Empower Change with Deep Insight Into Your
Organization’s Strengths and Key Developmental Opportunities
When setting out to improve your sales results, it’s essential to understand what strengths to accentuate and which specific problems to solve. Unfortunately, sales is often played out in the relatively unmonitored theatre of your customer’s offices. And, salespeople are notoriously good at making excuses and selling themselves to you.
These factors combine to thwart most attempts to diagnose the real underlying causes of success and failure. The only dependable way to get that understanding is by utilizing the right objective sales assessments and sales analysis tools, and comparing what’s happening now in your organization with known indicators of success.
Yet our clients report that other sales consultants and trainers don’t take the time to assess their organization at the level we do. They rely on generalized industry knowledge and surface-level understanding of the company’s goals, without getting a complete picture of its people, structure, and strategy.
Many also misapply tools when evaluating team members, using sales assessments that focus on general tendencies or personality traits – factors that don’t actually reflect potential sales success.
Many managers and executives end up coming to us with the mistaken belief that sales ability can’t be accurately assessed. As a result, they’ve been favoring salespeople they personally connect with or who match their idea of what a good seller is like. But the only way they can assess them is to actually hire them and see how they perform, a hit-or-miss approach that leads to all kinds of problems from HR issues to unreliable sales.
But with the appropriate sales assessment tools, combined with understanding based in decades of experience, we go deep with sales report consulting to get a complete picture not only of individuals’ sales and management abilities, but also how these abilities are operating within the company’s market strategy and structure.
Assess the Current Team
To best determine your company needs for sales improvement, we start by understanding the current makeup of your team. We assess each individual for the beliefs, habits, and best practices that drive sales success and identify counterproductive tendencies.
We also examine the team as a whole, looking at existing systems and processes and the effects of leadership. We can then customize the training and coaching needed to get your team pointed in the right direction, as well as identify any roles needing adjustment or new hires.
Optimize Hiring
Knowing what specific traits and skill sets are needed for any roles that need to be filled enables us to focus the hiring process. Using effective assessment tools for each candidate ensures that you hire the right person for each role who can and will sell successfully.
And, while nobody will ever be perfect, you’ll be hiring with up-front clarity about the support, coaching, and training each new team member will need for maximum success. Bottom line, you’ll be empowered to build your team with more confidence.
Check the Foundations
Sales teams don’t exist in isolation. To function at their best, they need to be supported by a solid infrastructure in the form of processes, systems, and tools, and well-defined value proposition, go-to-market strategy, and positioning.
What salespeople are taking to market and the competitive pressures at play have a profound impact on the selling styles and structure needed within the team. By checking that each of these foundational pieces is clearly spelled out and all of them fit together, we ensure a stable base for developing the team.
Our Sales Assessment Offerings
1. Sales Organization Assessment
This assessment focuses on key aspects of the organization that impact sales, such as the definition of the target customer and the value proposition that’s being offered to them. We also evaluate the competitive landscape and the go-to-market strategy being employed within it and check how well aligned the structure and systems of the sales team are with those strategies, definitions, and realities. The goal is to get all engines firing in the same direction and create the synergy that supports solid sales results.
;2. Sales Coaching Assessment Suite
This battery of scientifically-validated assessments delivers an in-depth view of a salesperson’s beliefs, habits, tendencies, and capabilities around selling. Are they more systematic in their approach or more improvisational? More relational or task-oriented? How well do they execute on best practices? What kind of clients are they most compatible with? How do their traits and skills fit with the role they’re in? Understanding each team member fully enables us to determine what role is the best (or bad) fit and what support they need for the greatest success.
3. Sales Management Assessment Suite
Great sales managers must be experts in both sales and sales management—distinct skill sets with their own requirements. When assessing managers, we look at sales-related traits as well as leadership skills and capabilities such as hiring, coaching, mentoring, and holding people accountable. We look at how they communicate and motivate, their capacity for relating, and their beliefs around leadership and management. Making sure managers have all the tools and abilities they need is essential for a team to be both well-supported and well-governed.
4. Sales Hiring Evaluations
Once you have a complete understanding of your current sales team and the infrastructure they’re working within, identifying and recruiting additional team members who match the specific roles you need to fill becomes a priority. Here we’re looking at skills and capabilities for execution as they compare with the needs you’ve identified. Instead of wasting time and energy on a guessing game of hiring and hoping, we empower you to hire with precision, awareness, and confidence.
5. Sales Team Audit
The Sales Team Audit provides an essential compendium of information about your company’s sales organization. Drawing from the information gathered in the assessment processes below, it includes a comprehensive evaluation of your people, processes, and strategies and the development of a complete, coherent plan to optimize all of it. We look at each aspect individually, as well as how they function together globally as your sales ecosystem.
Our solutions follow the principles of “The Culture of Sales™”
Michael Andersen’s new book, A Culture of Predictable Sales: One Sales Manager’s Journey, offers an entertaining and insightful overview of key concepts from his Intentional Sales Management™ training system. Written in novel form with easy-to-digest takeaway sections for each chapter, the book illuminates sales management best practices by showing them at play within relatable contexts.
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