You Want What, Sales Team Improvement?
Sales team improvement is a challenge when you are not sure where to begin.
Are your salespeople simply suffering from a lack of training? Do personality conflicts exist within the team, which create a toxic environment? Is your compensation plan out of alignment with the behavior you are trying to drive? Or is everyone completely useless and incompetent — and out to get you personally?
All of the above might be factors in your organization (besides the last one I hope), but there is one factor which accounts for 50 percent of sales success, and should therefore be considered first.
That factor is natural aptitude.
The quickest way to improve your sales team
The first step in improving a sales team begins at recruitment. Smart companies use aptitude tests for sales team improvement at this stage. These tests help wean out candidates who are incompetent or contain personality characteristics that might not be a good match for the team.
The fastest way to improve your sales team is with better people, and aptitude tests lead the way in finding them. Start here.
And once you are done testing the new recruits, test your existing staff as well.
Build up the skills
Now that you have the right people in the right seats on the bus, the next step in sales team improvement is to evaluate the effectiveness of your sales training programs.
Here are the features of the best ones:
- Good balance of theory and practical application
- Include role playing exercises
- Adaptable to your specific industry
- Include closing techniques as well as handling objections
- Incorporate new technology, such as social media and mobile devices
- High success rate in your industry as evidenced by testimonials and word-of-mouth
- The training company itself is doing well (they practice what they preach)
When you use aptitude tests to filter your hires, the ROI of your training expenses will be much greater than if you do not, because you will not waste precious time and money on incompetent people.
Use the Craft Personality Questionnaire
At Asher Strategies, we use the Craft Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) to make an immediate positive impact for our clients.
The way the CPQ improves businesses includes:
- Filters the duds from potential hires
- Improves training ROI
- Highlight weaknesses for focused coaching purposes
- Measures improvement and personal growth with coaching
- Improves the composition and balance of sales teams
There are other aptitude assessments out there, including a revamped version of the CPQ. We choose to stick with the original because it has been proven through numerous correlation studies to predict sales success or failure — and that is what we are interested in: REAL WORLD RESULTS.
If you would like to see the correlation studies for yourself, or any other metrics which prove the efficacy of the CPQ in real-life companies like your own, please drop us a line via email or phone call. We’d love to set up a conference call with your leadership to explore how you can implement the CPQ in the most cost-effective, efficient manne
