sales assessment
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Choose Which of These Two Assessments are More Predictive of Sales Success
- February 10, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This week, a candidate for a sales position sent along his Predictive Index (PI) assessment so that we could compare it to his sales assessment from Objective Management Group (OMG). Most people have little sense as to how assessments compare to each other – and even more have experience only with personality and behavioral styles assessments. I was able to extract the dashboard from OMG’s 21 page sales-specific assessment, and the graphics and selling summary from the 3-page Predictive Index behavioral styles assessment. You might find the comparison interesting!
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Sales Coaching and the Challenges of Different Types of Salespeople
- February 8, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recently a reader directed me to a video on the Harvard Business Review site. They rarely have accurate, relevant sales-specific information there, so I clicked over with great anticipation.
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Five Great Lessons That Apply to Every Company That Hires Salespeople
- November 2, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I turned sixty years old today and everyone is asking me how it feels to be sixty. To be honest, it feels exactly the same as it felt to be fifty-nine – which is essentially the same as it felt to be 40. Nothing has changed. And speaking of nothing changing, nothing has changed over at BigBrains where two updates have come my way. The first came from someone who knows the real identity of BigBrains and suggested that I refer to them as ShitForBrains instead. She must have met them!
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Part 4 – The Real Story Behind the Sales Selection Fiasco
- October 21, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This week we discovered a statistical difference between those salespeople who currently work for a company whose sales force was evaluated, and those sales candidates who were applying for sales positions.
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Is Benchmarking or Perfect Fit Analysis More Predictive for Selecting Great Salespeople?
- October 7, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I will actually show you the difference between benchmarking and the Perfect Fit Analysis that we use as proof to clients and to customize Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments.
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Sales Selection Case History – The Fix for This Insanity Works 99% of the Time
- October 2, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you had a crystal ball to predict whether or not your next sales candidate would succeed in a difficult selling role at your company, wouldn’t you want to use it? Heck, you would want to look into that thing even if it wasn’t a difficult selling role. But what if you were recruiting kids right out of college? What would you do then? Would you just recruit a whole bunch of kids and keep the ones who didn’t quit? Would you hire three times more than you needed and just keep the ones who were successful? Would you just hire anyone who looked and sounded good and go from there? What if you could use the crystal ball? Could that even work with college grads? Recently, we had an opportunity to study and answer that very question and the results will surprise you!
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The Science of Sales Selection vs. the Marketing of Modern Selling
- August 14, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I started with more than 100 sales-specific findings and narrowed them down to the 18 findings and scores that clearly differentiated their tops from their bottoms. A mistake made by behavioral scientists and sellers of personality and behavioral styles assessments is that they only look at top performers and identify common traits. They fail to realize that the bottom performers have the same personality traits and behavioral styles as the top performers and none of those traits or styles are predictive of sales performance.
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Trust and Integrity in Selling May Not Be What You Think
- July 28, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
as far as salespeople go, the holy grail is the salesperson who is both likable and has high integrity. I believe there are significantly more salespeople in this sales category than the other three categories combined. This may surprise people who are not in the sales professions because while salespeople constantly fight the stereotype of the snake oil salesperson, more often than not, it’s the prospects who lack integrity. They withhold information, bluff, play games, mislead salespeople and outright lie.
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Bugged by the Difference Between Great and Lousy Salespeople
- July 21, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, I noticed a large, furry, dead bug on the hood of my car. It seemed to be attached to the outer lip of the hood – like the edge of a cliff – right where the hood drops down to the grill. I got out of the car to remove the chunk of dead fur and I was shocked to see how wrong I was. It was dead all right, and it was furry. I’m not a tall person, so I wasn’t sitting high enough in the car to notice the distance between the bug and the lip of the hood, but my estimate was off by more than 2 feet! What I thought I saw was completely different from reality.
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How to Finally Get Sales Selection Right
- June 16, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Before I share some crucial sales selection tips, I need to begin with some baseball. My apologies to all of my cricket and soccer obsessed readers.
My team, the Boston Red Sox, just lost their seventh consecutive game. They are in last place and heading for their third last place finish in the past four years. The outlier year was 2013, when they won the World Series. I think there was far less talent on that championship team than on this year’s edition, but the 2013 team had a rallying cry (Boston Strong) and everyone overachieved. You can’t count on everyone overachieving each year, so in lieu of that, as Jim Collins would say, you must have the right people in the right seats.