If you interview and hire sales people you may have come to believe that the chance of making a good sales hire is about the same as winning a coin toss. This is extremely unfortunate, since a single bad hire costs between $75,000-$300,000,according to a recent Harvard Business Review article. The good news is, using a sales assessment test will eliminate most of the risk and vastly improve your chances of hiring winners.
This is why today most companies use sales tests as part of their hiring process. According to another HBR article ‘76% of organizations with more than 100 employees use tests for external hiring’.
Unlike the costly and cumbersome sales assessments of the past, today’s web based sales tests are not only better and faster but also highly economical, typically costing between $30-$60. This low cost and convenience means sales assessment tests are not only within reach of very small companies, but are also used on a massive scale by most large sales organizations.
How they are used can vary. While large organizations often have all candidates take the test as an upfront screen, most hiring managers have candidates take the sales test online, after a phone conversation but prior to an interview. One simply directs them to the testing web site and provides the credentials. Once the candidate has completed the test you have access to their test results immediately. Used in this way, the hiring manager is able to spend valuable face time with just pre-qualified candidates.
Using a sales assessment test effectively, bears keeping in mind that they are not a panacea but rather tools that should be used in combination with other hiring practices such as interviews and reference checks. Caveats aside, if you use a sales test, the 3 mistakes listed below will not only be eliminated, but you’ll vastly
improve your odds of hiring winners and those you do hire will get up to speed much faster.
3 Sales Hiring Mistakes
1. Relying on interviews
Even though we rely on interviews, extensive research has shown they are a poor way to evaluate sales candidates. Why? Sales candidates are good at ‘playing the role’. This is why certain candidates who look great today can turn out to be a complete failure. A sales assessment test looks beyond the ‘role’ to identify the real sales personality.
2. Rejecting certain candidates who do not interview well
Some of the very best sales people are introverts. Many of them are highly self-motivated and are great in technical sales. Unfortunately they do not interview well. A sales test provides an understanding of these candidates so you’ll know what they bring to the role.
3. Failing to understand the required sales personality
Sales roles differ. You may understand the technical qualifications, but without a clear and realistic picture of the sales traits it requires, you’re like a casting director, auditioning actors with no idea what you’re looking for. Sales test vendors perform job analyses so you work with a realistic picture of the required sales personality traits.
To learn more about the benefits of sales testing visit here: SalesTestOnline.com
David Pearce is the President of SalesTestOnline.com. Established in 1986, SalesTestOnline.com is North America’s #1 provider of sales personality tests as well as personality tests for sales positions used to evaluate sales employees for sales competency. SalesTestOnline.com has over 1400 satisfied customers (97% re-order rate) who use our personality sales test to measure sales aptitude when hiring. Our online
sales assessment test is customized to your unique criteria, fully automated, instantaneous, extremely accurate and very economical.
