Assess Sales Competence
Make more reliable talent decisions, decrease turnover and recruitment costs, and boost the productivity of your salesforce.
What is a Sales Competence Assessment?
The Sales Competency test is an assessment and coaching tool designed for the recruitment and development of salespeople. The assessment transforms the way organisations understand their salesforce and provides powerful insights to improve sales performance.
Sales Competence Assessments provide you with a sales competency framework to maximise the performance of your salespeople. Designed to strengthen and streamline learning, the assessment identifies strengths and weaknesses in 18 critically important sales competences.
Natural ability, predispositions, attitude, level of competence and mindset contribute the success of a salesperson. The revolutionary Sales Competence Assessment combines all these attributes into one report, that allows recruiters and sales managers make more reliable talent decisions, decrease staff turnover and recruitment costs, and increase the productivity of their salesforce.
The Sales Competence assessment measures the skills and competencies of salespeople in 18 areas, critical to their job performance. The test also reports on their mindset toward sales and their tendency to make excuses on the job.
Sales competency test reports highlight areas in which an individual may need development. The practical coaching tips and development plans provided in the assessment help to jumpstart sales development and progress.
Watch this video to lean more about our FinxS® Sales Competence Assessment Tool.
Boost Sales Performance
Make more reliable talent decisions, decrease turnover and recruitment costs, and increase the productivity of your salesforce.
Assess Sales Competence
Knowing how to assess sales competence can be overwhelming. Sales Competence Assessments transform the way we understand salespeople and teams. The assessment identifies the DNA of exceptional sales performance. The intuitive reports measure a salesperson's current level of competence in 18 key areas vital to success and provides explicit and tangible information to create a road map to success.
The assessment measures:
- The individuals current level of sales competence
- Underlying sales mindsets
- The sales Excuse Index®
- A salesperson's inclination toward sales roles
- Competence match between a salesperson's current ability and the sales process
The sales competency test measures 18 sales skills critical to success. Gain insight into a person's current level of competence levels across all 18 competencies. Identify areas of strength and development to understand where a salesperson may need extra coaching and development.
The sales skills measured in the report are:
- Prospecting
- Active Listening
- Qualifying
- Critical Thinking
- Building Rapport
- Ambition and Initiative
- Process Orientation
- Presenting
- Goal Orientation
- Time Management
- Need for Approval
- Dealing with Failure
- Controlling the Sales Process
- Competitiveness
- Handling Objections
- Money Concept
- Questioning Effectiveness
- Emotional Distance
Sales Mindsets
The Sales Competency Test also measures twelve mindsets. The mindsets act as a sales attitude assessment and are more innate than the eighteen sales competencies. These mindsets are like basic instincts and describe the way a person approaches problem solving and overcoming challenges. Sales attitudes are more difficult to coach than the competencies but allow for lasting change.
The twelve sales mindsets are:
- Conquering
- Hunter
- Persistence
- Reading the Situation
- Logic
- Hunger
- Empathy
- Social Approval
- Taking Control
- Next Step
- Finding the Truth
- Influencing
Measure Sales Excuse Index
We have revolutionised sales training with the introduction of the Sales Excuse Index. Sales is a tough profession and teams are often rampant with people who make excuses. We are the only company in New Zealand that can measure how likely a salesperson is to make excuses and on focus on non-sales related tasks. Sales managers can identify salespeople who stay focused on activities that will directly produce sales outcomes, leading to a focused and productive sales team.
Sales Competence Assessments
Sales Recruitment
Use the Sales Competence Recruitment Assessment during the pre-employment phase to uncover sales inhibitions that are not easily identified in an interview. Gain an accurate and easy-to-read percentage match between the candidate and your sales role to help select a winning sales force. The assessment also allows you to create your own sales role requirements and calculates a percentage matches for candidates.
Insights from the report help hiring managers understand if the respondent is better suited to a product or service where customers have latent or expressed need. Pair the respondent with a sales cycle and sales relationship that suits their skillset.
Sales Development
Sales Competence Development Assessments dig deeper into the DNA of a sales professionals mindset and level of ability. Generate an understanding of your sales people's current level of competence, mindsets that could potentially block sales success, revolutionary excuse index weighting and unique development plans in the Development Report.
The reports indicate areas in which an individual may need development. Practical coaching tips and development plans provided in the assessment enhance sales performance.
Sales Manager
The Sales Manager report pinpoints a salesperson's match at different phases of the sales process based on their current level of competence in the associated skillset. The report follows both pre- and post-sale processes to help the manager understand the strengths, weaknesses and development needs of their sales people. At every stage of the sales process, the results reveal if the competencies are a strength, small strength, medium impact, small risk, or a risk.
The stages in PRE-sale are, lead evaluation, initial contact, needs exploration, and closing/negotiation. The steps in POST-sale are: initial engagement, account management, and expansion.
Sales Team
Sales Competence Team reports deliver managers with a high level overview of the team. The reports provide big picture insights to make better decisions, develop the sales team, enhance productivity, and ultimately increase sales.
Once your salespeople have completed the questionnaire, there are seven team assessments available to sales managers at no additional cost. These assessments demonstrate and describe the sales team’s present competence level, their mindset score, and shared excuse index.
DISC Sales IQ
The DISC Sales IQ Test does what no other sales assessment can and connects a sales professional's natural, hard-wired DISC behavioural tendencies to 18 sales competencies critical to top sales performance.
The combination of the two technologies gives recruiters compelling insight into whether a candidate can quickly develop specific skills or if they are working against their natural behavioural style.
Assess and develop your salesforce
Sales Competence Assessment Questionnaire
The Sales Competence Assessment is an ipsative style questionnaire, also known as a forced-choice questionnaire, meaning respondents are given a set of statements and have to choose one or the other.
When completing the questionnaire, we recommend the respondents think of themselves in the current role. In each question, they are shown two statements and asked to choose the one they feel describes them better. For example:
Think of yourself when selling. Of the two options, select the one that describes you better.
- I have the mindset of a hunter who is always looking for new business opportunities
- I am an impatient listener who likes to take the conversation forward
Respondents have 99 statements to answer. Although the questionnaire does not have a time limit, we recommend respondents allow 30 minutes to answer all the questions.
The Sales Competence Questionnaire is designed specifically for salespeople with a minimum of six months experience. Some of the questions may be challenging for respondents to answer if they have never been in a sales role.
Sales Competence Accreditation
Our Sales Competence Accreditation training allows you to get started with our range of Sales Competence assessments in just one day. The sales accreditation workshop will empower you with in-depth, practical information on sales competence reports. It will provide you with a certification so that you can use the sales tool with your people and confidently debrief them on their results.
The comprehensive full-day workshop provides you with a lifetime certification with no expiry. Your certificate is transferable to other workplaces to help you enrich the portfolio of your skills and experience.
During the accreditation training, you will:
- Learn about our innovative tool for sales development and coaching
- Obtain a certificate authorising you to interpret the results independently
- Apply the Sales Competence Development and Recruitment Assessments to coaching and consulting situations.
- Understand how to apply to results for team applications
- Increase the effectiveness of your sales development programs
- Understand how to make more reliable hiring decisions
- Connect the sales tool to Extended DISC methodology for deeper analysis and development
- Enrich the portfolio of your products and services in a competitive market
Training is available online via video conference software or at a public certification day in Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch. We also travel across New Zealand to provide training from the comfort of your own office.
