The Complete Sales Person Assessment

The Complete Salesperson Assessment (CSA) is a set of assessment instruments that provide a sales manager with valuable insights on potential candidates or existing sales personnel. Although not a replacement for a proper hiring process that includes comprehensive interviewing and diligent reference checking, it is an additional tool that may help you from hiring the wrong person – or investing in expensive sales training.

The CSA consists of 4 instruments:

The Sales Temperament Assessment

Gauges a person’s overall suitability for sales and to specific types of selling situations.

The Sales Talent Fit

Determines whether your sales person’s or candidate’s values, behaviors and job preferences are a match for your specific sales role.

The Sales Skills Index

An objective analysis to determine how well a person understands the selling process.

The Sales Job Fit

If the job could talk, it would clearly define the knowledge, hard skills, people skills, behaviors and culture needed for superior performance.

The CSA can be sold as a complete package, or as individual sales force assessments. What’s the greatest advantage of the CSA? It can prevent companies from making expensive hiring or training mistakes.

Organizational Sales Performance Assessments

Charles Kettering, former head of research at General Motors, once said, “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” The Sales Performance Assessment will help identify and state the problem areas that need to be addressed in order for the sales department to reach its full potential.

Our Sales Performance Assessment is a comprehensive consulting service that provides an objective overview of a company’s sales organization and the performance problems it may be experiencing.

The Sales Performance Assessment identifies:

• The structure and goals of the sales organization
• The environment in which the sales force operates
• The resources and support services it needs
• The skills and knowledge of each individual
• The motivation, feedback and compensation appropriate for its needs
• The management techniques needed to plan, implement and monitor the sales effort

During the project, our qualified consultants will investigate and identify the market planning and account targeting processes within your sales organization. This will uncover:

• How your markets can be segmented
• How products can be tailored to meet market needs
• What selling strategies work best with your targeted accounts
• What strategies work best to maintain and develop long-term relationships
• What cross-selling strategies work best with your targeted accounts
• Which selling styles are appropriate for market penetration
• The need for territory definition and realignment

Management will receive a comprehensive final report that includes an executive summary and overview, sales SWOT analysis, sales performance audit, individual staff assessments, and the potential problem areas and recommendations – basically everything needed to get your sales department running to its full potential.

Hiring Assistance

Hiring the wrong person – particularly a salesperson – can be very costly in terms of lost sales, lost customers, and lost opportunities. However, the task of finding and hiring the right salespeople can be difficult and time-consuming. While we can’t recruit salespeople for you, we can assist in the hiring process. In fact, with the advent of social networking sites, particularly LinkedIn, that can help you find great people fast, recruiting organizations are quickly becoming a very expensive, and unnecessary option.

Here are five ways we can help you find a winner.

These services are available separately or as a package.

Job Descriptions, Recruitment Ads, Resource Material

Getting the right person to knock on your door is one of the first steps in successful hiring. This means clearly stating the type of person, in terms of skills and characteristics, that you are looking for. We will help you to develop and refine job descriptions and recruitment ads that accurately reflect what your company needs.

Criteria Development, Interview Questions, Screening

Knowing exactly what you are looking for and how to find it is also important. We will help you to develop a list of the mandatory and desirable hiring criteria, provide suitable sales interview questions, and screen and rank the candidates? initial responses.

Candidate Interviews

We will help you conduct hiring interviews with short-listed candidates (usually at third interview). Our Salesperson Assessment Tools will also be used to determine the candidate’s suitability for sales, particularly with respect to your company’s selling environment, to ensure an accurate match between the candidate and the position that needs to be filled.

Post-Interview Debrief and Recommendations

After the first steps of the hiring process have been completed, everything you have seen, heard, and learned must be pulled together. We will undergo a post-interview debrief complete with recommendations.

Reference Checking

This stage is critical. We will conduct reference checking on your behalf and provide you with a written summary of the results.

Hiring Training

We’ve generally seen two types of new hire training programs – the “fire hose” version – throw everything at them in a little under a week (retention low, frustration high), or the “osmosis” program – send them out with an “experienced” rep for a few days and they’ll figure the rest out – they’re “great”, right?

The Salesforce New-Hire Training program is a professionally customized on-boarding agenda designed specifically for your organization’s unique environment.

This agenda accomplishes this by focusing on three distinct components of on-boarding a new sales rep, namely;
(i) what do they need to know; (ii) when do they need to know it; and (iii) evaluating whether or not they have learned it before moving forward. The key here is to develop a testing process, and ensure the new sales person knows what they are supposed to be doing prior to seeing a new customer.

The Salesforce New-Hire Training program ensures that:

• There is consistent communication between the time the offer was accepted and the start date.
• On Day 1, the new salesperson is provided with clear directions on where to go; is greeted at the door, gets to sit with their manager, and have an ID card, workspace, supplies and equipment ready to go.
• They receive proper training on your product/service; your sales process including CRM; your competitors; your organization’s mission, vision and values, how to communicate your value proposition; your expectations in the terms of targets, activities and effectiveness.
• Your training format is varied and engaging (1:1, classroom, web, job shadow/sales calls)
• The new salesperson is tested to ensure that they are knowledgeable in the topic before proceeding to a new one.
• The stages of learning are clearly defined, have a logical sequence and are staggered over time.
• Ultimately, creates an experience that leaves the new hire prepared to hit their sales targets.

This program is designed to accomplish one objective and that is to help sales people move to revenue-generation mode as quickly as possible, and instilling the confidence to do so.