Sales Assessments Compared
-
Biased Polls and Poor Sales Questions: 83% of Salespeople Fail at This
- January 29, 2026
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Best Top 10 Lists, Politics and Sales, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
New OMG data reveals only 17% of salespeople are strong in Consultative Selling—especially at asking great, tough questions. See how biased poll questions mirror weak sales probes, and why specific competitor-weakness questions win more deals. Percentile breakdowns + fixes inside.
-
Let the Sales Conversation Wander: Evolving Chats Unlock Powerful Sales Discovery
- November 24, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Music and Sales, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
When Monday morning hit and I had zero article ideas queued up—first time in 20 years, post-surgery aside—I panicked a bit. Then, cruising in the car with Beatles tunes blasting, I pinged Grok with a wild card: “How many songs did Lennon and McCartney write?” What unfolded was a total detour: We tallied their 1,200+ jams, stacked ’em against my 2k sales rants, dove into Dolly Parton’s marathon, Nutcracker team-sync lessons, Eagles live magic over studio polish… and boom, this post was born. No script, just flow. And that’s the secret sauce for killer sales discovery too—ditch the grocery-list questions, let the chat evolve, and uncover those hidden “must-haves” that seal deals. Data from OMG? Only 27% of reps nail qualifying, but the pros? They’re 4x more likely to crush quotas. Here’s how to jam like a pro.
-
What CEOs Are Missing In Their Attempts to Grow Revenue
- June 21, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
CEOs are chasing AI, M&A, and fancy tools to grow revenue in 2025, but they’re missing the real game-changer: their salespeople. While they search for big-picture fixes, the fastest way to crush revenue goals is right in front of them—training reps to close more deals. Our latest blog dives into why developing your sales team is the secret weapon you’re ignoring and how to make it happen. Read it now!
-
Why You Should Never Use Your Gut to Hire Salespeople
- September 15, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
Your gut is nothing more than your feelings and when you allow feelings to influence your decisions, you make bad decisions.
The same should apply to hiring salespeople except, for some reason, Sales Managers, Sales Leaders and Human Resource professionals believe their gut does tell them when they have a salesperson who is close to perfect for their team.
-
DO ASSESSMENTS MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE SALES ORGANIZATION?
- August 8, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
Asking if assessments make a difference in sales is an important question because if they don’t, then companies shouldn’t waste their money and if they do, every company should be following suit.
But if you ask this question to the executives at 100 companies the results will look something like this:
-
Top Recommended Personality Assessments for Sales
- January 9, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
My Chrome home page often displays articles that Google thinks I might be interested in. Red Sox, Patriots, politics, software applications, gadgets, and for the first time, sales assessments! I thought, “Is this for real?”
-
Can Malcom Gladwell Explain the Sales Hiring Problem?
- January 4, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Books, Movies, Theater and Television, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
For the sales leaders who claim they trust their gut, this book and its many examples demonstrates that there is no such thing as accurate gut instinct. Like a coin flip, you’ll be right half the time. So what can companies do to improve on these odds? Assessments.
Consider these statistics from several sources:
-
Is 28 Years Long Enough for a Sales Assessment Trial ?
- September 19, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
Isn’t 28 years long enough for us to prove ourselves?
Clearly OMG is not for everyone. Companies that sell at the lowest price, companies that are the brand leaders, and companies that have a transactional sale don’t need to hire good salespeople because their salespeople are order-takers. But what about everyone else?
After consistently proving its legendary predictive accuracy making it a no-brainer to use OMG, there are five possible reasons why companies didn’t use OMG to assess their sales candidates over the past 28 years:
-
Understanding Competency Based Assessments – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!
- June 24, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
As an example, let’s say you were seeking to hire a ditch digger. While you must identify someone who is strong, can use tools and dig holes, the width and depth of the hole, as well as the difficulty of the digging is more important. Will this individual dig in sand, screened loom, compacted soil, clay, gravel, or rock? If an assessment, even one that was specific to ditch-digging, only looked at the tools they had available and their ability to dig in general, it would not necessarily identify someone who could dig monumentally huge holes in soil with large rocks.
It’s the same with a sales assessment.
-
Sales Selection Tools: Do You Get What You Pay For?
- December 9, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
If you have used Indeed to hire salespeople, they will offer to have your candidates take a free sales assessment. Doesn’t that sound great? It is great if the assessment is helpful but it happens to be a useless piece of crap. Why would anyone think, for even a moment, that there is any value in their lame, assessment-in-name-only test?
In this article we’ll explore how Indeed’s sales assessment compares to the gold standard in sales candidate assessments from Objective Management Group (OMG).
