What You Can Expect From Sales Assessment Tests and Preparation Tips

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Hiring a new employee typically costs 1.25 to 1.4 times their salary. Onboarding sales reps also usually takes a few months, and during this training period, they are not yet able to bring revenue into your business. This can make it seem risky to hire any new sales reps — especially if you only have a few interviews to gauge their abilities.

Sales assessment testing gives you a more holistic picture of a candidate to help you choose the right person for the job. The Sales Connection incorporates these tests into our hiring method to help companies succeed and grow. Keep reading to learn how sales assessment testing can transform your company’s hiring process, helping you find better salespeople and maintain a lower turnover rate.

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What Is a Sales Assessment Test?

A sales assessment test gives you deeper insight into potential employees' traits and sales skills than regular interview questions can provide.

In the past, a sales skills assessment test was expensive and time-consuming, so many businesses avoided using them. Now that sales candidates can complete these tests online, anytime, for free, they are becoming more widely utilized. The assessments are designed to reduce the number of interviews you need to conduct and ensure that only the most qualified applicants get to the final phases of the hiring process.

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Why Do Companies Conduct Sales Assessments?

A sales assessment test helps companies in many ways during the hiring process. Below are some of the benefits of performing a sales assessment before hiring:

• Provides additional perspective. Candidates often have essential sales competencies that a traditional sales interview wouldn't reveal.
• Identifies whether the candidate is a good fit. Depending on the position, an employee faces different challenges. For instance, someone in a medical device sales role focusing on outreach and lead qualification needs good conversational skills and a higher tolerance for sales rejections. Sales assessments can help you find the best fit for a role based on inherent traits, thereby increasing your new employees' ability to succeed.
• Determines the best client for the candidate. Depending on the challenges and goals of your various clients, they may need to be assigned to employees with particular skill sets. An assessment can help you figure out the best client or industry for a specific candidate. The test could include scenarios and questions based on the client's business model and industry, to provide insight into how the candidate would perform.

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How Do You Assess Selling Skills?

The ability to close a sale is hard to evaluate with just a few interviews and a resume. To get a more complete picture of the candidate and their ability to thrive on your team, it’s important to understand the skills that most great salespeople share. At The Sales Connection, we also look at your business's goals and challenges, so we can zero in on the type of sales rep who would do best at your company.

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Situational Judgment

This is often the most important skill for your company. To understand how the candidate would approach a situation, you can present challenges and problems they'll likely face in the role. Their response gives you insight into how they think, along with their strengths and weaknesses.

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Numerical Reasoning

Any successful salesperson needs to have basic math skills. You can have the candidate analyze different graphs, tables, and charts to learn about their numerical literacy. Many companies choose to time these tests, grading candidates on both accuracy and speed. Pay attention to their confidence when they give you an answer, as well.

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Error-Checking

The ability to find and correct errors is a skill that companies often undervalue. Detail-oriented salespeople who can figure out where something went wrong and how to fix it quickly are likely to succeed more often in the long run.

A typical error-checking test has the candidate compare data sets, spot and correct any mistakes on them, and answer some questions about the information. They also usually have a strict time frame, and the length of time the candidate takes to complete the test affects their final score.

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Verbal Reasoning

It probably goes without saying, but salespeople must have good communication skills to close deals and maintain client relationships. Common verbal reasoning tests give candidates a passage of text to read, followed by a series of true-or-false questions. Candidates who can quickly pick out the key pieces of information in the material usually perform well in these tests and in real-life scenarios.

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Types of Sales Assessment Questions

Since these tests try to quantify abstract skills, it's good to incorporate many different types of questions to get a fair and well-rounded opinion of the candidate.

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Sales Skills

This is a basic test to evaluate certain desirable sales skills, such as:

• Communication
• Handling objections
• Qualifying
• Closing
• Setting goals
• Pitching and presenting
• Reaching decision-makers
• Researching

For instance, you could ask the candidate to write a cold email to someone working at a fictional company that is similar to clients they may end up working with. If they return a well-written, concise, structured answer that clearly communicates the prospect with one clear call-to-action, they're likely a strong candidate.

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Sales Scenarios

Asking how the candidate would act in hypothetical scenarios similar to real challenges can help you understand how they will fit into the company. They may have a fresh perspective, or their thinking may line up nicely with your business values.

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Self-Assessment

This is usually some kind of personality test that helps you figure out how well the candidate will fit into your company’s culture. The questions generally address behavioral factors, such as:

• How well they work in a team
• Overall agreeableness
• How they work with leadership
• Their response to complications

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Cognitive Aptitude

Understanding how the candidate's brain works, from their verbal to mathematical skills, can provide important insight. Usually, these tests are similar to the type of standardized testing you may have completed when applying for college.

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Technical Skills and Industry-Specific Knowledge

You should check the candidate's familiarity with tools your company uses, like customer relationship management platforms or outreach tools. This can save time and money in the onboarding process later on, and someone experienced with these tools may even find ways to improve your procedures.

Depending on your field, it may also be valuable to learn about their domain knowledge. For instance, fields like pharmaceuticals and medical devices require in-depth medical knowledge. Usually, these roles have a rigorous training process, and your hiring decisions must consider the higher training and onboarding costs. A candidate more familiar with the field may have an easier onboarding process and is more likely to remain in their role long-term.

One way you can learn about a candidate's industry-specific knowledge is to check how they would research a particular subject. Someone more familiar with the field would be able to show that they follow industry news and resources, explaining the types of information they would look for and why.

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Which Personality Test Is Best for Sales?

Personality tests can help you figure out how well an interviewee is suited for a particular role. The candidate's results on the test could also inform your decision based on observations you make during the hiring process.

However, a sales personality test is only effective if the candidate answers honestly, without trying to figure out the answers you'd want them to give. So remind them to choose the answer that they feel best represents their opinion.

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Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

One of the most popular personality tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) helps you understand personality types according to four categories:

• Energy. This identifies whether the candidate's energy levels are higher when around many people in a fast-paced environment, like an extrovert, or when working independently, like an introvert.
• Information. This focuses on how candidates process information — either sensing, using common sense and past experience to solve problems, or intuitive, looking for patterns and creative possibilities to solve an issue.
• Decision-making. This determines whether candidates tend to weigh logic or empathy more heavily when making difficult decisions.
• Organization. This shows whether the candidate is more comfortable when sticking to a preset plan of action or when being flexible and spontaneous.

This test can help you place people in different roles. For instance, someone more extroverted is likely to have more success with making cold calls, while a more introverted person could be better at building a relationship with a prospect and learning about their specific pain points.

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DISC

This test assesses people's communication styles according to four different behavioral styles:

• Dominance. This describes how a person would respond to a challenge. Candidates with high dominance are often ambitious, direct, and competitive.
• Influence. People with this style are adept at relating to other people in a group and influencing them to take a certain action. These people are often enthusiastic, optimistic, and persuasive.
• Steadiness. Steady candidates are more composed and resistant to change, usually most comfortable when working consistently on a small number of tasks. These people are usually tactful, supportive, and even-tempered.
• Conscientiousness. This reflects a candidate's ability to respond to rules and procedures. If they score highly in this style, they're generally more analytical, attentive to detail, and task-oriented.

In general, people who get high scores in dominance are more likely to perform better in sales roles, though each communication style can be valuable depending on the details of the role.

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Caliper Profile Assessment Test

This test of 180 multiple-choice questions measures the candidate's motivations and characteristics as a way to understand how they'll perform in the sales role. It tests four categories to understand their key skills and personality traits:

• Leadership. Their maturity and ability to drive results.
• Interpersonal. Their ability to build relationships and contribute in a team setting.
• Decision-making. Their decisiveness and strategic thinking.
• Time management. Their process management, focus on quality, and organization.

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Holland Code Career Test

This is a test you could use for new job candidates or staff members who are interested in finding a role that fits them better. The test groups candidates according to their suitability for six different occupation categories:

• Realistic. The candidate enjoys working with practical things they can see and touch, like tools and machines.
• Investigative. They think analytically and like problem-solving.
• Artistic. They thrive in activities that take creativity, like creative writing or art.
• Social. They're most comfortable when their work involves directly helping other people.
• Enterprising. They like to lead or persuade people.
• Conventional. They're good at working with numbers and records.

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How to Pass a Sales Assessment Test

Your results are most effective when people take them calmly, not stressing out over what answers you might want to hear or how to pass the sales aptitude test. To ensure that the test results are as accurate as possible, you could offer candidates these simple sales assessment test tips.

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Research

As with any test, studying ahead of time will settle a lot of nerves. Candidates should know this already, but it doesn't hurt to remind them that your business's sales assessment test will likely be relevant to your specific industry, scale, and company. They can also prepare for some common sales assessment questions and answers, so they'll be ready with thoughtful, detailed responses.

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Start as Early as Possible

Though candidates can often finish sales assessment tests at their own convenience, let them know it's good to be prompt. Usually, they just need to schedule an hour or two to go through the process, and the best sales reps tend to try to get projects done sooner, rather than later, anyway.

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Answer Honestly

Subjective questions in self-assessments help you get an idea of how a potential employee's personality will fit into the team dynamic. If they give the first answer that comes to mind, you get a good idea of how they would act in real life. Let them know that this is more important than them figuring out the "right" answer — it's best for both the future employee and your business to hire the right fit for the role.

For multiple choice questions, remind them to select the option the answer they think is most relevant or important when there are multiple answers they feel are correct.

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Hire the Best Sales Reps

A sales assessment test is just one of the tools you can use to find the best sales reps. Instead of spending your valuable time researching more of these tools, The Sales Connection can help you find reps guaranteed to return your investment tenfold within 100 days. Book a diagnostic meeting with us today so we can discuss your business's needs and challenges to figure out the sort of sales professionals who would help your business the most.

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