Sales People Strengths

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 employees behavioral functions, interpersonal skills and communication ability among others. Sales people strengths testing seeks to address and evaluate an employees 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 employees 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 employees 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.


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As an employer, it is incumbent on you to weed out unproductive salespeople, retrain and relocate them as necessary. SPQ*Golds sales people strengths testing lets you accurately evaluate competence level of your sales force, so that you can make it lean, trim and hungry for action at all times. Sales people strengths testing opens the door for scientific analysis of sales performance and judgmental actions thereof.

Lack of urgency and direction marks the traits of low-goal salespeople. They drift aimlessly in their careers, unable to come to terms, having difficulty to cope with demands for making sales and are therefore a drag on companys resources. Yet it might as well be that some of them are indeed brilliant communicator and have proved their mettle in the past.

To effectively solve such situations, the most objective instrument is the sales people strengths testing from SPQ*GOLD. SPQ*Golds sales people strengths testing and other procedures have generated an extensive body of research results which have established good concurrent validity in a variety of disparate organizational settings, correlating significantly with objective outcome data, measured in dollars.

Many a time, an entire sales force is afflicted by low goal-connectedness. Mismanaged sales careers, deferring urgent actions, wastage of time, lack of immediacy, etc. are typical of such happenings. This results in less prospecting and even less selling. Sales managers, unable to allot reasons, see them as lazy and motivationally challenged. All this culminates in plunging financial results, putting company in dire straits.

What this translates on ground is the unequivocal ability of SPQ*Golds sales people strengths testing to significantly reduce downtime arising out of erratic sales behavior on part of few salespersons or a sales group as a whole.

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 companys 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 companys growth strategy.

Fortunately, SPQ*GOLDs 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*GOLDs 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.