Assessing your current sales team for sales aptitude can be an excellent way to provide a benchmark of where you stand today so you can set measured recruiting goals and objectives going forward.

Let’s say, for example, that you have 20 salespeople and you assess them all. The data will tell you two things.

1. How many A and B players you currently have
2. A snapshot of your overall team score

If you have, say, 10 A and B players, you can set a goal of raising that number to 15 within 12 months through attrition and setting the bar higher for new applicants. And if the team score is, say, 60 out of a possible 100, you can set a new goal of 70 within 12 months and so on. It can become incredibly exciting and gratifying to see these metrics, and accompanying production, improve over time.

However, assessing the current team does require some sensitivity. The idea is to improve over time. Current salespeople are best judged by past and ongoing performance tied to clear expectations since they are already in place. Assessing them is meant to improve selectivity of the next generation of candidates, not to replace the best criteria of all . . . performance.

If you are interested in assessing your current sales team for sales aptitude or would like to know more about assessing your current sales team as a powerful element for improving future recruiting and team building, please contact us today! We would be happy to get you started or provide more details about the process.

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Dr. Christopher Croner and Richard Abraham are authors of Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again and developers of the proprietary and patented sales assessment test, The DriveTest™, for sales candidates. To experience the difference of the DriveTest, contact us today!