Understanding the Sales Force

Just two weeks after beginning to use our Sales Candidate Assessments when we also delivered our proprietary STAR Training, a comprehensive, consistent, effective sales recruiting process, this client was in heaven. Plenty of candidates, a third of them were recommended, and they feel like they’re in control again.

It’s important to assess your candidates but it’s equally important to surround that assessment with a proven, effective process that assures a flow of quality candidates and a successful hand-off to sales management.

The single issue that seems to occur most often is the company which, early on in their use of our sales specific, pre-employment assessment (Express Screen) learns that the lion share of their candidates are not recommended for hiring. For some reason, rather than being thankful for avoiding another hiring mistake, they become angry, at the assessment, for discounting their candidates.

A new sales manager, without the benefit of our insight, could take 8 months to a year to figure out what’s going on and, in all likelihood, still won’t come up with the answers. In most of the companies we evaluate, the managers have been in place for quite some time and don’t have the answers because they aren’t looking in the right places.

There are three more components to this puzzle.

You always know when salespeople aren’t prospecting. Their pipeline becomes stale – not empty mind you, just old. And finally, they aren’t closing enough business. You know it. You may or may not do anything about it. Some managers fire these people. Others ignore it. A few actually know how to provide coaching and motivation in such a way that they can fix the problem. But what happens when you know they’re aren’t getting it done and you aren’t able to say anything or do anything because you’re so uncomfortable with confrontation?