Talent assessments are an excellent tool for understanding the way your candidates and current salespeople are wired. The difference in approach with each group is key to productive new hires and successful coaching.

Different Ways Sales Talent Assessments Support Selection

Talent assessments on your candidates helps to build a Talent Bank of highly talented salespeople. When you have a job opening, you will want to select from those candidates for the best fit for your open position.

Think of it like a sports team that keeps their benches full of successful athletes, ready to hit the field or floor at the sound of a whistle.

If you’re a CSS client using our Online Sales Talent Interview, you receive a graph of how your candidates responded in 12 areas of talent, which research has shown will determine success in a B2B sales environment. Those 12 talents are identified as:

• Strengths
• Situational talents
• Non-strengths

Save Time by Screening Candidates

Strengths, situational talents and non-strengths will help you determine a candidate’s fit, and you may even have the fortunate problem of having too many candidates!

In the interest of efficiency, for candidates, you may want to use the overall score to screen the candidates down to a manageable level quickly. In this early stage, that is a valid use of the overall score as an initial screening tool.

Our tools don’t just describe the candidate – they predict whether the candidate will become a top performer for your organization. Our talent assessments report an individual’s intensity levels in the specific themes that separate the best from the rest in this particular job. Statistically, it makes sense to use the overall score and cut-off as a guide.

Recommended candidates have been shown to have an 85% likelihood of being someone you would hire again, while a non-recommend is closer to 50/50. As you focus on the candidates that are above the cut-off, it’s time to dig deeper and look at their mix of talents, situational talents, and non-talents.

Taking a closer look will help you determine the best fit for the opening you have.

Staff Development

Talent assessments of your existing team need to be approached differently.

It would be a disservice to look at your current team and use the cut-off score. Your sales team is not an unknown entity - and you’re not screening through dozens of candidates!

The goal is to identify the best way to coach to their strengths and find workarounds for their non-strengths. Our Talent Team has led our client managers in Talent Focused Management since 1985, and know from experience that when the talent is there, and a person is coached based on those talents, their performance is higher.  

Understanding the talents of your salespeople is crucial for coaching and development. Through our Talent Focused Management workshops, we help managers build a unique coaching plan for each person on their team based on their individual talents.

Sales Talent Assessments Add Value That Help Achieve Sales Success

Your staff is more than just the total score. You already know how they approach their job and having the measurement of their sales talents is often an ah-ha moment for managers.

But more often, it helps a manager determine:

• How to most effectively coach to their salespeople’s strengths
• Put them in situations where their situational talents may fire
• Help them find workarounds for their non-strengths.

If you are using a talent assessment, it’s important to approach your selection of candidates and coaching your sales team differently. If you’d like to know more about how our assessments can help you, download our Talent Fit Factors form.