Stuart Armstrong

THE film ‘Moneyball’ brought to the notice of sports fans worldwide the accelerating new trend of detailed statistical analysis of player performances which supplemented gut feelings and intuition with scientific recruitment of sports teams.

You may remember that a baseball club with a limited budget was able to put together a winning team by recruiting players with superior but undervalued skills revealed by detailed in-field performance statistics.

These days, full-time data analysts measure players on hundreds of data points, both on and off the field, which has a proven impact on individual performance. 

In NRL, for example, players are assessed on over 260 data points from every game they play.

Coaching staff scour the information to pinpoint where changes can be made to improve on-field performance and ensure they have chosen their best A-team every week. Both the individuals and the team are also expected to be part of this evaluation. (See also: Des Hasler keeps track of vital signs.)

Today the same principle is being applied to hiring dealership staff where DPs and sales managers are able to measure an applicant’s potential against hundreds of proven data points to predict their actual sales performance before they hire.

PerceptionPredict has developed a cloud-based recruitment intelligence system that is all about finding the best possible sales candidates for the showroom while preventing the hire of low performers and avoiding the cost of managing or ultimately removing and then replacing under-performers.

The company has developed several algorithms designed to weed out potential poor performers before they get to first base on the showroom floor, leaving the dealership with an A-team of sales ‘players’.

PerceptionPredict has a background of human science in several industries and has more recently been working with car retailers selling BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and multiple other brands in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, the United States and Canada.

The key to the system is that it is able to use existing performance and behavioural data from thousands of salespeople and correlate that accumulated knowledge to sales candidates and predict their actual sales potential.

What is remarkable is that, as new recruits enter their system, their performance gets linked to their behavioural characteristics thereby constantly updating the accuracy of the system.

Additionally, the system can be embedded in the careers sections of dealers’ websites where prospective employees complete a series of very quick questionnaires. Once completed, the PerceptionPredict algorithm goes to work and any applicant exhibiting strong sales potential is flagged by email to the DP or sales management for contact and interview.

In this way poor performers don’t stand a chance and dealers avoid the risk of hiring them onto their sales teams.

Stuart Armstrong, director of PerceptionPredict Australia, told GoAutoNews Premium: “This is a real chance to bring people and business performance into the 21st century.

“For too long we have continued to use ‘old technology’ to fix a modern data issue. The technology exists to help businesses to significantly improve performance and the businesses who innovate and use it will give themselves a competitive advantage in today’s market.”

Mr Armstrong said that making the wrong choice wastes serious management time and “fixing the mistake” is riddled with hidden costs to the business. (See also: KPMG: Huge cost of staff turnover.)

“Harvard suggested that for some managers, 82 per cent of their time is spent fixing, solving and performance managing these staff,” Mr Armstrong said.

“The real value in finding and recruiting A-players is that you create the time to be more effective in your leadership role because you spend less time in your management role. You create time to be more strategic and more performance and growth focused.”

He said that PerceptionPredict would transform auto sales recruiting by arming dealership managers to:

• Find and select the best players for their team.
• Coach and develop their existing team players to higher levels of performance.

He said that by answering a series of short, online questionnaires, the system gathers information on applicants against multiple data points and correlates the positive and negative characteristics of the applicant to the profiles of successful car salespeople – no matter whether the applicant has sold cars before or not. 

The PerceptionPredict results identify key traits that influence whether a candidate will fit into the dealership, and it quantifies the number of vehicles a salesperson is capable of selling annually.

Existing team players complete the same questionnaires. Managers use these results to pinpoint areas for improvement and pinpoint the drivers for individual success.

“It goes without saying that the right talent is vital to the success of a dealer’s sales team. Like elite sports teams, any business which can attract the right competencies, manage talent effectively, utilise capacity efficiently and retain them is setting itself up for long-term success,” Mr Armstrong said.

“Using the PerceptionPredict data-driven approach to help you expand your talent pool by identifying how many vehicles an applicant can sell before you hire them could be the true game changer dealers have been looking for.”

By John Mellor