The SalesAssessment Blog » Hiring top performers

Is online assessment too time consuming?

shekharv — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:55:47 +0000

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.

Day 2: True story-Having the right team

shekharv — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:59:10 +0000

I had been working with the medium sized sales force. I had been working with them for about 2 months and had mixed feelings about their abilities. I had originally been brought in to hone their skills as consultative sellers and develop them as account managers. The sales people responded well to the training which is not suprising as many of them far from being consultative sellers or account managers were transactional sellers without much clue how to sell a service/product that could be of strategic importance to the companies that might buy it. Amongst the sales people there was a feeling that it was the fault of marketing that sales were so low and the offer wasn’t that good and..and.. some of this might have been true but it got to be a catalogue of excuses I am not saying this to make anyone feel bad it is what happened. The company had appointed a new Sales Director very experienced, very intelligent he asked me to meet with him. I was expecting to give a report on the training but instead the Sales Director opened up to me and said that the sales peole were not what he had been told to expect, instead of the brilliant startegic sellers he had expected he had inherited a bunch of largely transactional sellers in hats too big for them. He felt handicapped and I guess a little vulnerable. He wanted to know my assessment & recommendations. I am never comfortable giving an assessment from watching people on a training course because how people act in the field may be quite different good or bad. Training courses are not assessment centres I could though give a report back on attitude and behaviour. The Sales Director was very concerned about reaching targets for the rest of the year but had no real way of knowing who was good at what nor could he replace anyone easily or even be sure they were the right person to change. If you have ever been in this situation then you will understand the dilemma. 3 months later after much frustration there was whole sale slaughter in the Sales department. The sales director did this as fairly as he could but all the time thinking “I didn’t sign on to be a hatchet man.”

Now roll backwards wouldn’t it have been great if that sales director had an objective profile of the sales people that show’d their behaviour, attitude and motivation plus how skilled they were and then instead of measuring that against internal benchmarks you did that against world class top performers you would know before you got into post who should stay who should go and who should be developed. You would of course want to validate that against actual figures but instead of being told by someone who knows little or nothing about sales people or selling that you have a fantastic team you know what they are warts and all. Imagine if you did you could really hit the ground running knowing that the decisions you make about sales people are the right decisions.

Let us take the ideas of testing a stage further many sales people could also gain by having an annual MOT benchmarked against world class performers so they can have real input into their own development and be able to answer performance questions like ” I get the meeting why can’t I quite get the sale?” imagine being able to go to another employer equipped with a robust report that has rigorously tested your abilities. Imagine a transactional seller being able to identify the skills and attitude shortfalls they have should they wish to progress to Consultative selling and then seek ways to fill the gap and grow their career.

Enough imagining the tool is here right now and it is called Fit-4 and I am an unashamed advocate for it: robust, rigorous,online easy to use and the results packed with practical, easy to understand information. This is the link to yesterdays true story Fit-4 is also a great tool for helping you to selct the right person for the right sales role and saving money time and heartache on the way.

SDV Training with Sales assessment.com are specialists in helping companies improve their B2B sales. We do this by helping you select the right sales people for the right role, assessing existing sales people benchmarked against world class top performers and we design and deliver sales trainiing and coaching

2 True stories: Day One selecting the right sales person!

shekharv — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:47:04 +0000

Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty!

So I am sitting at a network lunch and telling my table that I help companies improve their sales performance, assisting you to select the right person in the first place to helping you assess the talent that you have and, designing focused reveue generating training &/or coaching. The guy to my left immediately said that’s interesting because my company is now at a point where I am wanting to employ a full time sales person. We converse and he tells me he is going to use a recruitment agency that have previously supplied him with engineers. I ask him what is the cost of getting your recruitment wrong and he says over a 3 month trial period including the agency fee around £8000 but that is acceptable. Now here’s the thing, he hadn’t calculated his time in making the decision nor the sales opportunities lost, or the possible negative impact on existing customers. He had plans for growth; and the wrong sales person could contribute enourmously to that growth, or knock them back a few years. Selection is difficult but in sales it is crucial. There are 3 areas that you need to focus on: first does this person have the right attitude and motivation for my customers, do they have the experience that I need in this position and finally, do they have the right skills at the right level for this post? The one that is probably easiest to gauge is experience, but be careful to differentiate between 1 years experience repeated 15 times and 15 years experience growing & developing as a sales person.

The others: attitude, motivation and skills need objective measures, linked to the type of sales and offer that you sell. With many small firms the owner managers have had no sales training and have little understanding of selling and even less of sales people. Selection often comes down to – do I like this person, can I work with them – and this could be an expensive mistake.

Bigger firms often have a Sales Director &/or an HR person who can usually assess experience and attitude, often with the help of a psychometric like MBTI, however the fundamental flaw is that many pyschometrics are generic in nature or focus on an aspect of managing people, life skills or a personality profile that requires adaption & intepretation to be applied to a sales person. Very few focus on selling - and even fewer on selling skills specific to the selling role that needs filling. A trial period may show up gaps in skill but should you really practice on your customers?

Now back to my networking lunch and my neighbour who is not sure he wants to recruit a sales person now except that I tell him there is a way of making it easier, cheaper and more certain. Okay says he, lets talk! After story 2 I tell you what we talked about.

Tomorrow comes the second story which is about a newly appointed sales director who inherited a top sales team; or did he?

What’s the point of assessing sales people?

Andrew Dugdale — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:42:15 +0000

CEO SalesAssessment.com

As an expert in assessing sales people I get asked this very often. The answer is simple.

If your team is not populated with top performing sales people – you will get outsold! That means at best you need more prospects per sale, with all the costs that incurs; or worst case – if your competitor has people who are a league better that yours, maybe you never win another deal.

Reality for most companies probably lies today somewhere in between these two extremes – pipelines slipping worse than ever; sales ‘disappearing’ at a higher rate than ever; win ratios becoming progressively worse; costs increasing…. yes, we are all familiar with this scenario by now. So what can be done to reverse this?

Just cloning your top performers, assuming you can achieve this without a rigorous assessment tool, is no longer enough. Think about this – what if your top performer is just not good enough to outsell those sales people in all the new competition springing up everyday. What if the skills required today to be a top performer have changed – and in most areas they have! Customer expectations are changing faster than the skill sets in most sales forces – but it needn’t be so.

The value of SalesAssessment.com’s Fit-4 offering is that it uniquely measures the 4 key areas that determine a sales person’s ability to create revenue, not generically, but for the specific role they are required to perform. Even better, all 4 areas are benchmarked against world class top performers. This means that uniquely with Fit-4, you are dramatically reducing the risk of being outsold by your competition; and since we are continuously aligning the benchmarks as the needs of the market changes, you can be sure that you will always have a team of top performing sales people.