A continuation of the ExP Story interview held in celebration our 2 year anniversary! You can watch the interview here.
How do you think ExP differentiates itself from other companies that offer similar services? Although we very much do assess our candidates, we don’t hold assessment centres. I think that’s quite core to how we differentiate ourselves in terms of the candidate experience. I’d just like you talk a little bit about that and why you chose not to hold assessment centres?
So your typical assessment centre involves a morning of activities, group sessions, presentations, and ‘Who’s your idol?’. Don’t get me wrong they are designed to find candidates who are confident, ambitious. However, my experience is that they are a brutality that isn’t necessary to find people that have the resilience to be a great SDR. If you send half the group home halfway through the day, you miss out on all those people that take that rejection, show some resilience and go apply again somewhere else. There’s no testing for resilience in that because I don’t think resilience is just about putting people through the fire.
Our process is designed around the skills that you need to be an SDR. We look at whether you can go through a process that involves a video or telephone interview, a secondary event where you do a role-play of a prospecting call. Then we give feedback, see how you handle that and how well you can try again. For me, that is the art of resilience. It’s can you do something, maybe fail at it, and then do it again better next time? So, we’ve avoided assessment days, and yes, we have to think about efficiency. However, we’ve tried to design our assessments so that we’re doing the right thing for our candidates by taking them through a process that is designed to help them do the actual role that they are going to be doing. I don’t know any SDR’s in their day job that have to talk about who their idol is. I mean I’d rather find out how well someone can make a cold call, how well someone can take feedback on board and how well they can be coached.
On resilience, we are hosting a webinar on the 1st of October on how you can build resilience (if you’d like a copy of that webinar, let us know via the contact us page).
So, as I said at the beginning, ExP has just hit its two-year anniversary. Reflecting on that, what are some of your favourite ExP memories and milestones.
Great question. I think some of my favourite memories have been over these last few months. We’ve come out of the pandemic in a much stronger position then we went into it. It’s been an absolute joy and pleasure to see the team pull together. Everything really went out of the window in March, and since then we’ve broken our record for revenue in a month, three, nearly four times. We have been more productive as a team across everything that we do. So, that’s been a real joy.
Early on we did a lot of careers fairs at universities. Having pulled in ringers from friends and family, I’d like to shout out to: my dad, my wife, Ethan Tunicliffe, Callum Beaumont, Nia Mullen, and so I’d also like to thank all those who came early on and helped us run those career fairs.
The last few months have been incredible in terms of productivity. We’ve really worked at uniting as a team and being as efficient as possible, and as a result there’s been a lot of things we’ve been able to celebrate via zoom!
I think I’d add to that. Sometimes it’s about finding those counter-productive things, those things that don’t make sense but are so important. You mentioned earlier how we have that values session every week where we just talk about the things we’ve done and measure ourselves up against the values we’ve set for ourselves.
That’s not a very efficient use of time. We don’t find any new customers, we don’t interview any candidates, we don’t do anything in that session that directly attributes to revenue. But, as we’ve started those sessions and used that time to get to know each other, to talk about the challenges we face and how our behaviour is driving the type of business we want to be a part of, we’ve seen an increase in every metric we measure.
So, what are the long-term goals that you have for ExP? What’s your vision for the future of the company?
The quick answer is growth. There are always going to be challenges around helping people be excellent at their jobs. The failure rate of salespeople is too high, and I don’t believe that’s because those employees aren’t of the right calibre. It’s because businesses don’t necessarily have the resources, the time or the energy to devote into helping their salespeople reach their potential. But, by us investing that time and committing to helping their salespeople perform at the level they are capable of, for as long and effectively as possible, it can revolutionize businesses. Businesses that are average succeed all the time and that happens because they invest in their people.
Interview by Jess Thomas, Featuring John Richardson