Is online assessment too time consuming?
It takes around 2 ½ hours to complete an online assessment – and both sales people and sales managers alike have told me that this is too long. However, the alternatives can be even more time consuming or render a result that is more ‘horoscope and hope’ than objective assessment. Gaining insight by observing sales meetings or listening in on sales calls is not enough. Even coupled with measuring KPIs, the picture you get may not be enough to make good recruitment or training decisions.
Time consuming but accurate is assessment based on observation. First, you need to define the selling role and develop the list of skills that you want to observe. These should be weighted by importance since not all skills contribute equally to the success of the role. Next, train your observers to avoid falling into the trap of only looking for evidence that supports a view they already have of the sales person. Schedule sales meetings or role-plays where you observe. Try to screen out the effect on the assessment of the subject knowing they are being observed. Finally, decide on a benchmark that defines what good looks like. This approach means spending a lot of time upfront in preparation and is costly for the sales manager who has to observe the sales person at meetings. The result can be robust and objective but does not yield much better information than using the right online assessment and takes hours in the making and hours in the doing. Two and a half hours seems quite short in comparison.
What if you want to test for a future role? Consider a sales person who wanted advancement to a sales manager role. He was very good in his sales role and if his employer hadn’t been willing to promote him he would probably have gone elsewhere. (Of course, if he had been put in the wrong role they would have lost him anyway.) An assessment centre would have helped, but for a single individual it was inappropriate. However, using an online assessment he was tested in the sales manager role and also in a new senior selling role. The tests revealed that he had potential as a sales manager and would probably be adequate in the role, but in the senior selling role he could excel. The boss didn’t have to persuade him to make the right choice – he himself elected to step up to the senior sales role. The boss was able to provide a focused development plan built around behaviours and competence that enabled the individual to fulfil their promise of excellent results and the whole process took 4 hours including feedback time.
So it seems in trying to improve your sales results you can either trust to a horoscope and hope approach, develop a full assessment centre or spend 2 ½ hours online with an assessment that is robust, objective, immediate and above all accessible by the sales person and the sales manager.
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