CPQ Sales Assessment – Build the Perfect Sales Team

Discover the best-in-class tool for selecting top salespeople

Everything in business depends on putting the right people into the right roles. Too often, sales managers and executives hire salespeople by the seat of their pants or rely on opinions, resulting in costly hiring mistakes.

The CPQ Sales Assessment is a proven tool in the search for the best salespeople which helps eliminate these mistakes. It has been administered over 1 million times, and correlation studies prove that high scores on the CPQ are predictors of future sales success.

The assessment itself uses a series of 75 multiple-choice questions to pull a person’s scores, on a scale of 1-100, for each one of the Eight Basic Personality Traits:

• Goal Orientation
• Need for Control
• Social Confidence
• Social Drive
• Detail Orientation
• Good Impression
• Need to Nurture
• Skepticism

These eight scores are then overlaid on an easy-to-read, color-coded chart that highlights specific ranges within each trait where success was found most often for the position being tested.

 

For example: 

For an Outside Sales Hunter position the range for success for the Goal Orientation trait, based on historical data, was found to be between 60 and 90 percent. If a person honestly scores within this range for Goal Orientation, research has demonstrated the person should be more successful as an outside salesperson than someone who scores out of range.

Each position will have different ranges for success, but the participant’s eight trait scores will not change. This allows a manager to find the position (from around 30) where the majority of a candidate’s scores match the ideal ranges, and place them where they are most likely to succeed.

The Most Important Factor of Sales Success

Salespeople are a lot like athletes. The more training they get, the better they perform. And just like training an athletic person will produce better results for a team than training someone naturally clumsy and slow, training a natural born salesperson will lead to greater revenue than if you trained someone without sales aptitude.

In fact, it has been determined that the single most important factor in sales success, which trumps product knowledge and even motivation, is natural ability.

It is the CPQ which exposes whether a candidate possesses this natural ability or not — reliably and repeatedly.

Other benefits:

• Standardized test eliminates bias and is legally defensible as a selection tool in compliance with several federal laws
• Reports are easily understandable and free of overly technical jargon
• Setting up an account takes less than 5 minutes
• The assessment can be completed in 20 to 30 minutes from any Internet-connected computer
• Results available online immediately
• Summary page provides high-level overview, or managers can use in-depth reports for coaching purposes
• Assesses compatibility for up to 30 sales, managerial, and customer-facing job roles
• Accuracy/Validity score for each applicant provides managers with an indication of how open, frank, and self-critical the candidate was in taking the CPQ, detecting those trying to “game” the system
• Follow-up questions provided to cross-verify results

Each poor hire can cost you dearly in the form of onboarding costs, training, and lost opportunity. Avoid the risk of investing time and money in the wrong people by testing each applicant to discover what makes them tick with the CPQ…

…and build the perfect sales team for your business in the process.