Top 10 Reasons Not to Test Your Sales Candidates

  • October 5, 2020
  • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
  • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

Testing.  Testing 1234.  Testing.  Check, check, check. How do I sound?  Testing 12345.

Anyone who has conducted or listened to a sound check should be familiar with those words.  More testing = better audio.

If you’re feeling ill, get tested.  That was the mantra for COVID-19.  But lots of people were getting tested.  In the USA, 345 out of every 1,000 people had been tested as of the end of September 2020.

Those aren’t the only two examples of testing being an obvious no-brainer.  Doctors test our vital signs – temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, blood and for some, EKG, and prostrate.  More thorough testing = more healthy.

Testing is not only normal, it’s expected.

So why in the world is it so difficult to get Sales Leaders and HR professionals to test sales candidates?

We hear everything, including this week’s top 10 reasons for not assessing:

  • “I hire using my gut feel”
  • “HR is not comfortable using assessments”
  • “We don’t want to be bound by the recommendation”
  • “We don’t want to spend the money”
  • “We don’t want to change our hiring process”
  • “We don’t want to inconvenience our recruiters”
  • “What if I get a false positive?”
  • “Legal won’t go for it”.
  • “Turnover is baked into our process”. Consider this internal note from today: “[He] has a potential client who hires 150 reps/week with 300% turnover! Wanted to know how to price that 7,000 hire license. I suggested we take a different approach and determine the real cause of the turnover problem and then look at how many they really need to hire.”  Anytime I read that turnover is greater than 100%, that’s an example of baked-in turnover.
  • We don’t believe in assessments”. Consider this email I received today: “Nice to e-meet you.  [He] sings [OMG’s] praises, but up front you should know that I have always been somewhat skeptical of Myers Briggs or personality profiling type exercises, so I’m the one you have to convince.”  Bad experiences with assessments that weren’t designed for sales creates biases.

These excuses are total BS.  Consider the following 4 facts:

  • Average sales turnover is now 34% and in some industries and companies it is much higher.  source
  • The average cost of sales turnover is 1.5 times compensation.  If average sales compensation is $95,000 that’s a cost of $142,000.  source.
  • Fewer than 50% of salespeople will hit quota this year.  Do you think that’s because of the pandemic?  Think again.  It’s been that way for years!  source
  • Average ramp-up time is 5 months.  This varies wildly across industries but here’s a formula to calculate what yours should be:  Length of Learning Curve + Length of Sales Cycle + 30 Days to transition.  If you have a six month sales cycle and it takes 3 months before a salesperson can have an intelligent conversation with a prospect, the ramp-up time – the time it takes for business to begin closing – is 10 months!

Let’s be conservative and say that for every ten salespeople, the average company turns over 3 per year at $142,000 each.  The $426,000 cost is nothing compared to these other three problems:

  1. The distraction of having to hire 3 more salespeople
  2. The disruption in the territory or vertical,
  3. The lost opportunity of having an under-performer representing you.

Consider 8 more facts:

  1. Companies that use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales candidate assessments have average turnover rates of just 8%.  That’s 425% better than average.
  2. Companies that use Objective Management Group’s sales candidate assessments have quota attainment of 88%.  That’s 205% better than average.
  3. When companies hire salespeople that were not recommended by OMG, 75% of them fail within 6 months.
  4. When companies hire (after doing their due diligence) salespeople that were recommended 92% rise to the top half of the company’s sales force
  5. OMG has been voted the Top Sales Assessment Tool in the World for 9 consecutive years
  6. OMG is customizable, incredibly accurate and predictive of sales success right down to the sales role for which you are hiring
  7. OMG has assessed 2,306,313 salespeople in – companies.
  8. OMG lowers recruiting costs and saves time – it’s not expensive.  Depending on the number of hires and the size of the candidate pool, assessments could cost as little as $8 each!

You would think that these 8 facts would thoroughly and completely rule over the top 10 reasons for not assessing. But every minute of the day, seven days a week they don’t.  People are stubborn. They don’t know what they don’t know while believing that they know everything.

This is my call to action.   Grab a sample.  Try it for free.  Register to begin using OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessments.

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