COMMENTS
Hiring salespeople - experienced or now - is difficult. That's because it's most important to find someone with the right fit for the job, as opposed to someone who's simply performed that job before. Here's a video about what to look for when hiring a new salesperson:
http://clearfit.com/howtohiresalescloser.php
Ben, since you went and placed a video ad on my Blog promoting your assessment, rather than deleting your comment, I've simply placed a link to a webinar that's a bit more thoughtful, comprehensive and backed up by science.
How Not to Screw Up Your Sales Hiring in 2010 Ben's assessment keys in on 5 personality traits and as you will learn reading
this series of articles, the lousy salespeople have those traits too. Personality traits are simply not predictive of sales success.
Hi Dave,
I'm sorry you felt that the video was an ad. The video does have our branding on it, like all free content that we produce, but we didn't pitch our product.
Everyone has those sales traits; the best salespeople just have them to a greater degree than anyone else. It's *how* you measure these traits that makes the difference.
It's been proven time and again, via concurrent validation, EEO and OFCCP oversight that personality attributes predict employment success in sales roles, when you are using the *right* assessment. When you are using an assessment that is not valid (like many people do), it is not predictive. However, using a valid and reliable normative psychometric tool that's customized around your own top sales performers is perhaps the most valid way to predict future sales success in a potential candidate.
Ben, I'm sorry if my comment was too vague for you to get my point.
It wouldn't be appropriate for me to visit your assessment company's blog and start posting links to my promotional videos, podcasts and articles. I'll keep those links right here, where I won't piss anyone off. But if you believe differently and you think it is appropriate, I'd be happy to have someone litter your comment boxes with links back to Objective Management Group and this blog.
As for your claim that "its been proven time and again" you point out that's it's been proven by concurrent validation. That form of validation is lame when it comes to salespeople and sales success. The only validation that holds any weight when it comes to salespeople and sales performance is Predictive Validity and there isn't an assessment on planet Earth that is more predictive than OMG's.
You also mention "customized around your own top sales performers". Since most companies aren't able to measure that by any means other than revenue, they usually pick the wrong ones. In many more cases, their so-called top performers are only tops at their company and when compared with the sales population at large would be considered weak. So what good does it do to go find salespeople who have the same personality traits as the mediocre salespeople they are being compared with? Especially when personality traits aren't predictive of sales success?
This underscores the major errors companies are making when they use Personality Tests for hiring whether it be for sales or any other function for that matter. I work with the MBTI, clearly the best in class for this type of work and the authors make it abundantly clear, as they have done for 20+ years that it should never never be used for recruitment purposes,yet companies continue to do that.MBTI states that it does not measure skills, intelligence, ability, competence etc. The MBTI is good at what it does i.e. suggests that people with a certain personality type prefer to behave in certain ways in varying circumstances.It ia alarming that so many HR practitioners have little or no clue to enquire about reliability and validity of the data that supposedly supports the instrument they are planing to use with potentially catastophic results.I read of an Australian company thta used DISC to restructure it's sales force.