BY C. Lee Smith
Do you have a good way to assess candidates who apply for your open sales positions? You want the best salespeople working effectively in positions that suit them. To get that, you should use a sales candidate assessment during your hiring process. This is especially true if you’re looking for a sales candidate who will fit your Challenger role.
What Is a Sales Candidate Assessment?
A sales candidate assessment is a standardized behavioral assessment, such as the one offered in the TeamTraitTM platform. These assessments present a set of questions to candidates being recruited for a sales position. The assessment can be taken in person or remotely, but it usually requires logging in to a platform. The questions include a focus on past work behavior and personal motivation, and they also assess a candidate’s skill and will to sell.
Why Should Managers Hire for Fit?
Sales managers consistently experience significant turnover in their departments. We all know this turnover is expensive and demoralizing. And the department’s culture suffers when good people leave. In the Voice of the Sales Manager survey produced by SalesFuel, the typical sales manager noted they experience a 30% turnover rate every year.
One reason people leave is because sales managers don’t hire for fit when they onboard sales reps. Interviews won’t give you what you need, but a formal sales candidate assessment will. TeamTrait's sales acumen assessment is particularly strong.
What Position Are You Hiring For?
You know what position you’re hiring for, but did you know that your candidates can fall into one of five broad sales professional categories? This knowledge can help you determine whether candidates will fit into your open position.
Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson cover a lot of ground in their book, "The Challenger Sale." Here are the types of sales professionals identified by Dixon and Adamson:
- Relationship builder — These reps develop strong connections with prospects and buyers
- Problem solver — These detail-oriented folks respond quickly to issues
- Hard worker — They don’t give up easily
- Lone wolf — They work every prospect as they see fit and don’t take direction well
- Challenger — They look at the world differently and push the customer
Hard Workers and Relationship Builders
For best results, hiring managers should also consider their company’s selling culture and the selling environment their new reps will encounter. In a low-complexity selling environment, hard workers make up 26% of high performers, according to Dixon and Adamson.
These team members, always ready to go the extra mile, do well when they are selling to an existing customer or when they work in an industry that doesn’t require in-depth technical or scientific knowledge. They will work tirelessly, but not necessarily creatively or aggressively, to get the job done.
These sales reps develop leads, qualify their prospects by using standard criteria, and invest the time needed to close the deal. Relationship builders are quick to serve customers, but that may not always fit the needs of a company looking to quickly grow sales.
Types of Sales Candidate Assessments
To find the best fit between a prospective employee and the open sales position, use customized assessments. To begin, recruiters should work with the assessment provider, such as TeamTrait, to review the job description. With a customized job description, the assessments will be scored to match what the recruiter is looking for in terms of skills and behavioral traits.
Challengers and the New B2B Selling Environment
The B2B selling environment has been changing quickly. Research shows that over 60% of buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. They don’t necessarily appreciate what a relationship builder can bring to them.
Today's prospects are accustomed to researching solutions to their problems. They check out online resources to educate themselves. Only when they have built a list of potential solutions do they reach out to a solution provider. They’ve also researched specific sellers in advance, according to our B2B BuyerSCAN findings.
These prospects raise the bar for sellers. Specifically, sales managers need high performers. According to Dixon and Adamson, 54% of high performers have the Challenger profile.
Traditionally, Challengers have used three T’s of selling. In doing so, they deliver sales with solid profits. How do Challengers fit into the new world of B2B buying? How can you use a sales candidate assessment to identify them?
What Challengers Do Differently
Challengers will not spend time building relationships. Back in the day, a relationship builder was quick to serve customers, but that is not always the most profitable sales strategy.
Dixon and Adamson explain that Challengers possess three qualities. They:
- “teach for differentiation”
- “tailor the message for resonance”
- “take control”
What exactly do these qualities encompass?
Teaching
In the teaching aspect, Challenger reps must be coached and educated about the issues a business owner who operates in a specific industry vertical faces on a regular basis. For example, a company that’s selling taxi services to businesses may be struggling to compete against the likes of Uber and Lyft.
A Challenger rep will speak intelligently about what’s happening in the industry and ask the owner if they’ve heard about the latest developments. The "teaching" process doesn’t end there. The rep usually will explain how the prospect can change an aspect of their business to better compete.
Tailoring
When it’s time to "tailor" their message, the rep will already know what the prospect believes is the most important factor in the buying decision. In a highly complex selling environment, the rep uses discovery skills to learn what each member on the buying team values. Challenger reps speak to the concerns of each of those individuals, and they move the prospect down the sales funnel.
Taking Control
The final quality of the Challenger rep may be the most difficult to perform successfully: taking control. The most successful Challengers sense how far they can push a prospect during negotiations and closing. This part of the selling process is particularly treacherous.
After all, nearly 32% of business owners who participated in SalesFuel’s B2B BuyerSCAN survey reported that the top behavior they disliked from sales reps is being repeatedly pushed to make a purchase before they’re ready.
In the world of solution selling, the Challenger rep will avoid giving price discounts and will instead offer other valued features. They’ll encourage the prospect to consider the rapid changes in the marketplace as a way to speed up the sales process without bullying.
Challenger reps can be a valuable asset to any organization. To find these individuals, hiring managers should use a challenger assessment.
How to Evaluate Sales Candidates Effectively
Recruiters must use several tools to effectively evaluate sales candidates. They typically review the resume to determine whether the candidate meets the required qualifications. As part of the sales candidate testing, they should require the top applicants to take behavioral assessments. These assessments will score all candidates using the standard questions. Personality traits, workplace behavior and motivation are a few of the details that the assessments evaluate. Finally, recruiters should interview the top candidates.
Sales Candidate Assessment vs. Traditional Interviews (Add Table)
| Sales Candidate Assessment | Traditional Interview |
| Consistent information collected from all candidates | Information collected may vary between candidates |
| Objective | Subjective |
| Scores provided for a candidate’s fit for type of sales position | Interviewer may be influenced by candidate’s claims |
| May measure traits like assertiveness and confidence | Relies on candidate’s claims about sales strengths |
Assess Sales Candidates
Not all sales positions must be filled with Challenger reps. But when you’re looking for this kind of rep, screen for the right workplace behavior. A good sales candidate assessment, like TeamTrait, will include questions that reveal an individual’s natural tendencies for sales aptitude and the type of sales position they are best suited for.
Conclusion
On the topic of assessments for hiring sales managers, the question is no longer “if”; it’s “when.” Pre-hire sales candidate testing is mandatory for today’s businesses. With the cost of a bad B2B sales hire now exceeding $177,000, businesses must use salesperson assessments. The assessment results yield objective scores that help recruiters and sales managers find the best candidate for the job.
Image by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.
Why are sales candidate assessments important?
Sales candidate assessments are important because they can measure whether a candidate has the skills and personal traits to be a good fit for an open sales position. These assessments also score candidates on how well they match with specific types of sales positions and sales cultures.
What is a Challenger sales assessment?
A Challenger sales assessment is a customized pre-hire assessment designed to screen candidates who will excel in the Challenger selling style. This selling style involves teaching, tailoring and taking control in a sales situation to convince the buyer that they need to purchase what is being sold.
What should a salesperson assessment measure?
A salesperson assessment should measure core sales skills such as discovery, communication, negotiating, and closing deals. These assessments should also measure soft skills such as how well they listen, whether they are empathic, and if they will fit well with the manager and other team members.
How do you evaluate sales candidates?
To evaluate sales candidates in a hiring scenario, recruiters should use a combination of resume data, interviews and salesperson or behavioral assessments. These information sources give a balanced view of each candidate, and the assessment data makes it easier to compare scores for sales skills and likely workplace behavior.
Are assessments useful for hiring sales managers?
Assessments are extremely useful for hiring sales managers. They remove bias from the hiring process. The objective results help business owners and leaders find the candidate with the right fit for managing the sales department.
