Understanding the Sales Force

Top 5 Reasons Why the OMG Sales Assessment is More Predictive

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

I was asked why Objective Management Group's (OMG) assessments are so much more predictive of sales success and future performance than behavioral styles assessments and personality assessments.  There is more than one answer to this question and I'll try to explain the top 5 answers below:

1. OMG's assessment was created, designed, built and enhanced specifically for sales, while personality and behavioral styles assessments were adapted for sales.  Adapted means that they identified traits/styles from their existing assessments that can impact sales.
2. Traits and Styles from personality assessments and behavioral styles assessments are examined and measured in a social/life context while findings in OMG's Assessments are examined and measured only in a sales context. For example, one of the important findings in OMG's assessment is to what degree a salesperson becomes emotional on a sales call.  Personality and Behavioral Styles assessments measure emotions but it's in the context of emotional stability and the tendency to become frustrated in life.  Many salespeople aren't bothered much by what life throws at them but easily become emotional when a sales call doesn't go the way they planned.  This a good example of why these other assessments often have findings that are contrary to OMG's Assessments.  Other findings common to both OMG's assessment and personality or behavioral styles assessments are Approval, Motivation, Rejection, Listening, Attitude, and Relationships.  As with the emotions example, none of these traits or styles are measured in the context of sales on those other assessments.
3. At OMG we are experts on sales, sales forces, selling, sales process, sales challenges, sales strategy and sales tactics. It's very difficult to measure what you don't understand and it's even more difficult to predict future performance when lacing an inherent understanding of how specific findings impact a sales process that is also being impacted by external sales challenges and expectations.
4. Assessments provide an understanding of an individual's strengths and weaknesses.  Sales Force evaluations help clients identify issues that need to be addressed in the sales organization.  Since clients often ask if we can answer specific questions, our data on nearly 400,000 salespeople helps us answer their questions.  That in turn allows us to continuously enhance our assessments and sales force evaluations to answer more and more relevant questions.  After all, what good is an assessment if it doesn't answer, in plain English, your most important questions about an individual, team, group, division, entity, strategy or process?
5. Our uncanny ability to make an accurate hiring recommendation is based on our knowledge of what it takes to succeed in sales, along with our ability to help clients understand what it takes to succeed in a sales position at their company, selling their products and services, to their market, against their competition, with their pricing strategy.  When we marry OMG's criteria to our client specific criteria, we can identify hirable salespeople who rise to the top half of their sales organization in the first year.  With our ability to measure intangibles that cause some salespeople to experience success more quickly than other good, but late bloomers, we can even identify Ideal hirable candidates.  With our ability to tweak hiring criteria, we can even identify Perfect Hirable candidates.

Did you learn anything from my top 5?
(c) Copyright 2008 Dave Kurlan

Posted by Dave Kurlan on Wed, Oct 01, 2008 @ 05:07 PM