A Quick Look on Digital Assessments For Sales Competencies
Digital Assessments For Sales Competencies
Digitalization has no doubt brought various kinds of evolutionary changes in traditional work culture. The requirement of well-aligned sales competency has significantly elevated for an employee to be considered responsible for the role. The cognitive, behavioural, and emotional aspect of a candidate is assessed in a specific and overall manner through assessments that are easy to avail and interesting to attend.
This is because the growth of an organization is followed by excellent teamwork, creative production, and most importantly active participation. According to Gallup, highly engaged employees help in reducing the rate of absenteeism and increasing customer ratings to 10% and 20% of the sales. While looking out for consistent employees, the core competencies in sales are highly concerned.
However, some studies made by Alan Benson, Simon Board, and Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn in 2019 show that hiring into an industry might be experiencing unintentional or intentional discrimination by the managers due to the tendency of favouring the same race candidates.
Furthermore, survey data from 251 salespeople results showed that the analytical skills of salespeople directly or indirectly affect sales performance in various trading situations.
Therefore, the recruitment team of an organization must be equipped enough while choosing the individuals based on sales competencies. Traditionally, the recruitment team verbally evaluates the potential employees and observes their level of experience and fluency abstractly. Hence, it is high time for the managers to switch their hiring procedures according to Gen-Z expectations.
Problems With Traditional Hiring Procedure
Doesn’t Evaluate The Performance Aspect
Traditional hiring practices limit the interviewers to assess the complete profile of the candidate. In the case of salespeople, role-related skills such as technical awareness, product awareness, rapport building, reporting, and insight into the industry are more important than previous roles played by the candidate. The sales competencies that affect the performance of the candidates are not thoroughly assessed in one-to-one employee-employer interaction.
Involves Recruiter’s Biases
The final evaluation is dependent on the first impression of the candidate. This might encourage various biases, be it intentional or unintentional. The selection of the candidates is done based on the memory of the interviewer, which is not quite reliable. Also, the interviewers are not trained properly due to which avoidance of personal bias can not be facilitated.
Interviews Don’t Cover Complete Candidate Personality
The interviews earlier constituted one-to-one interaction and written papers. It did not assess the behavioural and cognitive aspects of the candidate. Also, the personality of candidates was evaluated based on first impressions. The traditional interviews lacked in determining which candidates are consistent and devoted based on sales competencies.
Time-Consuming
The process of evaluation consumed time with no effective results. Often, the frustration of getting done with the long interviews affects the thorough evaluation of potential salespeople. Also, traditional interviewing did not cover soft skills such as initiative-taking, learning, and communicating which are more important than qualification.
Not Reliable
The language barrier makes written assessments difficult for the salespeople. There are no records of ratings, which means the evaluation is not empirical. The candidates give up on the lengthy assessments before completing even halfway through them. The validity of traditional interviews has therefore expired and it doesn’t attract enough Gen-Z candidates.
Determining the Best For Your Organization
To access the core competencies in sales, you must have the right tools to help. Choosing the best assessments for your organizational needs requires you to sort a few things beforehand. The employee quality required for the job posts, qualifications, level of technical knowledge, and personality preferences. This will help you choose your candidate for different employment sectors. Furthermore, it will help you maintain the right interaction and enthusiastic association with them.
Here are a few easy steps to follow in bringing sales core competencies to utility;
- Customize your tool preference according to your needs
- While choosing from a bunch, ensure that the assessments are validated
- Demand a sample report to the organization that structures your assessment
- Protect your time and resource through proper API integration
- Make your interface attractive and fun to attend for the candidates’
Competencies Assessed By PMaps Psychometrics
There are a few critical sales competencies or qualities a salesperson is expected to possess as an ideal candidate to be distinguished from the rest by maintaining high productivity. Through the right interaction and assignment of duty, the individuals gradually develop to become professionally competent.
This refers to practical soft skill development such as colleague relationship building, customer interactivity, engagement, and goal setting. In the case of commerce and trade-based careers, the competency demands are specific and goal-driven. Here are some of the must-have competencies to foster. PMaps assessment measures these competencies to produce a reliable and accurate candidate analysis report.
Perspective Taking
It is very important for the salespeople to outline their goals and form perspectives regarding the customer before they jump into the fieldwork. The assessments that measure this trait concentrate majorly on the aspect of understanding and interpreting realistic situations with the clients. Non-verbal signals of the customer need to be understood to facilitate the desirable presentation of products and services.
Also, it helps in deciding how far the sales must be persuaded with particular clients based on their reactions and attitude towards the approach. Therefore, it saves time and energy for the salesperson making their work smart and efficient.
Positivty
According to Marketing Donut sales statistics, only 8% of salespeople score 80% of all successful sales. At least five follow-ups are necessary to achieve a successful sale. However, 44% of salespeople give up after the first rejection. 22% of salespeople stop persuading by the second rejection and 14% of sales employees hang on only till the third. Further, 12% stopped by the fourth rejection due to lack of optimism, and only 8% went up for the final fifth follow-up.
Therefore, potential salespeople must balance their emotions while dealing with the customers. Also, for maintaining positivity throughout the career. Patience and hope are the best ingredients to create a successful career in sales. Measurement of this trait assesses the candidates’ positive and constructive mentality.
Motivation
According to expectancy theory, individuals in general behave in a particular manner to achieve an expected reward as a response or result to it. To meet high sales targets and aspire to bigger achievements, one requires motivation and drive. It is not possible for an employee to constantly stay energized for the role and responsibility.
However, a salesperson is expected to be consistently productive while approaching the customers. Because studies made on sales performance show the significant effect of intrinsic motivation as a fundamental condition to direct general and technical skills in successful dealing.
Ambiversion
A salesperson must build and maintain customers-relationship as stated in Rapport Management During The Exploration Phase Of The Salesperson–Customer Relationship by Kim Sydow Campbell, Lenita Davis, and Lauren Skinner. Another research by Scott M. Curry, Nicole E. Gravina, Andressa A. Sleiman & Erin Richard indicates that rapport-building behavior shows positive engagement and candidates who have the trait complete 14% more of the productive tasks. A project by Daniel Maurath analyzed the turnovers of ambiverted salespeople, it was found that they performed much better than introverted and extraverted salespeople.
In such a case, ambiversion personality traits can ensure high relationship-building potential with the customers and colleagues. Hence, it certainly makes a salesperson ideal as a salesperson is expected to be wisely introverted and informatively extroverted. The candidate must pass this aspect of the assessment to stand a firm chance of getting through the interview. To be able to empathize with the customer, an ideal candidate must acquire an interactive experience. Therefore, this trait needs to be measured while recruiting salespeople.
Benefits of PMaps Visual-Based Assessments
Visual Interface
The Gen-Z tends to adapt better to the technical environment than in typical ones. The assessments prepared by PMaps are structured to evaluate the sales candidates non-discriminant of language preference. The items of assessment ensure that candidates appearing feel comfortable and answer honestly. It does not limit the answers to social expectation, rather focuses on individual personality evaluation.
Fun & Interesting
The world today believes in smart work at every phase and position. The generation looks out for hooking and innovative systems in organizations. The assessments are developed to keep the candidates on the hook till the very end. Also, the duration of attending the assessment is significantly less. Graphics and audio enrich the digital experience of the candidates while encouraging curiosity throughout the psychometric assessments.
Quick
People these days are engaged in multiple activities thriving to find values of life in productivity. Organizations also experience high demands from the economy which makes the employee schedules tighter. To aid the unnecessary time consumption, managers must adopt digital means of evaluating individuals for sales. A considerable amount of time is saved as these assessments produce a complete report without any manual calculations.
Easily Accessible
These assessments allow both the candidate and manager to easily appear and review the interview respectively. The advanced calculation of data procures accurate reports of the individual. Also, the records of responses can be accessed from the cloud storage anytime throughout life. This data also gives reference to the employee for further monitoring and training of potential sales agents through the period of employment.
Covers All Aspects
A study this month found that salespeople who completed the decentralized program (digital evaluation) achieved approximately 23.5% higher sales performance than those who completed the centralized program (one-to-one interaction). This is because the onboarding process is much more scientific with digital assessments than in traditional interviews for hiring. It is also non-discriminant as it prevents first impression biases on recruiters’ side. It covers all sales competencies and evaluates the candidate based on individual qualities.
Cost-Efficient
The easy interpretation and evaluation of sales competency with digital psychometric assessments are not only easy to use, fun to attend, scientifically accurate, and quick by nature but also, it is budget-friendly and reliable. PMaps pre-assess are trusted by many established companies like Bajaj, Blue Heaven, Dishtv, Digicall, IDBI Bank, IDFC First Bank, Max Life Insurance and many more.
Environment Friendly
The digital assessments are environment friendly as it doesn’t depend on printed papers for interviews and record-keeping. It also reduces production cost of the overall industry. Although it might be contributing a minimal portion, when adapted by large groups of industries it would bring a significant change. The employee records can be accessed from the cloud no matter where you are. Digital sales competency assessments are overall very eco-friendly and economical by nature and are no doubt a healthy investment.
SUM UP:
The need for availing of modernized platforms and tools to operate organizations is growing unstoppably. Changing trends have taken an express ride with social media intervention. The efficiency of employees with adequate sales competencies will earn customers only when it is administered by advanced evaluating and monitoring tools.
Save your precious time by setting up your goals and criteria with the best competent salespeople from the very base of recruitment. Save a seat on the digital express evaluating critical core sales competencies before your competitors fit in!
– By Pratisrutee Mishra
Team PMaps