:: Words of sales test wisdom from those who know ::

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.