Building Top-Performing Sales Teams

Component #1: The Right People

Specialized Sales Assessment Tests

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins explains that one of the keys to developing a great company is having a management team that focuses on \"getting the right people on the bus\" (and the wrong people off the bus).

What are the characteristics of the right people for your sales organization? What makes your top sales performers different from your other salespeople? Why is it so hard to find more salespeople that perform like your top performers?

In their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney explore these questions. They compared the results of hundreds of thousands of sales assessment tests with actual sales performance measurements. Their conclusions?

“55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else” and “Another 20% to 25% have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else”

Wow! These are some sobering statistics! They say straight out, in plain English, that more than half of the people working in sales should be doing something else for a living! How did these people manage to land sales jobs in the first place? Why weren\'t they \"weeded out\" during the recruiting process?

Most of these hiring mistakes result from the fact that most hiring decisions are based solely upon SUBJECTIVE information. After all:

• What is a resume? It is a job applicant\'s subjective description of his or her capabilities and experience, written for the sole purpose of convincing the reader to invite the job applicant to an interview.
• What happens during interviews? Interviewees attempt to answer questions in a manner that makes the best impression. Meanwhile, interviewers form personal opinions about interviewees\' qualifications.

According to Lou Adler, author of Hire With Your Head: \"More errors are made during the first 30 minutes of an interview than at any other time. Emotions, biases, perceptions, stereotypes, and first impressions are powerful human forces that profoundly affect individual judgment.\" I\'m not suggesting that subjective information is useless. Subjective information is a valid and valuable component of any \"people decision\". However, if decisions based solely upon subjective information produce an undesirable result 80 percent of the time (remember the 80/20 rule?), doesn\'t it make sense to consider making a change? We can help you add quality OBJECTIVE information to your sales hiring decisions with specialized sales assessment tests. Unlike most sales assessment tests, our tests aren\'t limited to personality and behavioral traits. They also identify:

• How quickly the individual learns (a critical factor in sales training)
• How precisely and effectively the individual communicates, both verbally and in writing
• How talented they are at asking questions and picking out important pieces of information from the answers (crucial for effective opportunity qualification and maximizing account penetration)
• The individual\'s selling style (Consultative, Relationship, Hard Closer, etc.)
• The individual\'s relationship preference (Hunter, Farmer, Hybrid)
• How effectively the individual will prospect for new sales opportunities
• And much, much more!

Click the following link if you would like to learn more about how our specialized sales assessment tests can help you identify the Right People for your company\'s sales organization.

– 80/20 Sales Performance