Abstract

Organisations have become increasingly aware that a key driver of sustainability is the ability to attract, retain and manage talent effectively. Objectively assessing and effectively managing high performing employees has been the focus of much research and debate, yet many organisations still struggle when it comes to implementing an effective talent management system. This is particularly evident within developing nations and economies such as the UAE where these approaches are still in their infancy. Ironically the UAE, and the Gulf region in general, has a vast pool of young talent just waiting to be developed and engaged for current and future job demands. At Tanfeeth we have tried to approach this challenge from a scientific and evidence-based perspective, with the UAE’s specific demographic and cultural features in mind. So far we have had success with creating a highly predictive organisational talent model mainly focusing on leadership and management and we have now turned our attention to sales and customer service. The main aims of the research presented in this paper was (1) to understand the potentials, talents, competencies and skills which separates high performing sales employees from the rest. (2) To use this understanding to create a predictive model of sales performance which can help assessing to the extent to which someone will perform at an outstanding level within our sales teams. (3) To use the model to aid the identification of training, development and engagement activities that will develop and sustain high performance and (4) create a set of effective IT supported tools to manage sales employees across the talent life cycle. Initially 120 sales employees were selected to take part in this research but after a number of resignations and ‘reshuffling ‘of the sales team we ended up with a group of 79 participants. We divided this group into three sub groups based on whether they were top, medium or low performers. Each employee completed a number of assessments including potential, strength, mental ability and competency questionnaires in order to (1) identify core performance differentiators between the groups and (2) explore the predictive qualities of these differentiators. (3) Create a competency and skills framework for the department to further improve overall talent management processes and (4) develop a situational judgement test to be used for hiring and development purposes. Our results showed that a number of factors were predictive of sales performance and these factors were integrated into a set of tools and talent management methods to be used with our sales teams.