Sales Hiring

Your sales hiring team plays a critical role in revenue generation and company growth. Choosing suitable candidates for your sales roles is essential.

Adding a sales assessment to your hiring process dramatically reduces fruitless interviews and allows you to save time by only spending 45 minutes with the most qualified candidates.

Saves Time

Choosing the right salespeople is critical for a business, and every missed or lousy hire costs you revenue. Using assessments in the hiring process can help you improve your hiring ability and identify high-performing salespeople.

Sorting through resumes to find candidates worth interviewing is time-consuming and ineffective. Sales assessments can eliminate the need for this process by identifying the best-fit candidates quickly and efficiently.

A practical sales assessment will measure a candidate’s skills in essential areas such as prospecting, qualifying, closing, cold calling, goal setting, and more. It can also gauge an applicant’s ability to reach decision-makers and perform research and their motivations to achieve a sale.

Fortunately, you can browse sites like Challengerinc.com to understand more about assessment and how to decide appropriately to get the right people for your business. A superior sales assessment will rate a candidate’s success potential in multiple sales roles, allowing you to choose the right person even when they may have limited experience. For example, you might select a candidate who has excelled at inside sales but has yet to gain experience as a territory rep or strategic account manager.

Saves Money

Sales assessments help save time and money by ensuring that candidates who are a poor fit for the role or company culture aren’t hired. When used correctly, the correct sales assessment can eliminate hiring mistakes, increase the likelihood of selecting top performers, and ensure you use your valuable resources effectively.

Hiring the right salespeople is crucial for every business because they are the revenue drivers. Each failed or lousy hire results in millions of dollars of lost revenue. It also costs time and money to train new salespeople to hit quota. The average time to fill a sales position is 6.2 months.

Many managers rely on their gut intuition when selecting salespeople, but this is only predictive about 20% of the time. The best pre-hire assessments provide insight beyond resumes and interviews so that you can get it right the first time. These tools, such as realistic job previews and situational judgment tests, can be incorporated into the hiring process at each stage, from initial emails to a field day.

Prevents Over-Hiring

Hiring salespeople is a complex process that requires more than a simple resume or interview. Without a pre-screening assessment, missing great candidates or hiring someone who cannot hit your company’s sales targets can be easy. Personality or behavioral assessments, like the MBTI, can be helpful but must provide valuable information about an applicant’s selling ability. Sales assessments measure a candidate’s relevant skills and predict success in your sales environment and culture.

With the right tools and support, a sales assessment will save you time while improving your recruitment process. It also helps you hire top-performing salespeople to develop effective sales strategies, driving revenue growth and sustainable success for your business. To make the most of a sales assessment, use it to complement your traditional recruitment methods, including job ads, interviews, and reference checks. Do not rely solely on the assessment results to determine who should be hired, especially where a candidate has a well-documented track record in a similar role.

Prevents Poor Performance

A good sales assessment can help prevent poor or underperformance by identifying red flags during the interview process. For example, if a candidate seems hesitant about hitting their quota, you can use a sales assessment to determine how much drive they have. The best pre-hire assessments measure common personality traits found in top-performing salespeople.

A quality sales assessment also helps you make smarter hiring decisions by providing talent analytics in the critical job context that CVs and gut feelings cannot provide. For instance, a sales assessment puts the DISC personality assessment results in real-world terms to see how well a candidate will fit your selling environment and culture.

A superior sales assessment will not only predict a candidate’s ability to hit their quota. Still, it will identify whether they have the flexibility to grow into future roles you need. It will also pinpoint the necessary training and coaching to get them on a success vector as quickly as possible.

Prevents Disappointment

If you’re a sales manager, you have experienced the disappointment of hiring someone who does not meet expectations. This can cost your business significant time and money in coaching, training, and lost revenue.

A sales assessment can give in-depth insights into a candidate or incumbent’s performance and potential. This will help you understand what drives their performance and how to motivate them effectively without wasting valuable resources or money.

Sales assessments are designed to measure and identify critical skills often overlooked or misunderstood in an interview process. These include communication, objection handling, qualifying, goal setting, client research, and more. They allow you to take the guesswork out of the interview and select candidates with a greater chance of success long-term. This eliminates the need to rely solely on your gut feeling or a candidate’s resume and allows you to choose the most promising candidate for your business. It also allows you to assess your current team members and identify everyday development needs.