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Sales Assessment for Hiring and Training

By Lori Olson

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 21May2009 Word count: 709 Viewed: 289 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

People who are in sales are typically extroverted individuals and therefore know how to confidently discuss the subject they know best: themselves. What can be done to make the difficult task of wading through sales resumes easier? How can you be sure that you are hiring a person who not only has the right job skills but will be an asset to your business? What else needs to be considered besides work experience?

Here are some of the personal skills that you need to consider: personal accountability, self starting, results oriented, ethical, ability to preserve, stability, attention to details and so forth.

Although this can be overwhelming there is a way to make your sales assessments for hiring and training a lot easier. This is done by implementing a nonbiased system that allows you to objectively determine the true soft skills abilities that a sales person really needs.

Today it is not sufficient to use pushy, peddling tactics. The age of interruption marketing and pressure sales tactics is in decline and permission marketing has taken its place. Your sales force needs to have the soft skills for success in your market place. You can perform sales assessments that will first help you choose the individuals who have the strong sales personalities and then use it for your training programs. Individuals who have the right personal abilities will deliver the best results when soft skills are learned.

What is the best way to do a sales assessment? Sales assessment tests can be done online or in a separate room. This is a great way to eliminate any prejudice that the interviewer may have (consciously or unconsciously). The test should assess behaviors that the person displays, personal skills that the person has or lacks and the core values. These last two considerations are often hard to see during an interview because they are beneath the interviewee's surface. If an interviewer were to directly question a candidate with the hope of further discovery, a candidate might "fake" it by trying to give the answers that appear to be sought. Good sales assessment tests will have built in controls that help prevent manipulation of the test results.

The sales assessment test should be one that is easy to administer and easy for the candidate to take. It should not be more than 20 minutes in duration. Online tests will be scored immediately for the interviewer to review. The behavioral and personality characteristics of the examinee should be delivered in a way that is easy to interpret. A good test system will provide a detailed written analysis as well as some charts that make it easy to see where a candidate's strengths are.

Who should be tested? Since there is a cost involved with testing, it is wise to sort through the resumes and pick the best. These candidates do not need to be as thoroughly scrutinized as when testing is not being used. The test will help you make the final decision.

Now, here is an interesting consideration. Even if there are only a couple of candidates or you are hiring multiple people, it will pay to have them tested. Why? You will know their behavior profiles and be informed about the best ways to motivate them and manage them. This will increase the productivity of your team enormously.

This is why smart sales managers will make sure that their entire team has taken a valid sales assessment test. Each team member can be trained to understand personality profiles of everyone on the team and best of all understand the types of profiles that exist. Just consider how powerful this is. When a sales person is trained to first know oneself and then understand how to interact with other personality types, sales barriers are removed. Genuine communication is set up. Soft skills and permission marketing will reign. Your business will prosper because your sales team will be productive...even during tough times. Clearly, sales assessment is absolutely vital for hiring and training all your personnel.

In order to get the best results, make sure that the sales assessment tests you use are recognized and highly valued in the human resources industry. You can call a trusted small business consulting firm for recommendations.

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