A company does a skill assessment to evaluate their employees and determine whether they are suitable for future roles and perform well in their current positions. Would you hire a candidate without evaluating their coding skills while hiring a software engineer? On the same lines, you wouldn’t hire a salesperson without evaluating their sales and marketing skills. This is where you need a sales skill assessment test.

What is a sales assessment test? It is a valuable hiring tool that a company utilizes to gauge the professional skills of salespeople and their overall sales acumen. This assessment for sales representatives is a test that typically consists of questions meticulously crafted to evaluate the different aspects of sales such as goal setting, flexibility, teamwork, presentation, research, communication, and personality.

Sales and marketing assessments present businesses with crucial hiring and assessment capabilities. It has benefits such as assessing operational practices, sales knowledge, management practices, and skills and motivation of potential hires. The health of any business lies in sales and marketing, and a company must evaluate its employees periodically using this selling skills test.

This test can also be conducted as an online sales aptitude test. According to a Global Recruiting Trends report, most companies nowadays are shaking up traditional recruiting methods. Besides, talent acquisition professionals say that conventional interview techniques are often biased and can assess only limited soft skills, and the results are sometimes unreliable.

The rapidly growing popularity of online assessment tools and software attracts a number of businesses to use these tools to make their recruiting process more efficient, simpler, and more productive. These tools are useful in hiring candidates with the right temperament needed for the company’s success. There are several tools available in the market, and you need to choose the right one to make your hiring process effortless. So get a clearer picture of your sales team’s ability and test candidates using the many different tools.

While the sales team is mainly responsible for selling your company’s products and driving new businesses for organizations, a salesperson is not only associated with selling your products, but they act as representatives of your business. A talented salesperson can generate new leads and bring more money for the company from the sales proceeds. This can happen only when the salesperson is highly knowledgeable and understands customer behavior and market trends.

Importance of Sales Assessment

You may wonder why your company needs a sales assessment in the first place. Well, it is highly essential as it can predict the performance of your sales team. A sales skills assessment can provide you with the opportunity to assess whether your current sales team is efficient. Also, you can determine all the changes you can make in the selection process to select the best candidates.

When you fail to do regular assessments, chances are your company’s weaknesses might be overlooked and remain in the shadows. In addition to this, if you hire the wrong set of candidates, you might end up paying tenfold for replacing them.

According to a survey report from Checkster, 78% of job applicants lie in their resumes, and around 66% of hiring managers fail to do thorough checks. So when you do a sales and marketing assessment, you are assessing the candidates’ technical skills as well as conducting a thorough background check on their career history and education.

One of the common problems that a company faces is poor hiring decisions. The hiring process can be exhausting, and it takes time to properly onboard suitable candidates. Sometimes, the hiring team might even rush the process. This is where organizational candidate sales assessment can come to your rescue. These assessments ask the right questions to determine if the particular candidate is genuinely fit for your company’s sales team.

According to a report from Inc.com, 75% of sales hires in a company fail within the first year. This alarming percentage implies that an organization needs to focus on sales management. Your sales team would fail to achieve the intended targets without a proper leader. So, when you hire a sales manager, you need to conduct an appropriate sales operations manager assessment test. This is a crucial step in a hiring process where many companies are likely to fail.

So, the operations manager assessment test needs to assess skills such as business expertise, organizational management, expertise in analytical and reporting, program management, pipeline management, financial analysis, and management, understanding CRM and database management software, and people relation management. So hiring the perfect operations manager for sales can help your company enhance your overall sales management and produce stellar results.

Sales ability assessment might help assess your sales team’s awareness of tribal knowledge. Tribal knowledge refers to any unwritten information within a company that is not widely known to everyone and is primarily abstract knowledge. Documenting this tribal knowledge can increase the efficiency of your sales team as well as your company’s valuation.

So conducting a sales assessment can be an opportunity to know how sales employees interact with other departments. How are they assigning and managing leads? What operational sales information is being provided to the sales? Are the employees aware of the sales policies and systems?

Since sales is an evolving field, consistent training for employees is vital. A statistical report shows that the companies that provide sales training have an ROI of 353%. However, companies with no sales training have reported increased voluntary turnover from 7.9% to 14.2%. To avoid unnecessary employee turnovers, you regularly conduct sales skills assessments and analyze the results to provide proper sales training.

Tips for Hiring Professionals Using Sales Skill Assessment

Given its importance, you need to evaluate the sales ability of the candidates you are hiring for any sales position in your company. The selling skills assessment reports can help assess the candidates’ business-to-business and business-to-consumer selling abilities. For this, your company can use an appropriate sales personality test software which can be done as an online sales assessment test.

Following are some of the tests that must be included in the sales skill assessments:

1. Communication Assessment:

During the early interview stages, you can assess the candidates’ skill for writing a prospect from the way they write an email. Since sales representatives predominantly use email for communication, you should first check their ability to write clear and concise messages. You need to check how they respond to your questions for verbal communication, especially objections. This initial screening helps recruiters to decide whether they can move the candidate forward to the next round of interviews.

2. Problem-solving and Critical Thinking Assessment:

An online sales test can have specific questions that are meticulously designed to assess the candidates’ critical thinking, aptitude, cognitive ability, personality, etc. The sales job assessment test can help you screen candidates who have the right technical and professional skills to sell a product efficiently.

3. Take-home Exercises and Role-Play:

Depending on the role, you can give the candidates certain exercises that they can do at home. For instance, you can give exercises such as writing prospecting emails to a demo client. Also, in role-play, you can create different sale scenarios, specifically looking for how the candidates close a sale under pressure successfully.

4. Simulated Sales Pitch:

The final round of interviews can have a mock pitch where they can present a product to a team of stakeholders. The candidates can be given a well-known product to make sure they prepare. A skilled salesperson should possess good presentation and research skills. When making a pitch, the candidate needs to conduct thorough research on the product and present it precisely. The way in which the product is presented has a significant impact on making a good first impression. These skills are the one that wins a happy customer.

5. Soft Skills:

Finally, soft skills such as empathy, perseverance, confidence, time management, listening, and work ethic need to be evaluated. A high level of emotional intelligence is an added advantage, especially in the field of sales.

Determining how many of these qualities a candidate possesses depends on how they respond to the sales skills test and how they perform in the mock pitch. At the end of the day, every sales job interview ends with iconic phrases such as “Try and convince me to buy this product or sell me this pen.” Be more willing to hire candidates who show a true passion for selling a product. Since a company shares 80% of revenue from sales and 20% of revenue from producers, you need to be cautious in selecting sales representatives.

With many assessment tools available, you can try SkillRobo. A pre-hiring assessment software was developed to assess candidates. It is a cloud-based software that can be integrated with your organization’s HR evaluation system. Using this tool, you can easily create a range of sales skill tests with customized questions to test the sales and marketing skills of the candidates. In addition to this, you can get instant analysis and results, which helps recruiters to select the best-fit candidates.

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