Here is an excerpt from an Objective Management Group article worth pondering. We’ve used OMG evaluations as hiring and training tools for individual sales reps and sales teams for years. We believe their tools – along with our knowledge of them and training – provide a powerful approach for quickly, efficiently, and effectively helping salespeople, sales leaders, and their companies win business, beat their competition, and have the confidence to be the best. Read on – let us know if you’d like to know more.
Benefits of Assessments for Sales Teams
If you want an elite sales team, using the right talent assessment will save your time and increase the likelihood of high performance. Assessments measure a baseline of an individual’s personality, behavior, skills, tendencies, preferences, and more. And you can quickly and effectively solve problems with your team’s performance by giving an assessment to:
- Understand your current employees’ baseline qualities, characteristics, knowledge, and abilities
- Gain insight into individual employees’ areas of improvement or suitability for their role
- Create an action plan to improve an individual’s weaknesses
- Evaluate job candidates to ensure new hires will be successful salespeople in your organization
- Help new hires get up-to-speed
- Improve your team’s overall performance by improving every employee’s performance.
What You Should Look for in a Sales Team Assessment
While personality assessments, cognitive ability tests, biodata tests, and skills assessments all have advantages and disadvantages for measuring your sales employees, no matter which assessment you choose, you’ll want to make sure you’re measuring the qualities, skills, and behaviors that actually matter for sales success.
Below is a checklist of the most essential areas for an individual employee’s sales success. Use this as a guide for evaluating whether an assessment is right for your sales organization. Look for assessments that speak to your employees’ specific sales skills in the following areas.
For each salesperson, a reliable test will evaluate:
- What are their prospecting capabilities?
- Are they able to meet with the actual decision maker and is there anything that could interfere with that?
- What is the quality of their business relationships?
- Are they able to take a consultative approach to a sales opportunity and uncover compelling reasons to buy?
- Are they able to quantify the opportunity and be the value rather than selling on price?
- Are they able to thoroughly qualify an opportunity?
- Can they present the right content to the right people at the appropriate point in time?
- Can they close business on a timely basis?
- Are they able to follow a staged, milestone-centric sales process?
- Can they leverage CRM, social selling, and video proficiency for sales success?
- Are they able to ask questions, push back, and challenge conventional thinking without needing to be liked by others?
- Are they able to stay in the moment and use active listening skills?
- Do they have beliefs about sales that support or sabotage ideal sales outcomes?
- Does the way they make major purchasing decisions support ideal sales outcomes?
- Are they comfortable having in-depth discussions about money and finances with prospects?
- How well do they recover from rejection?
- How badly do they want to achieve greater sales success?
- How committed are they to do whatever it takes to achieve greater sales success?
- How do they feel about themselves and their career outlook in sales?
- Do they take responsibility for results or rationalize and make excuses?
- How motivated are they to achieve sales success?
Objective Management Group’s sales assessments target these key selling skills to evaluate current and prospective employees. Rooted in selling skills, these assessments combine the most relevant aspects of personality, cognitive ability, and biodata tests within the context of the sales profession so that every question provides actionable data for on-the-job improvement.
