Sales Managers and Leaders: are you 100% happy with the hires you have made in the past 12 months?

Finding and recruiting good people into any position is hard. Hiring consistently great salespeople is particularly challenging - and the sad truth is that despite all the effort we put into the process, it can still go wrong - for reasons that could potentially have been identified in advance.

Hiring mistakes are particularly costly when it comes to salespeople. When it goes wrong, we haven’t just wasted the associated recruitment, wage and overhead costs: we’ve lost the potential revenue that we had been expecting the successful candidate to generate - and we can never get that revenue back.

The standard personality tests used in generic recruitment aren’t very helpful, either. Although they can reveal some aspects of character, they aren’t designed to probe for the specific attributes that make for a successful salesperson, or to uncover specific sales-related attitude or behavioural issues...

Given the costs and consequences of getting it wrong, it’s perhaps surprising that every significant sales hiring process doesn’t already include a structured, evidence-based, and predictive role-specific assessment of every candidate’s attitudes, behaviours and competencies.

Some years ago, keen to break the cycle of less-than-perfect sales recruitment, I searched for assessment tools that could help. It didn’t take long to discard the generic personality tests, and I ultimately came across Objective Management Group’s candidate assessment process.

A sales-specific approach

Not only was OMG's approach sales-specific, it also proved to be highly predictive. Consider this: across thousands of organisations, 92% of candidates who were hired after being recommended by the OMG assessment tool rose to the top half of their new sales force within 12 months, whilst 75% of the candidates who despite not being recommended were nevertheless hired failed within 6 months.

I’ve been using the approach - together with OMG’s evaluation tools for existing salespeople, managers and organisations - ever since with my consulting clients, who tend to be in complex, high-value B2B sales environments where OMG’s 21 testable sales competencies are particularly vital.

Find out more

If any of this resonates, you can download a sample assessment here: https://info.objectivemanagement.com/page/Sample.aspx?DistNum=498. I think you’ll be impressed by the quality of the information, and that you’ll want to learn more.

If you’re determined to start your 2024 sales recruitment round with the strongest possible foundation, we should talk: https://www.inflexion-point.com/book-a-zoom-call.