The CORE Advantage
Greater Depth, Breadth and Accuracy
What distinguishes CORE assessments from all the others is that CORE incorporates an integrated system that looks at multiple aspects of an individual, not just at observable behaviors or self-perceived traits. It gets past misreporting or skewing, which sometimes occurs intentionally and often occurs unintentionally, to discover the individual’s true nature, strengths and limitations, overall development, emotional quotient (EQ) and current coping abilities. It also identifies any roadblocks that may be keeping an individual from reaching his/her fullest potential so that they may be removed or remedied in the fastest, most efficient way possible.
At 94% the accuracy rate of the CORE system is unparalleled in the world of assessments. That’s because CORE, as an integrated system, measures deeper and broader, uncovers misreporting or skewing and approaches people as works in progress, not as finished products to be categorized and boxed in.
A Positive Approach
CORE looks at the whole person from the perspective of potential. The CORE philosophy is that all people have available to them all human attributes to a greater or lesser degree. The goal of the CORE system is to discover which attributes naturally generate energy, enthusiasm and ease of use in the individual being profiled and which ones are likely to be difficult to sustain over long periods. Using an energy/effort model, the CORE system takes people out of pre-defined boxes that may or may not suit them and gives them the tools to develop the entire person in the most effective, efficient, and beneficial way.
Significantly Improve Hiring and Promotion Decisions in the Workplace
In today's highly competitive environment, corporations need exceptionally reliable tools for making hiring and promotion decisions. Many organizations rely on assessments to help in the selection process, but the usual assessments that simply define behavioral styles, general traits or functional preferences cannot provide the depth of information necessary for truly informed decisions.
If you have ever had the experience of hiring or promoting someone, based on the results of an assessment, only to have the candidate miserably fail to meet expectations, you are already aware of the limitations of the average assessment.
There are numerous assessments in the marketplace each claiming to be an excellent choice for optimizing human resources within the workplace. They use different means of measurement and prediction, but most have several limitations in common:
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They measure only one area or dimension of human functioning.
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They cannot be adequately checked for accurate reporting and can therefore be skewed without detection.
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They measure and report only what the profiler believes about him/herself (or wants you to believe). Research suggests that most people (54%) don't know themselves well enough to self-report accurately and, among those who can report accurately, a significant number choose to skew the results in their favor. Studies suggest that the odds of getting an accurate result on a typical assessment are approximately 23%.
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They do not show how effectively or ineffectively reported traits and attributes are being used.
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They cannot predict whether the individual will function as a positive asset or a negative liability.
- Most assessments have no way of measuring the single most important predictor of exceptional performance and personal success - emotional intelligence (EQ).
Click here to view a graph that illustrates how drastically different individuals who report the same general traits can be. This graph demonstrates the importance of knowing more than just an individual's type. Development levels, reactionary patterns and emotional intelligence are critically important factors for high performance and should be considered in every personnel decision.
CORE assessments are unique in many ways. In fact they are so uniquely superior to most instruments that many people cannot fully appreciate the differences until they have experienced them.
Only CORE assessments have the ability to:
- Accurately measure self-perception, behavioral styles and preferred functions
- Measure and predict emotional competence or emotional intelligence (EQ)
- Define how an individual is likely to function in a particular position and overal
- Detect attempts at skewing snd discover inadvertent misreporting
- Show development levels over the entire spectrum of human traits
- Describe reactionary patterns and behaviors with and without stressors
- Become quickly conversational and applicable to people and situations across the board. Everyone, from co-workers to customers to family members, can be understood and appreciated more fully using the CORE model.
- Get beyond erroneous self-perception and right to the core of an individual's authentic nature.
- Systematically move individuals away from self-defeating behaviors and beliefs and toward their highest level of functioning, both personally and professionally. CORE assessments are strengths based.
- Accurately define training needs so training can be narrowly applied for greatly improved results and minimization of waste in both training time and dollars
- Measure and track employee progress
Improve Employee Training Outcomes and Save Money Too
As with hiring and placement decisions, training today needs to be more focused and relevant. Sending entire departments to general training, costs organizations millions of dollars in lost man hours and wasted training dollars and often produce disappointing results. By knowing exactly where training is indicated and how to structure it for optimal results, training costs can be minimized and training results maximized. CORE MAP measures and reports on areas of development so that specific training needs can be pinpointed and addressed.
CORE assessments and training can help your company:
- Create well defined benchmarks to ensure you are hiring only the best suited for the job
- Accurately predict job effectiveness and fit to eliminate any unpleasant (and expensive) surprises
- Define requirements for long-term job satisfaction and reduced turnover
- Target the training needs of each employee, thereby improving training outcomes while eliminating unnecessary training time and expenditures.
- Understand the communication, interpersonal, and team styles of each employee
- Improve employee relations by helping employees understand differences and appreciate diversity
- Keep employees motivated and improve morale
- Improve management and leadership outcomes individually and within teams
- Reveal management styles to ensure the leadership in every department is optimal
- Increase management's ability to communicate, persuade and inspire
- Build better customer relations
- Reveal areas where training would yield the highest returns
- Increase sales through accurate hiring and targeted training
- Build strong, effective teams
- Improve employee communications
- Build stronger customer relations
- Prevent or more easily resolve conflict
- Effectively manage change
- Increase productivity
Workplace Competencies
There are a number of factors that contribute to competency in the workplace. The most obvious is training, but effective training goes far beyond job skills training, and all forms of training only account for approximately 35% of employee successes. The majority of competencies sought by companies nationwide actually fall outside the job skills arena. More than 80% of commonly sought competencies fall under the categories of emotional intelligence (EQ), interpersonal skills and personal traits.
Numerous research studies point to the fact that no amount of job skills training will produce a competent worker if the worker is not suited to the job by natural temperament and/or is not emotionally mature enough to handle the demands of the job. One study done by Dr. Judith Bardwick, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, concluded that a person's character (maturity level plus values) and personality influence his/her behavior and success on the job more than knowledge and training combined.
Competency in performing job skills is easy to measure and predict based on test results and past work records, but the competencies in the crucial 80% are not so easy to determine by ordinary means. While there are a number of assessments on the market today designed to measure temperament, attitudes or interests most have no means of checking to determine whether the reported traits and interests are actually present. Many assessments are easily skewed, which allows an applicant to appear to fit job requirements when they really don't, and many more are skewed unintentionally simply because the applicant is not self-aware enough to report accurately. Also, most assessments don't measure and predict EQ or personal development levels, which are huge determinants for effectiveness and competence.
There is only one assessment tool that is virtually impossible to skew without detection, accurately measures EQ, personal development and reactionary patterns, and which has the ability to determine whether what an individual is reporting is true and accurate. That tool is the CORE Multidimensional Awareness Profile. CORE MAP is a development and potentials assessment that is designed to measure an individual's or group's current development and accurately describe their future potential under varying circumstances and conditions.
Click here for information about the top 10 competencies listed by most organizations as essential to excellence on the job and the necessary factors for the effective development of each competency.
Click here for more information on using CORE for more effective hiring, placement and training
Personally CORE Sets You Free
Because the CORE system looks at the whole person, it doesn't take an individual out of one box and put them into another. Rather, it looks at where the individual is today, at the effects of early conditioning or current circumstances in shaping the individual's current perceptions, behaviors and outcomes, and creates an easy to follow roadmap to the individual's natural attributes; those which provide the energy, enthusiasm and natural abilities for creating optimal results.
- On a personal level the CORE system can be applied to:
- Rapid personal growth
- Better, healthier relationships with family, friends, co-workers and others
- Improved parenting and happier, better directed children
- Increased understanding and appreciation between couples
- A clear picture of one's ideal life path
- Insights into the best career path
Take Advantage of the CORE MAP Difference
CORE MAP is easy to administer, but because it measures deeply and broadly, and can describe or predict so many factors, the results must be interpreted by a trained facilitator. Your company may certify an in-house facilitator or choose from a national network of highly trained coaches, consultants, therapists and trainers who are experts in human development.
Additional Core Assessments
Click here
To learn how to gain the CORE Advantage for your Organization
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Succeeding at Selling in the Real World
(The one with PEOPLE in it)
As markets become more sophisticated and the techniques for reaching those markets effectively become ever more 
complicated, we sometimes lose sight of the two most important aspects of the selling process: the real, perfectly human person functioning in the role of Buyer and the real, perfectly human person functioning in the role of Seller.
These two aspects of the selling process are so vital as to make just about every other pale in comparison. Yet it is precisely these two vitally important aspects that all too often get relegated to chance, or to "doing what comes naturally" in the selling arena. Statistics prove this approach to be one with a very high mortality rate, because what comes naturally to most people in buyer/seller relationships often isn't pretty.
The role of Buyer requires us to be cautious, suspicious, guarded, and to regularly use the skill we developed so well during our "terrible twos", that of exercising our ability to say "NO, NO, NO".
The role of Seller, on the other hand, requires us to be assertive, expectant, open, and to attempt to use an entire cache of skills most of us never had the opportunity to learn. Skills such as persuading, negotiating, communicating effectively, noticing and effectively translating the nonverbal cues of others, problem solving, and knowing how to ask for something and get it on a fairly consistent basis, just to name a few. These are not seat-of-the-pants kinds of skills nor (unfortunately) were we born with them. These important interactional skills must be learned and most people have never had the opportunity to do that.
A few people have had the good fortune to be taught good relating and communicating skills in their youth. Others learn them by trial and error, but that's a very slow and sometimes very expensive way to learn. This is especially true for those in the selling professions.
Research consistently shows that the world's top sales professionals excel as a direct result of having acquired and implemented strong interactional human-to-human skills, which they use as primary tools. The technical skills salespeople use are important of course, but they are really secondary to selling success.
Unfortunately, most sales training consists primarily of technical skills. Too often sales training follows the lines of "This is what we sell...This is what it does...This is why the buyer needs it...This is how much you will make for each unit you sell...These are the objections you are likely to hear...Here are some answers to those objections...Here’s how you close the sale...Go get 'em!"
That kind of training is usually a prescription for failure, unless the necessary interactional skills are already well developed in the individual being so trained. But the fact is, the odds of finding individuals who are well trained in interactional skills right off the street or among average salespeople are so small that I certainly wouldn't want to bet my business on it. Especially when training those who possess the right natural attributes is so much easier and less expensive in the long run.
What constitutes "the right natural attributes" depends on the type of selling an individual will be engaged in. For example, those who are effective at selling technically based products or services have different attributes than those who are effective at selling entertainment or time share vacations. The attributes of those who are effective at keeping customers long term are different than the attributes of those who are effective at bringing in new accounts.
In fact, in most organizations where keeping customers long term is important, and where continually adding to the customer base is also important, a team selling approach would yield far better results precisely because the skill sets are so different. Typically, those who are exceptionally good at bringing in new accounts don’t like maintaining those accounts. They feel that "hand holding" slows their progress and keeps them from making new sales, and generally, its the challenge and novelty of the new sale they most enjoy and at which they excel.
On the other hand, those who are good at maintaining an existing customer base typically dislike having to prospect for new customers and will resist prospecting as much as they can get by with. It isn’t uncommon for salespeople, who are excellent at maintaining accounts to spend inordinate amounts of time with current customers in order to have an excuse for not prospecting much. How can they, they reason, when their current customers are occupying all their time? But, give them more customers that have been established by someone else and they will happily find the time to service them all.
By using a team approach, with one "point" person and one "hand holder" making up the team, both will be happy and highly effective, provided they are also suited to the industry, product and/or service.
In an age and economy where an organization can’t afford to waste time and resources on hiring and training new employees; when the cost of employee turnover is in the tens of thousands of dollars, and is especially high in the selling profession where it takes time to get a new hire up to speed, no company can afford to hire blindly. And yet, hiring decisions are often made based solely on resumes, interviews and assessments that measure observable traits. Sometimes, when a company is desperate for sales people, they even hire based on surface presentation alone. It is no wonder the turnover rate among salespeople is so high or that so many organizations are constantly nursing along a mediocre sales staff.
There are a lot of people out there who, with the right training, would make excellent sales people, but the right training is not just technique. In fact the mix that creates excellent sales people follows the old 80/20 rule. Excellent sales people rely on technique about 20% and on good people skills 80%, and that’s exactly how their training should be mixed.
Current statistics show (and most sales managers would concur) that less than 2 percent of those who attempt to enter the selling profession really excel at it and become superstars. Another 6 percent do well and enjoy exceptional incomes, with an additional 12 percent earning average to slightly above-average incomes That leaves eighty percent that do poorly or don't make the grade at all (there’s that 80/20 rule again). Those sad odds could be greatly improved if the training mix (currently 80% technical and 20% people skills) were reversed.
Even seasoned sales people who are already high performers can greatly improve their close ratio by learning a few human-to-human interaction skills. It is not uncommon for seasoned sales people who have had years of technical training, tell me during or after my Psychology of Superior Selling workshop that it was learning about themselves as sales people and about their customers from the perspective of human nature that enabled them to fully understand and integrate the selling process. And I regularly hear that this was the most useful thing they ever learned.
People skills are what the superstars have that the wanna-be’s are missing. It is people skills that those top achievers, often referred to as "natural born" salespeople, have to their credit and that ordinary-to-poor salespeople are missing. Yet these "natural born" salespeople often have no idea exactly what it is they say or do that translates into megabucks in selling.
I have made it a point to study these superstar salespeople over the years, and I have asked a great number of them to what they attribute their success. Their general reply is, "I don't really know for sure. All I know is I love what I do and just do what comes naturally."
Their customers describe them as genuine, charismatic, caring, concerned, knowledgeable, helpful, "good people". Watching them in action however, it soon becomes apparent that their edge is their ability to interact with their customers in an easy, effective manner that puts the customer at ease, makes him/her feel important and understood, and gives the distinct impression that this salesperson is a true expert that can be trusted and relied upon.
The truth is, there are no "natural born" sales people. No one is born with selling skills or the people skills necessary for selling success. Admittedly, these skills are more easily developed by some people than by others, and a fortunate few begin developing them in childhood so that by the time they reach adulthood the skills seem natural. But, walking and talking seem pretty natural by the time we reach adulthood too, and certainly those are skills we all had to learn.
Success in selling, as with any other profession, is a matter of learning a set of skills and applying them consistently, sort of like typing. In typing, you either hunt-n-peck all your life or you learn the basic skills. If you learn the basic skills, you either use them only when necessary and plug along at 30 words per minute or you practice and continue to apply those skills until you work your way up to 120 words per minute or more. At the point of proficiency, a typist becomes a valuable commodity. A proficient sales person is invaluable. In fact, highly proficient salespeople can pretty much write their own tickets, because they are the lifeblood of an organization.
So, whether you are a salesperson whose goal is to become indispensable and recession proof, or an organization ready to build a first class sales team, the key is in adding a healthy mix of person-to-person interactional skills to your training agenda. These are skills that salespeople quickly and easily incorporate into their selling styles if the skills are presented correctly during the training process. Once incorporated, the results are dramatic! Sales improve early on and, as the skills become second nature, the salespeople and the profits just keep getting better!
Article by Sherry Buffington, Ph.D.
Sherry Buffington, Ph.D. is the founder and CEO of the Dallas based training, consulting and coaching firm, Star Performance Systems, which specializes in helping individuals succeed and organizations increase their productivity and profits by maximizing the potential of their people.
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