We started using sales personality tests here at Sales Talent in March of 2002 to help me answer a vexing question. For the first time in my career, I had a recruiter on my team that did everything I asked of her and yet she was failing. At the prompting of a mentor, I had our entire team take Caliper’s sales assessment to see if our under-achieving recruiter was simply not “cut out for sales”. The short answer, according to Caliper, was that she wasn’t. Not even close. More importantly, the Caliper assessment correctly predicted that the performers on my team possessed sales aptitude. It even revealed why our failing recruiter was willing to work so hard at a job that she was ill-suited for. Like a kid with a shiny new toy, I was elated.

Sales Assessments - Sales Hiring Shortcut?

Flash forward fourteen years and I still use and believe in sales personality assessments. I’ve also come to understand that their value is that of a tool and works poorly as a key predictor of sales success. Until I understood how to apply their results to our sales environment, the results actually gave me a false sense of confidence. That false confidence stopped me from vetting candidates as deeply as I otherwise would have. In that vein, I have observed clients of ours implement sales assessments only to see the quality of their sales hires go down.

To be sure, these assessments provide lots of meaningful data. How you interpret and use that data is where you can gain a benefit or get yourself into trouble. Just as important as what they can measure is what these tests can’t measure. Drive. In the words of George Tucker (creator of The PEAC System), “some people simply have so much drive it doesn’t matter if they’re not suited for a job”. The opposite is also true. Some people are ideally suited for a job but lack drive.

Which Tests Do We Use?

When we are evaluating a potential recruiter for our team we use four different personality tests: Caliper, PEAC, FIRO-B, and Grit. The first two tests are sales oriented and the second two we use for a specific insight into the person’s hard wiring. We go to these lengths for two reasons. 1. Each test gives a different insight into the potential fit of a candidate and fills in information voids. 2. We gain a more holistic understanding of how to best support and develop that person should we ultimately hire them.

It has been my experience that the value of each assessment’s findings increased with the number of assessed hires that I had real-world sales data on (both successful and unsuccessful hires). To increase our own database of assessments I’ve given these assessments to Sales Talent hires from our past and other top performers from our industry. Without a base of dozens of successful sales hires to compare against, blindly taking a sales assessment’s hiring recommendation is problematic. To illustrate, none of our current recruiters were recommended as a “match” by Caliper, yet all of them are top 5% producers when compared to their peers in our industry. With that noted, let’s look at how most assessments work.

Making Sense of Assessments.

The graphic below (taken from H.R. Chally) illustrates the challenge with assessments. A lot of the data you’ll receive doesn’t predict job performance.

Caliper, for instance, provides a score of 1-99 on 40 different personality dynamics such as a person’s “assertiveness”, “energy” or “urgency”. The score represents what percentile a person is for that dynamic relative to the general population. To complicate matters, many of these dynamics work in tandem to strengthen or reinforce each other or they may work to cancel each other out. A specific example would be “urgency” and “anxiety”. Adding in high “anxiety” to a person that is also high on “urgency” is like adding fuel to the fire which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your sale and your environment. Because of the wealth of information Caliper provides and the complexity of how each dynamic influences behavior, I prefer this assessment to other, more simplified sales assessments such as the PI. It is also one of the more difficult assessments to "game" or match your answers to the needs of the job.

Whichever assessment you use, the key to using them correctly is identifying the dynamics that must be present (or absent) and it what amount. Many qualities, such as ‘thoroughness”, work best for us when they are in the middle of the range (30-70).

How We Use Sales Assessments for Our Sales Hiring.

We use the information from these assessments primarily to gain a more complete picture of the person (strengths, weaknesses, how to lead them, etc). Very little of this data gives us a Hire or No Hire result. There are, however, a few specific ingredients that we have found in every successful hire we’ve made. Given that there are different paths to achieving success, these scores usually need to fall into a wide range.

As an aside, it should not be assumed that higher scores are better. With that noted, I prefer extreme personalities as they tend to do extremely well or extremely bad. It also tends to show up quickly which it will be once you’ve hired them.

To help make sense of all this information, we’ve grouped the qualities that we look for into general categories such as sales aptitude and process/structure. We then combine all of the scores that apply to a given category such as sales aptitude. This gives us a fairly complete picture as to a person’s overall suitability for sales. Areas of concern uncovered by the assessments are addressed through follow-up questions that we add to their interview process.

I'll give you a real-world example of how we vet concerns. One of our most successful hires had an “urgency” score, per Caliper, of 45 which was below our bar of 60 (out of 99). After each step in the interview process, we watched how quickly he responded. We also dug into this topic with his references. Each step of the way his response time was excellent and his references went out of their way to speak to his responsiveness. Conversely, we have eliminated candidates with strong “urgency” scores that failed to display that behavior during the interview process. 

Helping to make sense of how to incorporate assessments into the greater interview process is a chart (shown below) found in an excellent HBR article, The Best Ways to Hire Salespeople.

Our own evaluation process weights our structured interviews more and assessment results less. One additional tool/step that we have in our own interview process is requiring potential hires to document their sales numbers. I discuss this topic in detail in our eBook on How to Hire Top Sales Performers.

Using Sales Assessments at Your Company.

Unless you have a wealth of top sales performers to assess at your company I advise that you start slowly with integrating sales personality tests into your interview process. Given how hot the current recruiting market is, tossing out potentially viable candidates is a quick path to unfilled positions. 

In my experience, sales assessments should be used to answer two questions. 1. Does the person in question possess general sales aptitude? 2. Are there any red flags the assessment raises that should be addressed during the interview process? Until you have enough data and have invested the time and energy to isolate exactly which traits are required in your sales role; asking anything more of a sales assessment is asking too much.

About Chris Carlson

Chris Carlson is the founder and President of Sales Talent Inc, a National B2B sales recruiting firm. Employers can click here to learn more about our sales recruiting services. Sales professionals can view our current sales openings here.