Your beloved team is at the bottom of the league, recent performances have been poor and the prospect of relegation looms. Week after week you’ll hear the same comments from football supporters, TV pundits and read them in the Sunday news papers.

“…The Chairman needs to put his hand in his pocket to strengthen the team”
“…The Manager is tactically inept and has run out of ideas”
“…They just didn’t show any passion and didn’t show any fight”


So, what do you or the average supporter want or expect to happen in order to revive this ailing club?


“The club has decided to sell our key players to save costs”
“New contracts will not being issued to future stars”
“We have decided to not to invest in our youth academy”


No doubt if you are a football supporter then the mere uttering of the above would make your blood boil and you demanding the board resignation.


Now let’s take a step back and take a look at YOUR football club put in other way… YOUR Business!


Your ‘backroom’ team are your support staff and perform roles such as HR, Accounts, Order Takers and Customer Support. We then move on to the team staff. These include the scouts, the coaches and physio’s whose sole job is to develop talent, spot future stars, suggest position moves and make sure that every player is fit for the job they are tasked with, which then moves us on nicely to YOUR team of players… YOUR Sales Professionals!


The similarities of a team of footballers and a team of sales professionals in astounding.


Your sales professionals are the people at the sharp end, out on show with their performance being played out and in the view of everyone else. Their tactics fight and passion is brought into question by every other staff member even if not verbalised yet they are the custodians of the company’s success.


Then we come to the football manager or in business terms, someone who hold a position of Sales Director or heads up the Sales Team. The person who picks the team, runs them through training, teaches them their fabled tactics and above all their inspiration and motivator. The same criticism you’d expect to be directed at a football manager is regularly thrown at them…

“It’s your responsibility for the poor results?”
“Your team need motivating”
“If the results don’t change then…”


And finally, the football Chairman or in our case the MD. Yes Sir/Madam it is you who wields the sword of power and it is ultimately your leadership and direction all others follow and it is your job to make sure the club moves forward and pleases the fans [your customers] who show loyalty, buy your products and who are the reason your club exists.


A football lesson
So what can we take out of the football analogy and place within our businesses?


• Are you listening to what you supporters are telling you?
• Are you asking your supporters for their opinion?
• What are your backroom team saying about your current tactics, formation and team?
• Is your team getting the best training by their coaches?
• Do your scouts have the right abilities to spot up and coming stars?
• Does your manager have the right credentials to get the best out of your players?
• Do your player respect and play to your manager’s tactics and formation?
• Is your Chairman putting up the funds to develop the team and supporting staff?
• Are you playing for promotion, relegation or simply survival?


If any of these were true with the team YOU support, then you’d expect them to do something about it wouldn’t you?


If we look at the difference in approach over the last 13 years between famous North London rivals Arsenal and Tottenham. One has taken a long term approach, backing a strategic thinking manager, investing in all of the team for the long term using scientific methods, developing a set of values and a culture everyone believes in and only recruiting people with the potential skills attitudes and beliefs that will fit in to the team. The other team with its short term view and desire for instant success has gone through 13 managers and wasted millions of pounds, always recruiting based on current behaviours (or reputation), never looking at the true motivators, drivers, values and beliefs of the new recruits or ensuring these fit with those of the club.


If you want to take the long term strategic approach to ensuring your team has the right values, beliefs , drivers and motivation and get the right new players to fit your culture then start by contacting AxiaMetrics to see how the Axia profiling tool, based on Nobel Prize winning research and the true and proven science of value Axiology can help.

Yesterday in the press it was reported that TMobile staff has been selling customers personal details to third parties who then sold them on to the highest bidder compromising the personal data of many of TMobile’s customers. This is not only an embarrassment for TMobile but could spark a potential revenue downturn as current customers evaluate their options.


Could this have been prevented ? We believe it could have. If TMobile had incorporate the Axia Profile as part of their recruitment and assessment processes they would have known what motivated their staff and understood more about the personal values and ethos. Use of the Axia Profile as part of the recruitment process would in most cases have prevented the very staff who sold these details from being employed in the first place, and would have highlighted any staff who were dissatisfied or who posed a risk during an annual assessment process that utilised the profile.


The question is not whether you can afford to include the Axia Profile as part of your recruitment and assessment processes, but whether you can afford not to.

Is winning or losing in a recession your choice?


If you’ve chosen to be part of the so called recession then you won’t like this!


- You’ll be offended, do nothing and carry on subscribing to the doom and gloom. (Enjoy the recession!)
- This article will ignite the desire to adapt, acquire the knowledge and prosper where you competitors can’t. (Let’s hope the recession lasts a little longer)


What is a recession?


Is it not just another way of expressing lean times, hardship and scarcity? But if this is true then what is the difference between a recession and what we might call a drought, a famine, war or an epidemic?


So what happens when we look to nature or human behaviour in each of these contexts? Who survives? Who perishes and what behaviours are prevalent?


Let’s go back to the genius that was Charles Darwin and his well known and generally accepted theory of evolution. A phrase that most people have heard is; ‘the survival of the fittest or selfish genes?’ What does this mean and how does it relate to an economic recession?


The similarities are not only there for all to see but when looked at in this context can often be viewed as a little scary.


When food and water are at a premium, where animals and humans are at risk of total extinction, a strange but truly amazing set of behaviours come to the forefront. These behaviours are ones of adaptation, education and sheer cunning. There can not be many of us who do not marvel at BBC natural history programs such as life, or life on earth which graphically display how over time species have developed to take advantage of their environment and ensure survival.


When times are tough your company really only has two options:


1. Put you head in the sand, cross your fingers and hope that everything will be alright and carry on doing exactly what you’ve always done.
2. Look at the opportunities you have got and adapt to make sure it is you that secure them because lets face it, if you’re not thinking like this then your competitors will be!!!


So I will ask you a question… With the economic recession upon us, what are YOU doing to ensure your sales team are armed to claim the limited prizes, your management team is thinking strategically to maximise opportunities and your operations staff are increasing efficiencies and productivity? For most companies the only honest answer is…nothing or at best they’ve given the sales team a rocket up the proverbial and sent them on their way, increased the number and duration of management meetings and laid off a few in the back room to reduce costs, Yep, that ought to do it!


If you are a manager, team leader, or business owner and you do not know exactly the values, beliefs,talents, strengths and weaknesses of all your people, what drives and motivates them and how they can and will adapt with the right leadership, then you really ought to give up and get what you can for the business.


Just a passing consideration… How much have you spent in the past 3 years on IT equipment compared to understanding, training and developing the asset that will influence the future of your business – your people!


Anyone who has read ‘Good to Great’ will know that the great companies start with ensuring they have the best people, in the right positions then with these people confront the brutal facts about their business to achieve their goals.


It sounds easy when you say it like that, but the starting point has to be understanding your people, what makes them tick and how to get the right people in the right jobs in your business.


Many organisations have tried and failed at this with the outdated and now largely discredited psychometric tests which are self reports, mere profiles of behavior and neither scientific or objective.


AxiaMetrics are specialists in values based people analysis, using the Axia Profile technology, based on Nobel Prize nominated research and proven scientific theory we can quickly evaluate your people asset to ensure your evolution and success as survival of the fittest.
To find out more about how Axiametrics can help you contact us here.

Prior to forming AxiaMetrics I had been sales director at a number of financial and insurance services companies and grew my own organisation in financial sales. Until last year I viewed testing profiles, such as MBTI, DISC, Meyers-Briggs etc, as abject failures at predicting sales success.

Why ? Firstly they are self reports (Garbage in = Garbage out) and secondly, they are unable to predict an individuals drivers and motivation. Last year I was introduced to the Science of Axiology and after trials on my own sales teams I became so interested and influenced by the power of it as a recruitment and development aid I researched the providers in the US and I set up AxiaMetrics LLP to distribute what I found to be the best available derivative.

It is not a self report but an assessment based on your values, thinking process and judgement. It is an online profile that is impossible to cheat as the questions are not leading and its not coroborative, i.e it does not seek to put the respondents in a group or type. It has tailored outputs that have been developed in conjunction with many major US corporations specifically for Sales recruitment and development. Using this technology larger sales teams are able to competency model their sales team to identify exactly what it is in their organisation that makes their elite performers ELITE.

Validity studies are extensive and whilst it only claims to be about 75% predictor of hiring success it has proven to be over 90% acurate predictor of failure, thus helping sales managers avoid those hires that are destined to fail. I would be happy to provide evidence of validity and if you are curious, why not take the test to see some of the outputs for yourself.

Gary May, the founder of the Association of Sales Professionals states that “for me and the Association of Sales Professionals there is only one ‘test’ than accurately and consistently performs as a reliable indicator as to whether someone can sell. That ‘tool’ s based on the Science of Axiology.” Gary goes on to say “As an example I have taken the Axia Profile twice myself and the level of accuracy and the insight I was presented with was astounding. It identified that although I was brilliant at work based problem solving, there were personal issues that were preventing me from putting them to use. [I’d had a personal breakup 3 weeks previous!]. Another example is how it shows levels of empathy. We all know that empathy is at the route of every great sales person BUT how does someone use that their empathy skill. Someone with huge empathy ability could use it to great use in coaching or developing a team but conversely to know what someone else feels means they’ll also know how to hurt and push the wrong buttons. I know not of a another single profile tool which enables you to have such a wonder insight into yourself, your staff and their teams! ”

We are currently running a large scale trial in one of the UK’s most respected call centres, a times 100 employer and finalist in the recent European Call centre of the year awards as they like me have been so impressed with the depth and accuracy of this as a predictor.

If you are at all considering profiling then I’d urge you to talk to us about Axiology, similarily, if you are at all interested in increasing sales revenues, staff productivity, or replicating your elite performers then get in touch, I can guarantee you that the results will speak for themself.