Understanding the Sales Force

Something's Gotta Give

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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

Their biggest problem is that they are in the one-call close - high end time share - and the majority of the salespeople they have been hiring are ineffective in this arena. While your company may not have the challenge of the one-call close, you likely have some challenge with which your salespeople struggle. Most companies are not very effective at identifying their biggest challenge and even when they do, they generally don't know how to determine if their sales candidates can handle the challenge that caused many so before them to fail. Clearly, the two biggest reasons for failure are the inability to identify what a salesperson must be able to do; and the inability to predict whether a candidate will do what you need.

If you can figure out the first part, what they must be able to do to succeed, there is an assessment that will help with the second part - whether they will (not can) do it. Let's take the case of the time share scenario I discussed above. Objective Management Group's Express Screen, a sales specific pre-employment assessment, has the unique ability to predict whether a sales candidate will succeed in a high-paying, commission sales, one-call close business - with 95% accuracy. It will accurately predict whether candidates will succeed in your business too!

Back to the time share scenario. If all of the new salespeople succeed, there is a balanced work load and no pressure on just a few salespeople to get the job done, how many salespeople do you think would burn-out?

Most sales personnel problems can be solved by making more effective hiring decisions; but the decisions are only as good as the process leading up to the decision. Wrong candidates in nets you the wrong candidates on whom to base a decision. A good hiring proces will be enhanced when you correctly use an effective assessment, one built, not adapted, for sales to provide relevent intelligence and recommendations about your candidates.

Posted by Dave Kurlan on Mon, May 09, 2005 @ 10:40 PM