Sales Team Hiring Assessments

Stop recruiting blindly; discover top salespeople with certainty through sales hiring assessments

The search for top salespeople can be an endless and expensive activity for businesses. Well-meaning sales managers and recruiters often try to fit square pegs into round holes by putting “good workers” or “friendly people” into sales roles without really gauging whether they have a knack for sales in the first place.

Successfully hiring top salespeople today involves a lot more than blind guesses: it requires a deeper knowledge of the applicant in order to put him or her in the best possible position for success.

The way to achieve this is through a sales hiring assessment, such as the Craft Personality Questionnaire.

Sales hiring tests have been around for many decades, but none are as comprehensive in the reporting or as accurate in correlating to sales growth as the CPQ.

Here are a few reasons why we feel this is the best sales hiring assessment for hiring top salespeople:

• Knowledge is power. When a salesperson understands how their personality affects their behavior and performance, it is empowering and can lead to marked improvement. The CPQ provides a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each test taker as it relates to their chosen profession.
• Stretch to Success. The CPQ sales hiring test provides tips to help people “stretch” non-optimum personality-driven behavioral tendencies to better support co-workers, prospects and customers. For example, knowing that some customers need to be nurtured, even though the associate has a low internal “need to nurture“ trait, improves customer satisfaction and employee success because the salesperson simply tries harder to nurture.
• Assemble a balanced team. Every sales organization needs a blend of contrasting personality types — thinkers vs. doers; farmers vs. hunters; dominant vs. caring — because each makes decisions in a fundamentally different way. Assembling a well-balanced team using the CPQ can eliminate blind-spots in the team’s decision making process and allow a company to sell to many different personality types.s
• Give each employee the best chance to succeed. There is an old expression which goes, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” When you put people into the roles where they have the maximum probability of success and personal achievement, rather than jobs they are unsuitable for, you have happier, more productive employees. The CPQ provides insight into personality compatibility for 30 different business roles from outside sales to administrative assistant to customer service representative so you can find the best match.
• Improve training ROI. Many training dollars have been wasted on people who just don’t have the inherent skill needed to make it as salespeople. The CPQ helps you avoid investing in the wrong people, and helps you pick the right ones to train. Furthermore, by identifying what the weak points are, you can target your personal coaching to address those flaws rather than waste time with a blanket coaching approach.
• Made for the real world. The CPQ has been the subject of more than 60 correlation studies which show that, based on real world observations, high sales aptitude scores coincide with strong growth and weak scores coincide with slow growth. You can be sure that if you hire people with high natural aptitude as shown by the CPQ, and you manage and train them correctly, you will experience increased sales.
• Easy to use. Perhaps the most important aspect of the CPQ sales hiring test is how easy it is to both take and interpret. The test is accessible from any desktop browser and composed of 75 questions which take about 20 minutes to half-hour to take. The results are delivered immediately. Trait scores are clearly color-coded and explained, along with coaching recommendations for each one. A busy manager can easily understand the important characteristics of an applicant in a few minutes just by reading the generated reports, without any special training.

Hiring top salespeople does not have to be based on luck or pure intuition. With the CPQ sales hiring assessment, you now have science on your side to help you make the right choices.