Written by Mote Chan, Simba Events Management Trainee
Recently, I often discuss the conference industry with my peers, and when I talk about the success and growth of the FBIF in recent years, it is generally believed that although there is a direction and a clear model, it is more important to implement the person. It's not easy to have a dead man on a team, but there are multiple people in our team at the same time. The paths and patterns we have traveled are difficult to replicate.
In fact, for Simba, the actual situation is also the same. We also wanted to find sales like Bill, and we wanted to find a plan like Bella, to copy the founding team, but none of them worked out. Therefore, trying to repeat the original path is also difficult for us internally.
Of course, over the years Simba has added some partners who have stuck in other dimensions or are extremely capable in some dimensions, such as Jean, who is extremely efficient in inviting guests and is more insistent than Bella. But when it comes to personnel, everyone is so different that it is impossible for us to recruit the next exact same person.
However, for the company to grow, the team, the model must be replicable. How do you get a weaker team to beat a stronger team? Copying the "masters" is a problem, but it must be overcome.
This article attempts to answer why we can't replicate the top employees, and what model we can replace.
Table of contents for this article
One, 50 ordinary employees, but also can not be worth a top employee
Bill's method is too simple, why is it difficult to copy?
Third, in the past, why was talent training wrong?
Fourth, in another way, there have been many successful cases
Fifth, a new employee training model
A 50 ordinary employees is not worth a top employee
Jobs: "50 ordinary employees are not worth a genius employee." ”
In the exhibition industry, whether it is in sales, planning, or the company's talent recruitment, the gap in the performance of employees makes me very much recognize this sentence. This sentence also applies to all walks of life and all positions. Conference industry sales, but also showed an extreme 50 times, or even 100 times the gap, with the accumulation of time, the performance of top sales and ordinary sales gap will only be further expanded.
Bill is a genius salesman in Simba, with a performance of 8.47 million in the project in 2020, accounting for 42.17% of the performance of the entire sales department and 32.43% of the company's performance.
Table 1: Bill's performance in FBI 2020 compared to other sales.
(Note: This table excludes sales that have been involved in FBIF2020 projects for a short period of time, and does not include the performance generated by employees outside the sales department)
▼Table 2: Average sales department performance statistics
(Note: Million-level sales are among the top sales among peers.) Therefore, in the statistics, the performance of million-level sales is also removed and then averaged)
▼Table 3: FBIF's historical performance and Bill's personal performance, as well as Bill's personal performance.
(Note: Since 2017, Simba's business has gradually included events, media, training, consulting, etc.)
▼Table 4: Peer project sales performance
Description: A single sales of more than one million, its performance is already 10 times the average performance of other sales.
In the conference industry, a sales performance of more than 1 million is already at the top. Simba has 5 sales of more than 1 million in 2020, and Bill is still nearly 10 times the average performance of all Simba sales. If you put it in the entire conference industry, the average performance of a single project should be only 50-1 million, and the average performance of a single sales should be 100,000-200,000 (in Simba, we remove million-level sales, and the average performance is only 200,000), so Bill's performance is nearly 50-100 times compared to the average of peers.
So, the question is, if the company recruits 50-100 sales, can it create the same performance as Bill? The answer is possible. But wage costs and management costs have also risen exponentially, and no company is willing to invest in this way! Like the vast majority of companies, we're trying to find top employees and we're trying to develop top employees.
However, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, practice has proved that such talents can be found. But why don't the vast majority of companies give up hiring and training? Because, the method of success, it seems particularly simple.
Bill's method is simple, why is it so difficult to copy?
(1) Where is Bill's sales method simple?
I am also from sales, my sales model is more similar to Bill, and later because the company did not have stable HR, at the same time, it was always impossible to recruit people, I rotated to the personnel department, and quickly recruited people. Bill asked me why we couldn't recruit so many HR people in the past, and you can recruit quickly. I said, it's a lot of chat, a lot of appointments. Bill says it's exactly the same as doing sales. It's very simple for us to understand each other because that's how simple our approach is.
Sales is essentially a mathematical problem. Moreover, from the superficial work content of the two of us: repetitive, simple, boring, tedious, and untechnical.
For example: Bill in the sales stage, most of the day, is one by one on WeChat and customers to chat, work WeChat has 8, each number is basically full, there is such a base guarantee, how can the performance conversion not be high?
I do recruitment is also similar, Boss direct employment paid account can call 200 greetings a day, I must call 200 greetings, and many hr just wait for resumes to vote after the release, or take the initiative to chat 3-5, even the reply to the person is not, how to recruit people? (We are not BAT).
The steps for selling and hiring are roughly the same:
Under the premise that the essence of sales is a mathematical problem (probability), we will continue to grow the base, which is why we think it is very important to do sales with market thinking.
"When Happiness Knocks": "Only by making more calls will there be more potential customers; only by contacting more potential customers will there be actual visits to customers; only more actual visits to customers will sign more contracts." ”
Our biggest puzzle is, how can we even do such a simple job that most people can't do? It's hard to recruit such people, and it's hard to train such people.
I have also encountered countless sales in the exhibition industry, as well as a large number of exhibition professionals, and the first job in the industry was also telephone sales, and then left in disgrace. Basically, there is nothing more than a common reason: it is too boring, too unskilled, and I am a college graduate who is not here to call.
There is an important problem. If a lot of chat must have performance and a good income, then I believe that more people will be willing to stick to it. So there's a big question about why Bill and I talk a lot about results, and a lot of people talk a lot and have no results.
A top salesman, no matter how diligent, can put in at most 2 times as many hours as others. Relying solely on diligence cannot solve the problem.
(2) Why is Bill's method difficult to replicate?
I recently replied to a question on Zhihu about how to succeed in sales, and in this answer I summarized the law of two eights, work hard, and smart.
The following elements of success can continue to be sorted out, mainly in Bill:
1, a successful sales, must understand the market
To understand the market, in essence, to know how to judge the direction of the market, to know where to attack. This ability basically brushes off 90% of sales in the market. Bill is a salesman who understands the market, and at any stage, he knows very clearly and clearly the direction in which he and his team are attacking.
There are many potential markets, but under the premise of limited time and energy, only 80% of the time can be invested in 20% of the market that can be transformed, rather than indiscriminate treatment.
(Law of Two Eight)
2. Time allocation
Bill works with a high focus on the core of his work. This is also something that most people can't do. An ordinary salesman, you will find that he is busy throughout the day, until the end of the day to find that the work is not completed as planned.
Speaking of time allocation, early in the sale, Bill and I called to make sure we made the most of the daytime time, and we put the Restaarch work all over the evenings, weekends, and all the holidays.
Time allocation also needs to follow the law of two eights, and 80% of the time should be invested in things that can directly produce results.
3. Good at learning, continuous summary, continuous iteration
Many people say how many years of work experience they have, which basically belongs to a method of 5 years and 10 years. Obsolete method with an empirical value of 0 or even a negative value. Simba has experienced the iteration of telemarketing, email marketing, WeChat sales and other models, among which Bill personally innovated and iterated in WeChat sales, group sales, booth sales and other fields to double efficiency. This is an important factor in his continuous higher performance. Contact Bill will find that Top Sales is more likely to learn, more willing to accept excellent methods, more able to innovate independently.
4. Perseverance
With the right direction, and in the right direction, keep attacking. Bill often says to have "strategic focus," and that's it. Once you've set your goal, stay tuned!
Very few people can do that! I understand very well that long, repetitive work, especially when there is no hope in sight, is easy to doubt life. So, at this moment, like Xu Sanduo, like Forrest Gump is very good.
(Sales is a math problem)
5. Long-termism
Simba chose to be brand-oriented to the conference, Bill has contributed more than 50% of brand owners in previous years, and 55.60% of brand owners in the 2020 project. It can be said that Bill uses the sales department as the main force to make the company's values and conference concepts land.
Most sales are driven by "this year/now" performance, and to ensure that orders are issued this year, only the customers who are most likely to make orders this year are contacted. Bill builds a lot of contacts and reserves every year for potential future customers, and many customers have been talking for 7-8 years and are still following up.
The 8.47 million in 2020 can be described as a thick accumulation, and this performance is only the beginning, not the end (the FBIF's exhibition target is 100 million+).
(Matthew Effect)
6. Thick accumulation and thin hair
Most ordinary sales do not even adhere to a project (ordinary sales liquidity is quite large), most of the sales that insist on completing 1 project have only stayed in the industry for 1-2 years, and this part of the sales accounts for 80% or more in the industry.
A salesman can persist in an industry for 5 years, or even 10 years, which is rare! Holding on for so long, it has won 99% of sales. Coupled with the accumulation mentioned above, there will also be a large number of referrals from old customers every year. Thick accumulation is inevitable.
3. Why was talent training in the past wrong?
To sum up the past, our biggest mistake is to try to recruit top employees directly; the other is to try to train the working methods of top employees to new people, expecting individuals to accept it completely. This approach is biased towards one-sided training, with less long-term continuous training.
Whether it is me or Bill, analyzing the achievement of their own performance, there is a theory, there is a process to follow, we used to think that as long as these theories are clearly explained to employees, method training continues, and employees are guided to persevere. Because, there is no threshold for these things at all.
Although we realized earlier that every excellent individual cannot be copied, we are still making such mistakes in the actual division of labor, which is also the mistake that many enterprises make at the beginning of the establishment of departments and positions.
Whether it is a senior salesman or a new sales person, it is often a personal battle, with strong independence, which means that a single sales person has to complete all the things in the sales process. So if this salesman, even if he only needs to complete 500,000 performance in a single project, he needs to do:
1. The correct market direction;
2. Reach out to enough people for effective key decisions;
3. Reasonable time allocation;
4. Need to accept high-intensity work, as well as voluntary overtime;
5. Resist the pressure and stick to it (or enjoy the process).
We underestimated the difficulty of our approach for most newcomers, having tried Devil's Camp and exploring the Management Trainee Program.
(1) Devil's training camp
In the early days of entrepreneurship, most of the new people we recruited were mainly sales, and they had experienced several rotations, and the yield rate was extremely low. Because the past training materials were not concise enough, I, Bella, and Bill also summarized their sales experiences at the end of 2014, and then summarized and spent weeks writing 13,950 words of "Devil's Training Camp" training materials and organizing centralized training for employees. As a result, high-pressure training, one partner left the next day. Devil's training camp is equivalent to a short-term training camp, lack of follow-up system follow-up, no work method into the new person's work habits, just understand, but not become a solidified method.
Simba Devil Bootcamp training documentation
Later, we were still very lucky to recruit excellent new partners and excellent peer partners, so that the sales department has become the company's strongest combat effectiveness and the most stable department. However, the large-scale cultivation of new talents, we still have not succeeded, which is why we need to further explore.
(2) Pipe trainees
In 2019, after studying the management trainee mechanism on the market, I think that the traditional rotation mechanism, which is just a simple rotation study, cannot actually achieve the purpose of effectively cultivating management trainees. Understanding the business and being able to actually do it well, and being able to drive business or management innovation, does not mean that it can be done after understanding everything.
My personal experience, from the sales department, planning department, marketing department, to the media, and then to the personnel department, although due to the company's development needs and "forced" continuous transformation, but the process is almost the same as the management trainees, this process, but also let me have more unexpected gains, more comprehensive understanding of the company's various departments, therefore, but also better understand the actual needs of each department, in the need for cross-departmental collaboration, as well as to promote company-level reform, my multi-departmental experience, I can be more practical, and more effective to promote change.
Therefore, combined with my experience, I propose a new idea for management trainees: the management trainees who expect to join Simba need to create higher performance than ordinary employees in the process of rotation, and establish a successful system before leaving the rotation department.
But in fact, after joining the department, management trainees still belong to relatively independent individuals in operation, for most of the management trainees, higher expectations, for personal ability requirements will be too high.
In fact, including large factories, most of the enterprises' pipe training generation power is very low. The core of management trainees is still people, not a rotation mechanism. The best of the bunch who are admitted to the school are capable of what makes them stand out in most fields. The rotation mechanism of management trainees only speeds up this process.
At Simba, we may not be able to recruit people like big factories, and according to the existing methods, it may take longer for management trainees to stand out.
In other words, there have been many successful cases
(1) High-output employee + assistant model
In 2016, I broke away from meeting planning (Bella was fully responsible for meeting planning) and returned to sales. At that time, the company had almost no retained sales, and Bill and I focused on overseas and domestic respectively. Considering that the two of us had to do a lot of Research work and customer liaison work, we started hiring assistants to work with us.
This model has proved to be very successful in practice.
In the past, whether it was me or Bill, to make sure we were fully connected to customers during the day, we needed to do a lot of Research outside of work hours, and the work was very intense. During the workday, it takes a lot of time to deal with trivial matters. Sometimes the customer's plan writing, to enter the supplier system and other work, sign and mail contracts, but also often have to be completed during working hours, which seriously affects the time we invest in contacting customers and negotiating.
The assistant model breaks down our Research, signing, mailing contracts, and basic documentary and customer service work into assistants. This has increased our time to acquire and convert at least 3x.
My configuration at the time was: I +2 assistants. In 2016, my performance also reached a record 2.53 million, after my previous record was 1.04 million in 2012.
At present, Bill uses this collaborative approach (1+X) to greatly improve work efficiency, which means that we can increase the output of our core employees several times without increasing sales. From a purely performance growth perspective, this model is several times more efficient than recruitment and sales. Assistants who participate in collaboration also have the opportunity to significantly increase their personal income.
(2) The media department's hot spots are extremely divided and efficient
As a media, we all know the importance of chasing hot spots. When Wilbur and I first started running media, we were inexperienced and often realized that hotspots were hot spots for hours or even days later. Always have to look at other people's articles from afar to read a ride.
Most of the time, the two of us were alone chasing hot spots. The process of discovering hotspots, looking for authorization, editing, taking titles, writing abstracts, finding pictures, typesetting, pushing, sharing to the community, sharing to the circle of friends, etc. are all one-person operations. Therefore, when a hot spot is found to an article, the short is as short as 30 minutes and as long as a few hours. This is often fatal for chasing hot spots. 30 minutes, enough to vary tens of thousands of readings.
Therefore, in order to ensure that we are the first in the field of food Chinese to chase hot spots (currently mainly fixed hot spots). We break down the steps into different people, and each person takes turns to take on different roles, ensuring that the team can be combined into a new hotspot group at any time. In the simulation exercise, we can produce articles as quickly as 10 minutes.
Starting from 2018, fixing hot news, we can basically maintain the first place in the Chinese, and rarely lose hands.
Compared with the past, a single person is alone, and the new collaboration model can make the results of dozens of minutes of close collaboration between media editing partners reach the sum of one week's reading.
(3) The wolf tactics of the sales department
In the sales department, large enterprises need determination, perseverance, and strength. For ordinary sales, it is often difficult to achieve.
Bill's strategy is to have a sales mix and collaborate to conquer big businesses. For Bill, for the same business, he can establish contacts with dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Ordinary sales may only be able to establish 3-5, so multiple sales liaison operations can also be close to or reach the level of Bill.
(4) The way of combining strong and powerful
In most organizational development models, it's often a competent member who promotes to leader and then leads a bunch of new people or members who are weaker than themselves. This model is equivalent to a combination of strong + weak. The special forces model is to select elites from each unit to form a stronger team.
In Simba's most important transformation, our 4 projects were combined into one project, which is equivalent to the elite formation of special forces. Prior to that, we formed a team with Bella and Bryan as the core, and another team with Me and Bill as the core. We each lead new people, and in one year, we have to complete 4 projects, the core team is scattered, and the energy is highly dispersed.
When our 4 projects are combined into 1, I serve as overseas sales, Bill for domestic sales, Bella for planning, Bryan for the conference, the formation of the conference "dream team", this combination, may be unprecedented in the conference industry, basically the core problems of a project can be successfully solved, there is no big shortcoming.
If it is not a strong combination model, a project has many shortcomings, and leader simply does not have the energy to fight fires everywhere.
5. A new employee training model
The story of Zhu Di's victory over the Mongol cavalry and Qi Jiguang's resistance to the Wu dynasty described in the book "Those Things of the Ming Dynasty" is amazing! It has also been taught to me that relatively weak individuals, combined in a reasonable way, can form a more powerful force. For business development, building a team of heroes is far more important than creating individual heroes.
The quality of a single soldier, the Mongol cavalry is far better than the Ming cavalry, cavalry to cavalry, the Ming army can not fight at all, but Zhu Di creatively attacked the Mongol cavalry in a combination of shenji battalion (using a fire bolt) + cavalry + infantry combination (which was called "three axes for your life" in the past), and the Mongol cavalry had to be shot first when facing the Ming army, and the form began to reverse.
And Qi Jiguang did more absolutely, the Mandarin Duck Array may be the most perfect formation in history, 12 soldiers combined into the Mandarin Duck Array, "long and short, stabbing and guarding", "Ninghai encounter ming army killed 300 Wokou, none of them died", this kind of casualty ratio, is simply a unilateral massacre, unprecedented in the era of cold weapons.
For individuals, it seems that the participation link is not prominent, and it is not as cool as the personal performance of superheroes, but the most important thing in fighting is to win. Not only a simple division of labor, but also a combination of cooperation, and the most important thing is the method of victory.
(1) The management trainees of the group and the rotation of the group
Summarize the above-mentioned failure lessons and successful experiences. We should build a team of heroes, not individual heroes.
I want to start a new management trainee model. In the past, management trainees entered a certain department independently, or multiple management trainees entered a certain department at the same time, but worked independently. Now the new management trainee model is to form a group into a certain department and cooperate in combat.
Our expectations of management trainees have not changed: Simba's management trainees have created higher performance (out of 10) performance compared to the average employee during the rotation process and have established a successful system before leaving the rotation department.
The new rotation will be changed to a small group of 2-4 people, entering the department to solve problems within the department (or solving problems at the company level), and being directly led by the highest results in the department and efficient employees, collaborating in a new combination. Instead of rotating between posts and departments in the past, a single post was further dismantled into subdivided modules, and modules were rotated within the same post.
All team members receive uniform training, take on different responsibilities when collaborating, and participate in different divisions of labor, but each person takes turns executing specific modules and taking turns as a group leader to exercise leadership skills.
In the process of rotation, we will jointly establish unified implementation standards, processes, training documents, and train new people, continuously select better personnel in the rotation process, and establish a sustainable operation system before leaving the rotation position and department.
(2) New apprenticeship system and 1+x assistant mode
Since last year, Simba has also promoted the mentoring system. The existing master system is still taught by the master and apprenticed, but the newcomer still has a strong independence. The nature of a master is equivalent to guidance. But in the future master-apprentice system, I envision that the apprentice should always be the master's assistant before leaving the master. The fundamental purpose of fully assisting the master in his work under the guidance of the master is to make the apprentice accept and fully implement the master's method in the early stage, and on the basis of full mastery, he is allowed to personally optimize (rigidity-optimization-solidification). Instead of being in the early stages, just receiving training and then still running independently, the new model, equivalent to Zamabu, the training cycle of new people is longer, but the basic skills mastered are more solid.
At the same time, for high-performing employees, assistants should be equipped to further improve their work efficiency, while for low-performance employees who have expertise in a certain dimension, they should be transferred to support or assistant positions. In this way, 1+1 will be greater than 2.
VI Summary
The logic at the heart of this article is to either become a top employee or become a member of the top system.
The above is a summary and reflection on the cultivation of new talents in the company. Simba will gradually implement a new model to create a family army in the exhibition and media industries.
VII About the author
Mote Chan Mott, Simba Events, Founder & Chief Talent Officer
Mote entered the conference industry in 2011 and became the company's annual sales champion in his first year. In 2013, he co-founded Simba Events with 3 partners. During the period of entrepreneurship, Mote has successively held multiple positions in the company, such as sales, planning, media, marketing, and personnel, and has successfully promoted the company's business reform and innovation for many times, with the performance of a single project of the FBIF exceeding 10 million in 2018 and 20 million in 2020 (excluding other businesses). Simba Events' overall performance maintains an annual growth rate of more than 60%!
*Author: Mote, founder of Simba Events. This article was first published in Mote Mote (ID: motesimba), original title: About the way to cultivate people, I thought wrong in the past.