The quality of sales talent has been identified as a key indicator of the Organization or the department’s revenue growth and performance. The war of Talent (Mckinsey 2000 and 2015) clearly articulates that 20% of the sales team delivers more than 67% of the revenues which means that there is a huge gap in assessing and hiring the right talent.
Hiring managers seem to not have the necessary competency or tools to assess the incoming talent and make informed decisions based on scientific data that are usually difficult to interpret during a normal interview process. This is not a generic statement but seems to be the case based on my experience of observing several such managers, especially while trying to hire knowledge workers. It has also been observed that hiring managers tend to interview sales talent for the job based on the job description and not for long-term futuristic employment hence limiting the discussions to transactional questions.
It was concluded by Tepper, Bakosh, and Hagberg (2009) that talent assessment data and benchmarking with high performers by leveraging the right assessment tools can benefit the sales hiring managers in assessing the stage of the Sales Talent Lifecycle. We @ Spiria conduct niche assessments that are specialized for sales leaders that clearly leverage deep data and analytics to help hiring managers to support their experience and intuitions or for talent development on a long-term basis
