I’m looking at the results of a new kind of psychometric test designed specifically for sales teams – and it is a real eye-opener. I’ve seen generic personality and psychometric assessments before, but they tended to be so vague and ‘touchy-feely’ that they were more like entertaining curiosities than business tools. (I know – some people swear by them and before I start getting hate mail from the Cult of Myers-Briggs, I humbly acknowledge that they are not without merit.)

The whole point of the assessment is to help sales managers do 3 things:

1) Build a profile of your “ideal” salesperson.
2) Select candidates for your sales team more accurately. (Notice I didn’t say – select BETTER candidates. It’s a distinction I’ll get to in a minute.)
3) Make your existing team more effective.

Because the test I was looking at was specifically geared for salespeople, the questions and scoring centers on selling & marketing situations. None of those weird “which do you find more interesting, a stop sign or a squirrel?” kinds of question. This test asked things like, “If a client gets angry, do you get emotional or try to calm them down?”, so the data it provides tends to be useful for the average sales manager – or for the HR manager who has to recruit the sales team.
Profiling your “ideal” salesperson works if you have people on your team that are performing more or less the way you want them to. The test identified 18 personality characteristics and ranks the testee based on 2 poles – such as Self-aware vs. Self-unaware, or Bold vs. Cautious. So far, nothing too out of the ordinary for psych testing – but it’s still a very useful way of getting an objective assessment of what is going on inside the brain-pan of your top sellers.

The benefit here is that it allowed me to build a profile of my top sellers and compare them with a universe of other sales people – so I was able to work with a small sample and develop a useful picture. Now I can test new prospective hires and see if they have the right stuff. This particular test offers prompts and insights that sales managers may find useful (for instance, my sample test told me that I “may be more concerned with getting the job done than with “soft” people issues”. To be honest I would not necessarily be my own first choice when hiring a new sales associate!) The system I was looking at even offered interviewers recommended lines of questioning for determining if an assertive candidate was “go for the sale” assertive or “crazy stalker” assertive. Most of the interview question prompts were actually quite insightful & useful – and would be very helpful for Chinese HR managers more accustomed to finding team-players than hard-driving aggressive salespeople.

But what about the people that are already working for you? This is usually where most assessment tests fall down, because they can’t offer useful advice – just vague descriptions. The test I looked at is helpful because it can be used by training & development managers to customize a training plan to work with a sales team’s existing characteristics. That means that if you sales team is more Wary than Decisive you can build a training program that helps with decision making, leadership and soft skills – instead of firing the whole lot of them and starting over from scratch looking for ideal candidates that aren’t readily available. And in China, that can be a very useful thing.