I hate aptitude tests. I hate college educated human resources personnel.
It’s like huntin’ possums, even if you get one, you’ve wasted your time, ’cause it ain’t worth eatin’.
Aptitude tests for salespeople are worthless. The best way to find out if person can sell or not is ridiculously simple. You know how I like simple.
Give them an interest test. If they can pass that, they can sell. Invariably.
How might you give an interest test ? There’s several ways.
One way, used by Saunders Norvell, a great sales manager from the past, was to take all the applicants to dinner, one at a time.
He’d ask several questions about their background, their family, their hobbies and such and then he’d sit back and see if the person could hold his attention or whether they just held their own attention.
The one who did the best job of gaining his interest got the job and he was never known to select a loser salesman.
Some people can talk all night, but it’s not about anything worth talking about. Some of them get caught up in listening to themselves and forget that you’re supposed to be the one listening, not them.
Some can’t get out more than three words at a time. If you get this far with one of these people, you’re a loser too. Surely you can’t even fathom hiring someone as a salesperson who can’t carry on a conversation.
If you have to drag words out of them, so will your customers. Except they won’t bother.
The fastest way to more sales is to make sure you’re an interesting person. One way to do that is to read.
The fastest way to no sales is to hire someone who’s only claim to fame is the number of hours they watch TV every night.
I once had a sales manager use this very tactic on me … for 7 weeks. We had dinner once a week. Played golf once a week. Got together on the weekends. Yada yada, blah blah.
He finally gave me the job and I sold him over $20 million dollars worth of product in 6 years as payback for his great taste in salesmen 
.
The next time you have a sales opening, give those HR tests the heave ho and give the applicant’s an interest test and you’ll not have any more openings for a long, long time.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
once again, short and to the point.
At the risk of sounding corny, where have you been all my life?!?
I have gone the gut instinct route, the psychometric testing route and the route advocated above and I could say without question that the interest test is probably as good as any and better than most.
I could also confirm that it is a hell of alot cheaper than paying for testing. More importantly, anything that could limit the risk of putting a dud on the road for 6 months is cheaper both in real dollars cost and opportunity cost of lost sales.
Hire a boring rep, let him burn through the prospects that you would like to bring on board and then see how fast these prospects will give you another shot.
In an industry that is competitive, with not much differentiation between suppliers (like my business- printing) you simply cannot afford to waste valuable face time.
This advice is spot-on for hiring salesmen.
Consider yourself one of my favorite reads lately.
For what it’s worth!!
Hope I’ve helped Jamie. I’m pretty much simple, short, sweet and pointless, er … I mean, to the point all the time.
Testing sucks. Numbers tell, stories sell.