AlignMark Recruiting and Selection Blog

Sales Assessment - How to Assess Your Prospects for Sales Talent

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Most companies want a sales assessment that takes only 5   minutes and provides perfect prediction.  But that’s not         realistic, and not valid. In fact, there is no single magic wand that lets you predict who’s going to be a good salesperson. To accurately predict who will be a successful salesperson requires time and more than one kind of assessment—resulting in a significant payoff. Research has examined the relationship between a variety of assessments used to hire salespeople and future earnings.  Starting with NASA, the concept of job simulation has always proven to be one of the most effective tools used in the selection process.

In the 1960’s, corporations starting introducing the same concept to employees. And when job simulation was combined with other assessments the accuracy was even further enhanced.  Take a look:

The concept of using simulation to predict performance became simple.  You can easily see the parallel in terms of a flight simulator. If you look at a cognitive test, a personality test, and even a typical interview they tell you very little about how a person is likely to behave in a particular situation.   A cognitive test may tell you whether the person is smart enough to get through training, or if they have the minimal level of intelligence to interact in certain situations.  A personality test may tell you what kinds of situations the person “prefers” to work in but it tells you nothing about how a person can adapt their preferred style and still be effective.  The only real way to determine how someone will behave on the job is to hire them and see if they will work out or not.  Obviously that is way too expensive a method for hiring and it sure doesn’t work well with a rocket. 

So the most effective way to see how someone is likely to behave on the job is to put them in situations similar to the actual job.  Pro sports teams have tryouts that simulate the conditions of the real game against real competition before deciding who makes the roster.  Airlines use flight simulators that simulate the real conditions of the job.  So why shouldn’t a company use a sales simulator to accomplish the same results.  A sales simulator can utilize video to simulate the conditions of the job in many different ways.  Various stages of the sales cycle can be simulated, different objections by customers can be simulated, along with many other sales activities.   How applicants respond to video situations is very informative about how they will respond in actual sales situations.  Look for our next blog when I discuss validity…how do you know the assessment will work?

View  an example of a sales simulator now.