Your sales teams are the primary human face of your organisation and – still – identifying and retaining high performing sales talent continues to elude many businesses.
A successful salesperson will not only enable your organisation to ride out the economic uncertainty but will also ensure you are ready to seize the opportunities that present during the recovery.
Effectively predicting sales performance is critical to the success of any business, and using well designed, rigorous psychometric assessments as part of a sales selection process can really boost our chances of finding and retaining the right salespeople.
We have been using psychometric assessments for more than 25 years now. We have assessed more than 80,000 people in sales, sales management and leadership roles using a variety of high quality assessment tools for both selection and development purposes. The tools we use are designed to measure cognitive abilities, personality, motives & values, Call Reluctance, coping & derailing behaviours, EQ, etc.
We use well researched, well built, validated assessments constructed by professional psychometricians because, like diagnostic tools used in medicine and other scientific applications, good assessments are calibrated to measure specific aspects of self.
To get the most value out of psychometric assessments when applied to your sales selection process you might like to consider these important points:
- Use as part of a selection process: psychometric assessments should be used in concert with other validated selection tools such as structured behavioural interviews, competency based simulation exercises and structured reference checks where findings can be cross referenced against core criteria that have been established as relevant to the job and culture in question.
- Predictive ability: psychometric assessments should account for no more than 20% of your decision making criteria. They can never be 100% predictive of performance.
- Purpose built: use psychometric assessments that have been purpose built to measure specific qualities, abilities or attributes.
- What to measure: there are a variety of assessments you can use on their own or combined. Select the ones that will measure what you need for the specific role.
- Cost: most businesses reserve the more stringent psychometric assessment process until after they have developed a short list of candidates who have been through the initial screening parameters and a thorough Behavioural Interview. When you balance the cost of including psychometric tools in your recruitment process against the cost of one or more poor selection decisions. Which bill would you rather pay?
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au
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