If you’re a leader in business-to-business (B2B) sales, it’s really important to know how to pick the right people for your sales team. Choosing someone who doesn’t fit well or doesn’t have the right skills can cause a lot of trouble for your company.
When you hire someone who isn’t right for the job, it can cost a lot of money. But it’s not just about money. A bad hire can make the rest of the team feel down, hurt your relationships with customers, and give your company a bad name. If you check carefully to see if someone fits in with the company’s culture and has the skills needed before you hire them, you can avoid these problems.
Every time you hire a new salesperson, it costs money. If they don’t work out, you lose the money you spent on them. This includes the time people at your company spent hiring them, the time when they weren’t selling anything yet, the money spent on training that didn’t help, the sales that didn’t happen, and the cost of finding someone new for the job.
If a salesperson doesn’t have the key skills for selling, like finding new customers, giving presentations, or closing deals, they won’t be able to help the company make more money—at least not right away. They’ll need more time and training to get better.
If they don’t get better, you might miss out on sales, and they might not meet their sales goals. Customers might not have a good time talking to a salesperson who isn’t skilled. And if they don’t learn what they need to, you might have to find someone else for the job, which means starting the hiring process all over again.
If someone doesn’t fit well with the company’s culture, they might not feel very excited or motivated, and they might not do their best work. If they don’t share the same values or work in the same way as their teammates, it can cause problems and make the team feel unhappy. This could even hurt your relationships with customers. And if they’re not happy, they might leave, which means you’ll have to find someone new again.
Using the Brooks Talent Index™, you can learn what makes someone good at sales.
Why It’s Good to Check Sales Skills Before Hiring
There are lots of good things that come from checking the sales skills of people before you hire them and also the people who are already on your team.
When you check someone’s sales skills before hiring them, you can be fair and look at their strengths, weaknesses, what motivates them, and how they behave to see if they’re a really good fit for a sales job. This can help you avoid hiring the wrong person.
Seeing where someone needs to get better can help you make a plan just for them that will help them build the skills they need.
Knowing how someone behaves, what motivates them, and how they think can help you figure out what kind of sales job, area, products, and customers would be best for them based on what they’re good at.
Checking your sales team’s skills gives you real facts that can help you make better choices about saying “good job,” coaching, promoting, and paying them.
When you have the right people in the right jobs and help them get better in areas they need to, you can make your sales team do the best work they can and bring in more money.
Assessments can also help you find salespeople with a lot of potential who could become leaders, based on things like how well they’re motivated, their skills, and how they sell.
Overall, using hiring assessments to check sales talent gives you a clear, fact-based way to hire, coach, and help salespeople become the best they can be. This can lead to customers having better experiences, the company making more money, and keeping good talent around.
There are many good sales skills assessments that can help sales leaders understand how a salesperson behaves, what motivates them, and what they’re good at.
Different Types of Sales Assessments and Hiring Tips
The DISC assessment looks at different ways of behaving (D for Dominance, I for Influence, S for Steadiness, C for Compliance) and how they can change the way someone sells. Salespeople can learn about their own style and how to talk to customers in a way that they like.
Sales leaders can use this information to help them coach better, talk better, and give feedback that really helps.
Hiring Tip: Try to find people with a mix of styles. The best salespeople often have a lot of I and D traits, which help them connect with people and get things done.
This tool looks at what motivates someone to act, like wanting to learn, being useful, liking their surroundings, helping others, having power, and needing structure. Find out what makes each salesperson excited.
Sales leaders can use this knowledge to match jobs, pay, and coaching to what motivates the candidate, which can make them work harder and do better.
Hiring Tip: Make sure someone’s motivators fit with what the sales job and company culture need.
This test shows the top skills out of 25 that a person has and how good they are at them. Sales leaders can use this test to find strengths and areas that need improvement, and focus coaching to manage and help salespeople get better.
Hiring Tip: Use what you learn about someone’s skills to decide where they should work, what they should sell, and who they should sell to.
This test checks how well someone can process information, solve problems, and make decisions. It helps salespeople understand themselves and the world around them better. The best salespeople often can handle complex sales because they can think well.
Hiring Tip: Figure out what new hires need to learn and what jobs and tasks they’d be best at.
The Brooks Group’s special IMPACT Selling Skills Index® gives a clear look at important sales skills like finding new customers, understanding needs, presenting, and negotiating.
Sales leaders can use the index to see how good someone is at these skills and find areas where they need to get better so they can focus their coaching and development plans.
Hiring Tip: Check the sales skills of new people and see how strong your current sales team is.
When you know how each salesperson behaves, what motivates them, how they think, and what they’re good at, you can do a better job of hiring, training, and coaching both now and in the future.
Whether you use one test or a whole bunch of assessments to avoid hiring the wrong person, you’ll learn things that will help you build and manage better teams, predict who will do well in sales, hire smarter people, and keep your sales team from changing too much.
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