Reviewing your sales team’s performance is a must, but how do you do it effectively to ensure you get the most accurate and applicable results? By making sure you use the right assessment.
There are a variety on the market, and deciding which one to use can be a time-consuming process, so here are ones you are most likely to encounter.
Personality assessments
These are offered in abundance and can most certainly provide more insight into who a person is than a face-to-face meeting – but when it comes to applying it to a salesperson, unfortunately they aren’t very helpful. Why? Because they are not able to measure a person’s actual ability to be successful in sales.
There are also those who note that personality is not a fixed thing and that it changes with circumstance. An American psychologist, Walter Mischel, embarked on a large research programme which discovered that only by analysing behaviour in its situational context would there be consistency in personality attributes.
So an individual might rate highly in terms of having motivation to achieve in life – but if that isn’t put in the context of a sales situation with many other factors taken into consideration, then it is impossible to understand their ‘real personality’ when it comes to making a cold call or closing a sale.
Behavioural assessments
Behavioural assessments often run the same course as personality tests. They were designed to show how people are different, and they can also provide information on how people communicate and how they might behave in a variety of scenarios depending on their individual qualities and predispositions. But if the assessment doesn’t focus specifically on real-life sales situations, then behaviour cannot be effectively measured and you can’t accurately evaluate your sales team.
Sales-specific assessments
This is definitely a lot closer to what assessment should be implemented for a company to gain the right insights into their sales team (and of course also for hiring new sales employees). But there does need to be caution around whether a sales assessment can be broken down into the specifics of your business – what you sell to who, and how you sell it. You can’t possibly use the same assessment criteria for a salesperson who sells high volumes of a low cost product against someone who works in a long sales cycle, selling six-figure IT software solutions.
