Benefits of a robust assessment methodology 5: helping organisations understand what has gone wrong with a bid
Far too often an organisation can lose a deal even when the bid was good.
This is where an effective sales assessment tool comes in: it enables a company to understand whether there is an underlying ‘people problem’ when a bid is unexpectedly lost, or whether there has been a structural or bid mis-match issue.
According to Dow Jones, 33% of bids are lost through the incompetence of the salesperson – that adds up to trillions of dollars of lost business.
Just as importantly in today’s tough economic environment, 24% of all bids end up with no decision being made, while only 52% of salespeople are meeting target.
With business harder and harder to win, it is imperative to ensure that the right people are in the right roles and there are no gaps in essential skills and competencies.
Benefits of a robust assessment methodology 4: empower sales management
We all know that the best salespeople don’t necessarily make the best managers – they’re two completely different roles.
Appropriate assessment allows an organisation – and specifically the CEO or the sales leader – to determine whether their managers actually understand or are capable of performing a genuine sales management role.
The role of the sales manager is a fundamental one within any sales organisation, yet most people who call themselves sales managers are not performing that role.
Effective assessment can highlight areas of individual strength and weakness, enabling an organisation to put in place focused development plans to help the sales managers improve their own competencies and so become stronger and more effective managers. This, in turn, will deliver stronger, more effective and more highly motivated sales teams.
Benefits of a robust sales assessment methodology 3 – Gain a clear understanding of competency strengths and weaknesses
A robust and effective assessment test provides a sales leader with a genuine window into individual team members’ competencies, allowing the manager to understand where any gaps are, specifically related to the role the salesperson is being asked to perform. This obviously benefits the company in that it allows the organisation to focus spending on the skills gaps and hence, where the consequent benefit is, which in turn helps minimise the total training spend, whilst maximising return on the training investment. Again, this tends to raise team morale.
At a personal level, individuals gain insight into why they have been struggling and they will recognise when their employer has decided to help them to get over a specific problem. For instance, this may be one that has been troubling them throughout their career.
Benefits of a robust sales assessment methodology 2 – You hire the right people
With an effective sales assessment tool, a manager can restrict hiring to candidates genuinely suited to a specific role.
This enables the sales leader steadily to raise the average quality of the team with each hiring.
This, in turn, has a knock-on effect on team morale, as existing members know they are guaranteed to be joined by a high-performing colleague, while also encouraging them to up their own game.
An additional spin-off benefit of using assessments such as Fit-4 is that managers waste much less of their time interviewing unsuitable candidates.
Get the right salespeople in the right sales roles
In the current tough business environment, it is vital to fit the right people in the right roles – particularly in sales. Many organisations are failing to win deals, even though the bids they have put together are in themselves excellent.
At the same time, more and more bids are ending up with no buying decision at all at the end of the bid process. Research by both DowJones and Aberdeen Group show that, in many cases, this is a people issue, where an incompetent salesperson or one ill-suited to the particular role is involved.
Robust and objective asessment
To combat this problem what every sales leader needs is a robust and objective way of assessing whether team members have the competencies and skills necessary to succeed in their assigned roles. And salespeople need to be assessed against a benchmark set of competencies which are set at a level where it is safe to assume results.
The Fit-4 benchmark standard is set at the level of a world-class, high-performing individual in a specific sales role. Independent analysis by psychometric specialists SHL has found the Fit-4 assessment to be very accurate, and indeed is at a level where it would be expected that 88% or more of people hired using this system will hit or exceed their targets.
Here’s the first of six major benefit of using a sales assessment test like Fit-4….
1 Right person – right role
Using an effective sales assessment test like Fit-4 allows the employing organisation to determine if new hires are suitable for the vacancies they have available or whether incumbents are genuinely matched to their roles. This is good for both the company and the individual, provided that the appropriate role is available, because matching employees properly to specific sales roles is good for revenue performance, staff retention and leads to more motivated employees: people talk more positively about the business – hence, happier customers and more revenue.
At the same time, this is good for individual salespeople because they are more successful, they are happier doing that role and they are more positive about their employer.
The only potential downside of finding people who are in mis-matched sales roles is if the company doesn’t have the right role for them to move to. Then it may be a case of the appropriate training interventions or, as a last resort, redundancy.