Sales Assessment Completion Times May Impact the Validity of the Assessments

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan
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Sales Leadership Challenges to Having a World Class Sales Force - By Dave Kurlan

How would you like to influence the development of our never-ending quest for improvement in our suite of world-class assessment tools? We constantly seek ways to expand our world-class insights, legendary accuracy, and real-world relevance.

I just reviewed some new data that Jim Sasena, our Operations/Technical Director, dug up for me. This particular data set shows the percentage of Sales Candidate Assessments that are completed in a particular amount of time.

assessment times

What I found most interesting about this graph is that the percentage of time outside the norm is about 5%. That number correlates perfectly with the percentage of assessments that have a low confidence score (when we aren't confident in our finding because at least one of the internal analyzes we run on the test data indicates that the person may have tried to fake or influence the results) and our predictive validity (95% - highest in the industry). Suppose this candidate did great on the assessment and was recommended for your position. Wouldn't it be cool to learn that it took him 111 minutes to complete the 35 minute assessment and we are discrediting the findings and recommendation? What do you suppose the candidate did during that 111 minutes?

"Hi Bob, can you call me back. I'm taking a sales assessment and I need to know how to answer a couple questions. Hurry!"

"Hi Bob, me again. I have one more question I need help with. Thanks so much. I owe you one buddy."

"Sorry to bother you again Bob. Can you feed me the answer to one more question? I owe you some tickets to the game."

Why would someone need helping taking our assessment? Because the questions are asked in a sales context, not a social context, and your candidates may not know the ideal answers. As a matter of fact, most salespeople, even veterans, don't know the best answers because all of the answers could correlate to how they think and act in sales situations - methods and beliefs that aren't necessarily the best for sales success.

Is there something you would love to know about your next sales candidates? Tell me what it is and I'll respond and let you know if we do that already or if we can do that in the future. You can influence what we report! Here's an example: "Can you tell us whether our candidate would be able to go into a new market, where we are totally unknown, get through to CEO's, sell a high-end consulting service that is also priced higher than the well-known competition, and close this business in 2 calls?

If you don't use Objective Management Group's assessments, don't feel left out. Just take one minute (that's all - I promise) and complete this very simple survey of between 1 and 5 questions. Non-users only!!!

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Free PDF Download
Sales Leadership Challenges to Having a World Class Sales Force - By Dave Kurlan

About the Author: Dave Kurlan

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Dave Kurlan is a best-selling author, top-rated speaker and thought leader on sales development. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling (Dan Seidman), Stepping Stones (Deepak Chopra and Brian Tracey) and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2 (David Riklan).
Click here to visit Dave's website.

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Sales Assessment Completion Times May Impact the Validity of the Assessments

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