3 Ways Your New Sales Hire Assessment Could Set You Up For Failure.
A sales hiring assessment tool is used to evaluate the skills and behaviors of potential new hires to make an informed hiring decision about someone’s sales ability.
For example, if you’re hiring a salesperson, you need to know if they have sales skills or if they’re getting by with their sparkling personality. This means that you need to assess for behaviors that are consistent with what you want your sales team and sales leaders to be able to do.
Most companies rely on various assessments to help them determine which candidate will be the best fit for their organization. It is a vital part of any successful sales hiring process.
But maybe you should stop and ask: is your assessment tool and process really working for you?
Here at Improve Growth, we see a lot of companies making the same mistakes with their assessment tools. To help you avoid the same, we’ve compiled a list of the 3 biggest mistakes we see businesses make with their sales assessment tools.
Problem #1: They just don’t use one.
Pretty self-explanatory.
A sales assessment is part of every successful sales hiring process.
If you want to waste time onboarding candidates who cannot do the job you hired them for, I guess you can…but why would you?
While researching, implementing, and consistently using the right assessment will cost money and time, it’s an investment in the success of your business…and a heck of a lot cheaper than the alternative which is a churn and burn style of hiring that leaves you exhausted and with little revenue to show for your efforts.
Problem #2: They use the wrong assessment tool.
This isn’t the place for a generic new hire assessment, and it most certainly isn’t the place for a Myers-Briggs test. While those assessments have value, they don’t give you the necessary information you need to determine how well your candidate can do at the most crucial part of their job: selling.
This is a common mistake in hiring for sales. Many recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers use the wrong assessment tool to screen candidates for sales jobs. Add in bad interviewing skills. Yikes!
Unfortunately, most of these tools are designed to test for general sales knowledge, not sales skills. While these assessments can help determine whether a candidate has the right knowledge to be a sales professional, they aren’t effective at gauging a candidate’s ability to sell.
You need to use a sales-specific assessment tool that helps inform your hiring decision by giving you insights into your candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and sales skillset (and lets you know if they are capable of actually selling).
Problem: #3: They use the assessment tool at the wrong time.
Using a sales assessment tool at the end of your hiring process is one of the biggest mistakes you can make!
Assessments should be done at the beginning of the process…before you even see their resume.
The reason is simple: before you get eyeballs on a candidate, you should know if they deserve your attention. To be blunt, resumes can range from 100% accurate, to slightly padded, to complete and total lies.
Your candidates can’t fake an assessment – it is critical data that can be used to help determine who moves onto the next stage of your hiring process.
Knowing they meet your sales team criteria (and stand a good chance at being successful on your team) is vital to inform your decision to spend time reviewing their resume and application.
Your goal is to determine if they can sell. If they can’t, there’s no reason to spend the money to interview them. Your resources would be better spent somewhere else.
Unfortunately, we often see businesses wait until the candidates have gone through the majority of the hiring process before giving them a sales assessment. Sometimes, it’s used as the deciding factor between two candidates.
Often, when used at the end of the process, the hiring manager has already decided who they want to hire, and their “dream” candidate becomes hard to pass up…no matter what the assessment says.
This leads to a decision being made based on emotions rather than data. And that’s when you start to have big problems with your sales team.
In Conclusion
To have a successful sales team, you must have a sales assessment tool that ensures your new hires are ready to sell. It’s easy to make mistakes, which is why it’s so important you get this critical component of your sales hiring process right.
So, how do you know if your sales assessment tool is working? And that you’re using it at the right time?
We can help with that! Contact us for a 30-minute consultation of your current hiring process (including your sales assessment usage). Discover how our metrics and data-driven approach can help solve your sales team woes, increase revenue, and improve the growth of your business.