Choosing an applicant with a sales personality that will fit the culture of your workplace, compliment the product or service you’re promoting, and actually bring in prospects, leads, and revenue can be a challenging task for hiring managers. Truly getting a sense of someone’s sales personality is nearly impossible without throwing them onto a number of calls and seeing how they fare. Unfortunately, it can take a few months to confirm whether someone is ill fit for a position, but by that time company resources have already been invested in them. If only there was a way to get a sense of this before employees are brought on with the organization.
The good news is that industrial psychologists have developed what are known as sales personality tests for workplaces that experience this very issue. Sometimes carefully reading over someone’s resume or even conducting a series of comprehensive interviews won’t be able to cut through the persona an applicant is presenting to you. This is not to say they’re doing this maliciously; many people expressing interest in sales are unaware of just how challenging it can be until they start working in the field for an extended period. Sales personality tests make it easy to hire a candidate for any sales role and by including this test early on in the hiring process, companies alleviate hiring risks and save both themselves and their applicants further time and energy.
The affordable personality tests available through companies like SalesTestOnline take only 10 minutes for applicants to complete, measuring qualities like motivational style, assertiveness, emotional maturity, stamina, sense of urgency, dependence and sociability. They do this by implementing strategic questions that are not skills based, encouraging applicants to respond honestly. While many things can be taught on the job, having the right combination of soft skills is integral to success in sales. Once completing the test, each applicant is then compared against a target profile that is developed specifically for the position in question.
These benchmark profiles are derived from doing an in-depth analysis of the company and the position being recruited for; alternatively, companies may choose to ask their strongest employees to complete mock tests and use those results to help find candidates well-suited to working with the established group. Once a test is taken, the results are delivered immediately to the hiring committee; what’s more is that tests are accessible and can be taken during any time of the day in six different languages (English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Standard Chinese).
When it comes to filling a position at a sales enterprise, you want the person you employ to stick, to use their strengths and intuition to lead each call in the desired direction. You also want them to fit seamlessly into the culture of your office and have a passion for what they’re selling. Next time a position comes available, see whether a sales personality test helps to make hiring more transparent; the candidate who scores the highest may be not the candidate you were initially drawn to but they could do wonders for your business in the long term.
Originally posted on February 14, 2018 @ 7:51 am