Build Sales Teams

For many organizations, there is a wide gulf between sales leads and sales generation. While it is not possible to convert every lead into a sale, the onus always remains on narrowing the gulf to minimum. Therein lies the necessity to build sales team resilient enough to achieve desired objective.

Companies live and die by the sheer quality of their sales force, and so the priority to build sales team is rarely questioned. Corporate history is replete with instances where an excellent sales team has generated tremendous sales for an average product, but a poor sales team has not been able to cut much ice even with a top-quality product.

Many a time, companies rely on individual sales performance at the cost of taking trouble to build sales team. While this benefits in the short term, this cannot help over a longer period. Difficulty arises when selected sales persons fail to deliver for one reason or other. Big companies recognize the fallacy of individual brilliance and therefore emphasize the need to build sales team as a coherent unit.

Would you build sales team from in-house staff or hire outside service? This is a debate that is best left to company management to decide upon. When a company agrees to build sales team from in-house staff, it gains direct control over the team and can access the decision-making process leading to planning and executing a sales strategy. Further, in-house sales-team works for the company only, and its primary goal is to sell company’s goods or services. An outside agency, on the other hand, may be dealing in many products from different companies and does not owe strict allegiance to any particular company.

The first step to build sales team is to get on roll capable, goal-achieving individuals who will collectively make a formidable sales force. What are the traits to look for in a salesperson before taking him/her on board? Here are some important ones:

Despite generous budget, recruiting ideal salespersons is often a big challenge for companies. It is one thing to ask the right questions, quite another to screen right candidates. If not done properly, it becomes difficult to build sales team which will be responsive to company’s growth strategy.

Fortunately, SPQ*GOLD’s Sales Preference Questionnaire is an effective help for a company to build sales team ideally suited for its purpose. SPQ*GOLD offers online test administration, which is a big advantage for 2 reasons. First, it reduces recruitment cost to a large extent. Second, SPQ*GOLD’s comprehensive analysis ensures an almost fault-free end-result. This translates to more value for less cost incurred in order to build sales team.

No wonder, SPQ*GOLD enjoys an unrivalled acceptance across wide cross-section of companies as the only proven tool to help build sales team.

Pre-employment personality testing is a major consideration for most companies in order to pre-empt job avoidance among aspiring candidates. Of particular significance is the sales people strengths testing, which takes a peek at an employee’s behavioral functions, interpersonal skills and communication ability among others. Sales people strengths testing seeks to address and evaluate an employee’s likely response to crunch situations like inclination to or reluctance of making sales call.

ISCIS, an acronym for Inhibited Social Contact Initiation Syndrome, is a pointer of emotion-activated avoidance behavior among employees, related in particular to the act of initiating first social contact. Cutting across disparate contact-dependent work-settings like business, government, academics, fund-raising and even dating, ISCIS symptoms are equally prevalent and come into play when an individual is reluctant to meet new people, and subside or altogether cease after an initial contact has been successfully made.

The sales people strengths testing is effective in ferreting out key behavioral traits in employees so that it is easier for an assessor to judge an employee’s potential in meeting larger objectives of a company. In conducting sales people strengths testing, certain parameters are important in terms of effectiveness of the test and achieving impartial test-results. Some of these are enumerated below:

SPQ* Gold, authored by George W. Dudley and Shannon L. Goodson, is a result of pioneering research aimed at tracing emotional liability in prospective employees through the widely-acclaimed Sales Preference Questionnaire. SPQ* Gold dovetails measurement of all 12 sub-types of sales call reluctance and includes three scales used to detect non-standard attitudes toward completing the instrument.

One of the scales, the "Brake" score, is a statistical composite derived after aggregating scores from all 12 diagnostic sub-categories. The Brake score provides a succinct overall view of an employee’s effort which, instead of prospecting for sales, is diverted to non-productive coping behaviors intended to reduce emotional discomfort associated with prospecting for new business.

For any sales-oriented entity, whether government, business, academics or any other, sales people strengths testing is an absolute necessity, for which SPQ* Gold is a valuable aid.