sales assessment
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Top 5 Keys to Hire Ideal Sales Candidates at Your Company
- September 11, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There’s no time like the present to hire salespeople but your sales recruiting strategy must consider the ever changing ebb and flow of the candidate pool. This article explains the five keys to hiring ideal salespeople for your company and has lots of data to back it up.
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New Data: Is Sales Compensation Aligned With Changing Motivational Needs?
- October 31, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When interviewing sales and sales leadership candidates, similar counter-intuitive discussions occur. Many candidates claim that money isn’t that important because they love sales – until they claim that the base salary isn’t high enough. For others, even though they may not disclose it, the base salary is completely irrelevant as long as the company won’t cap the salesperson’s total earnings. We need to decode the topic of compensation so that we can be sure that both the base salary and the total on-plan earnings are acceptable to candidates.
It is very important to make sense of the hidden and unpredictable compensation responses because many salespeople leave the company after a short time because they don’t believe earnings are equivalent to the compensation that was promised.
It is crucial to understand that salespeople are motivated primarily by one of two motivational styles and unless you wish to hire only one type of salesperson, there must be two compensation plans that should be tailored accordingly. Let’s discuss this.
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The Bob Chronicles – The Difference Between Selling Skills and Effectiveness
- October 12, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today a client asked me to explain the difference between skills and effectiveness. You won’t find the answer by doing a Google search as that search turns up exactly nothing on the subject. This article will discuss the similarity between symptoms/causes and skills/effectiveness. Do you remember Bob, the subject of many articles and my favorite weak salesperson to write about?
Bob strikes again!
I’ve written 10 articles about Bob and everyone says that the Bob series is their favorite.
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Understanding Competency Based Assessments – What Ditch Diggers and Salespeople Have in Common!
- June 24, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: 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.
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Selling and the Need for Speed
- June 8, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salespeople tend to be in a rush to close – before an opportunity is even closable.
Salespeople tend to be in a rush to present – before an opportunity is even qualified. Most salespeople are in such a hurry that they completely skip things like qualifying and discovery. And when salespeople do perform discovery they accept the very first indicator they hear and rush to explain how their product or service addresses that indicator.
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Sales Selection Tools: Do You Get What You Pay For?
- December 9, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: 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).
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A Home Run – How the Right Data Can Help You Hire Your Ideal Salespeople
- July 13, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
From time to time I’ve posted some compelling top/bottom sales team analyses using sales assessment data from Objective Management Group (OMG). From nearly 250 data points in 21 Sales Core Competencies, we identify the specific findings and scores that differentiate a company’s top 3 performers from their bottom 3 non-performers.
There are several reasons for doing this:
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How Gas Grills, Gardening, Masks, and Baseball Mimic Your Sales Team
- May 3, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My project corresponds so well with how many executives approach their sales teams.
They do nothing for years, and then, after growing frustrated with complacency and inability to grow revenue, finally decide to make changes and rebuild their sales teams.
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My Prediction – What’s in Store for Sales Teams in 2021?
- January 8, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When I made my predictions for 2020 I’m pretty sure I didn’t predict a pandemic. Making predictions isn’t easy.
In the US, sales teams are coming off three robust years of sales growth and while revenue was up during that time, the percentage of salespeople hitting quotas was not. That means the top 20% were not only carrying the load, they carried more of the load.
That dynamic growth hit an iron barrier last spring when COVID became the unexpected economic disrupter, but the second half comeback was quite impressive. What does 2021 have in store for those of us in the sales world? In the US, how will Democrat control of all three branches of government affect sales and selling? And how long before that kicks in?
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Found! The Caliper vs OMG Comparison: Which Sales Candidate Assessment is More Predictive?
- December 1, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Almost nine years in the making, this article compares OMG with Caliper and I did update it so that the information on both assessments is current.
I compared two assessments for the same candidate: one from Objective Management Group (OMG) and one from Caliper. Not being one to pass up opportunities like this, I conducted another comparison where OMG recommended this person for the role and Caliper did not.
