No company likes high turnover rates, and replacing employees over and over can do a great deal of damage, especially during busy quarters that require all salesperson a to be firing on also owners. Companies are forced to spend time and money training employees that may end up leaving because they were not a proper fit for the sales role they were hired to fill.
Anyone who works in sales will tell you that soft skills can be the most important tool a prospective candidate brings to the table. If you are a hiring manager or a recruiter, you know that a job in sales isn’t simply about understanding the product or service, it’s about knowing how to read customers, how to anticipate how they may respond, and knowing which tactics to use in order to steer them toward a sale. Sales is not about tricking customers, but rather about evaluating their needs and determining how those needs can best be served.
Consider that the qualities managers often want to see in an interview are actually different from those potential customers want to see from the sales person with whom they interact. Salespeople must be assertive, sure, but they do not need to be headstrong or overly aggressive.
Confidence may impress in an interview, but self-assuredness can give way to self-centredness, and this might just sour sales relationships. Salespeople should never be making sales for their own sake, but instead they should be working towards meeting sales targets strategically and always putting the customer’s needs and priorities first.
This is why so many companies are using sales personality tests to help them avoid the same tired hiring patterns that lead to such high turnover. Sales personality tests determine which candidates truly have the proper attitude and who is likely to remain in a sales position long-term. Furthermore, sales personality tests identify soft skills and will tell hiring managers and recruiters which candidates will be best for which types of sales roles. Because the best salesperson functions as a mediator between your company’s need to sell and the customer’s needs as a consumer with whom you’re trying to connect, making sure the sales person is the right fit is of key importance.
Tools like sales personality tests diminish risk because they have upwards of 90% accuracy, which ensures that those who make it through the hiring process are in fact worthy of their employer’s energy, time, and investment.
Available through providers such as SalesTestOnline, sales personality tests show hiring managers which of their candidates have the exact right attitude for the exact sales role they need to fill. And unlike interviews, these tests allow you to measure things like assertiveness, sociability, emotional maturity, motivational style, sense of urgency, dependence, and stamina.
If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager looking for the right sales person to join your team, why not cut to the quick and suss out a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses easily through a sales personality test?