices. It also shows how to coach B-level reps to turn them into A-players and how to weed out C-players before they do too much damage.
|
| Customer Reviews:
A solid short guide to building a better sales team by hiring better salespeople September 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book teaches the simple truth that if you hire better salespeople you will get more high quality sales. The authors teach you how to do that and how to coach them to be even better. You will learn how to analyze your sales team and what to do with what you learn. The authors show you how to recruit and hire the best salespeople and provide you with forms, checklists, and key techniques on how to accomplish your purposes. Coaching your salespeople is also very important and this book gives you a chapter on how to do that.
The last chapter provides you with the way to get started with the topgrading process and four appendices that provide the means to scorecard your current sales reps, a career history form so you can understand what your salespeople and prospective salespeople have done, and forms for an interview checklist and reference checks. The last appendix lays out the numbers of how topgrading your sales team will make you more money.
Very good.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
Apply Topgrading concepts quickly to improve your sales July 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Topgrading for sales is a must in any manager's library. It's an easy way to get introduced to the Topgrading concepts. You'll be able to rapidly implement tools for better hiring and get results. It will help you improve your sales. Although Topgrading for sales is a great place to start, if you're serious about Topgrading, I suggest you also get the original Topgrading book - How leading companies win by hiring, coaching and keeping the best employees.
 How to hire the best- and make your managing easier July 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Elaborate marble facade of NYSE as seen from t...
Image via Wikipedia
Topgrading for Sales. World-class methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives. Bradford D. Smart & Greg Alexander. 2008. ISBN 9781591842064. Stats from this book: In the USA the national failure rate in the sales profession is 40% which is also the annual turnover/ termination rate. The life of a sales manager is 19 months. The cost of a sales mis hire is easily $600 000, which translates into a mis hires annually in the US of about 8 million people annually ( or 8million * $600k = ?) . Alexander teamed up with Smart to bring top grading to Sales. While at GE, Alexander did wonders with this approach. He strive to only hire the top 5 % of the sales guys. This book contains everything you want to know on how to do this. Lots of very very useful advice here. My only concern is for those of us in small regional markets like Canada etc, how big is that 5% pool? Not very, so what is a smaller co to do? I think there are great ideas here on how to hire better people which will make your management tasks that much easier. If you have to take folks as they come, you will know out of the gate that some of them are going to take lots of your resources in order to be successful The gem for me was the idea of having a virtual bench, ie knowing who in your market you would like to have working for you that are not, nurturing relationships so that when you need fresh faces in the filed you have a connectors/prospects bench to go to. Lots of work, but it is a valid idea. Every Sales manager should have this one on their shelf.
Topgrading for Sales: World-Class Methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives June 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In today's competitive landscape, getting and keeping the best talent is necessary to win the game. The Topgrading process is a good process to really identify talent that will help make an organization stronger. I use Brad's techniques in my business and they have served me well. I recommend any person who has responsibility for hiring and managing sales people to become very familiar with this book.
Topgrading for Sales June 26, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you are a manager hiring sales representatives this is a must read. It is a practical no nonsense method to identifying top talent. Do not shortcut the process or you will shortcut your results. My team started Topgrading over a year ago and we have drastically reduced turnover and mis-hires. We have been awaiting the Topgrading for sales as the information in this book is only serving to help us improve on what we were already doing.
|
|
|
|
