Sales Skills Assessment

Whether you’re hiring for an entry-level sales position or a high-level sales executive, all sales representatives share the same fundamental goal of driving revenue and maintaining business growth. 

Strong sales candidates have excellent communication skills, presentation capabilities, positive growth mindsets, management and organizational skills, and research skills. They also need the inner drive and motivation to land new clients and achieve the established sales goals. 

What Is a Sales Skills Assessment

Sales skills assessments come in many shapes and sizes, but the most important thing you want to assess is the candidate’s ability to communicate effectively and convincingly with the goal of closing a sale. Because you might be hiring for a particular type of sales rep (cold email/phone sales, e-commerce sales reps, account managers, sales associates, B2B sales, etc., you should cater your assessment to your needs. If you’re focusing on social media or email sales, ask your applicants to create convincing copy samples. If you need someone to create presentations for B2B clients, ask them to research a topic and create a presentation on it. 

How to use sales skills assessments

Sales skills assessments are similar to communication assessments. You can use a digital reference check to compare candidate self-assessments with their previous managers/peers. Writing tests, presentation assessments, sample emails, mock phone calls, and interviews are some of the best sales skills assessments you can leverage for sales reps. 

Why you should use a sales skills assessment

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, bad hires can cost you 30 percent of that employee's annual salary. Other hiring resources claim that bad hires can cost you nearly $1 million in lost productivity and team morale. 

Sales skills assessments aren’t all-in-one solutions to finding the best quality of hire, but they’re an essential part of a holistic hiring process. The cost and time commitment to implement a hiring assessment are minimal compared to how much lost time, energy, money, and other resources your team will spend on a bad hire. 

Using a sales skill assessment and doing your hiring due diligence can help you avoid candidates who:

• Are unskilled or lack the experience to perform their role
• Miss key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Have bad attitudes and don’t embrace the company culture
• Are often late or absent
• Repeatedly makes the same mistakes
• Are unwilling to learn are take constructive criticism from team leaders

What to Test for in Your Sales Skills Assessments

Sales positions aren’t one-size-fits-all. Your company will have different sales needs from the next organization, so it’s important to tailor your assessment to fit your particular role. 

Here are a few of the most important things to test for in your sales skills assessment:

• Conversational skills
• Reading and writing skills
• Motivation and drive
• Presentation skills
• Email copy skills
• Research skills
• EQ
• Multi-tasking
• Tone of voice
• Ability to ask questions
• Clarity and cohesion in spoken and written communications
• Interpersonal skills
• Confidence

Sales Skills Assessment Example Template Questions

You should be using a variety of skill assessments to match the needs of your position. However, the two following templates are some of the most common assessments for email sales and presentation sales candidates. 

Email copy template

Ask applicants to craft an email for the next client, business, or set of customers you’re trying to reach. Rather than coming up with a hypothetical company or scenario, use the actual company and your sales goals in the assessment. 

Here’s what the task might look:

We’re reaching out to [Name of Company] to sell our CRM service. Create an email that introduces our CRM and describes how our service will benefit their organization. You can find everything you need to know about what our CRM offers by clicking this link, and here’s everything you need to know about the client. 

Requirements:

• Subject line

• Preview text

• Body (250 words)

Sales interview questions

Ditch the “sell me this pen” cliches, and try for some more comprehensive sales interview questions. Here are a few to get you started. 

• Would you rather close a $20,000 deal or go for $200,000?

1. This is a great way to gain some insight into the personality and mindset of the person you’re interviewing. Do they have a “go big or go home strategy?”, or do they reliably take the safe deals? Depending on your needs and the nature of your business, you can assess which style suits you best. 

• What’s your proudest sales achievement?

• What’s your favorite movie or TV show? Why do you like it so much?

1. This question will demonstrate their ability to describe something they should know inside and out. If they can’t talk about their favorite movie or tv show convincingly, they probably won’t be able to talk about your products or services. 

• How do you learn about a new topic you know very little about? 

• How do you stay on top of trends in sales technologies?

Final Thoughts: Sales Skills Assessment

The right sales candidates will help drive revenue, land new clients, close important deals, and support the growth of your business. To land the best hire, you need the best hiring assessments, screening tools, and pre-hire evaluation processes in place. 

With Crosschq, you’ll get cutting-edge competency analytics that help you make intelligent and data-driven correlations between candidate skill sets and quality of hire. Benefit from digital 360 reference checks, performance competencies, quality of hire analytics, and more. 

Find your ideal sales candidate with Crosschq today.