Three Reasons to use a Sales Personality Test with Your Current Sales People
By David Pearce, President, SalesTestOnline.com
While it is definitely true that sales personality tests are most typically used as a hiring tool to select sales candidates, one should not overlook the benefits of using sales assessments to evaluate your current sales people.
1. Hiring candidates who have the sales personality traits of your A players
Often it may seem as though there is little commonality to the sales personality traits of your top performers. In my experience, however, nothing could be further from the truth. I can almost guarantee you that when you evaluate your top performers with a sales personality test, many sales personality traits that are common among them will be clearly and readily identified. How does this benefit you? By having a clear picture of their shared sales success traits you now have the necessary information to hire new people who closely match those of the A players. As the article A Sales Personality Test will eliminate these 5 Sales Hiring Mistakes explains one of the most common hiring mistakes one makes when hiring for sales, is to hire without having a clear picture of the necessary traits required for success. This costly mistake will now be eliminated and going forward you will know exactly how close sales candidates are to matching the sales personality traits of your A players. The bottom line is that you will know that new hires have high potential for success.
2. Improving the B players
You already know who your B players are and you've already identified their work related gaps and weaknesses. So why should you have them complete a sales personality test? Just like any other problem you can't begin to deal with it properly until you know it's true cause. Think of the sales personality test as a diagnostic tool that helps you to understand the root cause of the performance issue. Once you've diagnosed why the sales person is struggling in a particular area only then can you take the steps necessary to deal with it. In the case of B players you will find that they quite often lack some of the key sales personality traits of the A players. Knowing this and knowing specifically what those deficiencies are will equip you with an understanding of how to work around them in your daily management and ongoing training. In other instances you will quite likely uncover a B player who has the potential to be an A player but is not achieving his or her potential. In these situations you are operating with the comforting knowledge that at least the rep has high potential in the first place and that you are not wasting time, effort and money on someone who does not really have a chance of success.
3. Confirming the Bad News Quickly
Evaluating your poorest performers with a sales test can deliver many of the same benefits as testing your B players. Specifically diagnosing the real reasons for the poor performance so you may deal with it effectively. What can happen more frequently with this group however, is the sales test results confirm that you are wasting your time with the rep and, it may be better for all concerned to cut your losses sooner than later. The reality with these reps is that they never had the potential in the first place and should not have been hired. Trying to continue to make then successful is a waste of time, effort and money. The good news is that with your future hires the sales personality test will identify both these types before you hire them so you can eliminate this kind of hiring mistake.
Conclusion
A sales personality test eliminates hiring errors and ensures that you choose the highest potential sales people. When used with your current sales people you can take things to another level by hiring those with the same sales success traits as your A players. You will better understand your existing sales people, therefore managing, motivating and training them far more effectively.
David Pearce is the President of SalesTestOnline.com. Established in 1986, SalesTestOnline.com is North America's #1 provider of sales personality tests as well as personality tests for sales positions used to evaluate sales employees for sales competency. SalesTestOnline.com has over 1400 satisfied customers (97% re-order rate) who use our personality sales test to measure sales aptitude assessment when hiring. Our online sales assessment test is customized to your unique criteria, fully automated, instantaneous, extremely accurate and very economical.