SALES ASSESSMENT TESTING

Pre-employment testing is a major consideration for most companies in order to pre-empt job avoidance among aspiring candidates. Of particular significance is sales assessment testing, which takes a peek at an employee’s behavioral functions, interpersonal skills and communication ability among others. Sales assessment testing seeks to address and evaluate an employee’s likely response in crunch situations like inclination to or reluctance of making sales calls.

ISCIS, an acronym for Inhibited Social Contact Initiation Syndrome, is a pointer of emotion-activated avoidance behavior among employees, related in particular to the act of initiating first social contact. Cutting across disparate contact-dependent work-settings like business, government, academics, fund-raising and even dating, ISCIS symptoms are equally prevalent and come into play when an individual is reluctant to meet new people, and subside or altogether cease after an initial contact has been successfully made.

Sales assessment testing is effective in ferreting out key behavioral traits in employees so that it is easier for an assessor to judge an employee’s potential in meeting larger objectives of a company. In conducting sales assessment testing, certain parameters are important in terms of effectiveness of the test and achieving impartial test-results. Some of these are enumerated below:

SPQ* Gold, authored by George W. Dudley and Shannon L. Goodson, is a result of pioneering research aimed at tracing emotional liability in prospective employees through the widely-acclaimed Sales Preference Questionnaire. SPQ* Gold dovetails measurement of all 12 types of sales call reluctance and includes three scales used to detect non-standard attitudes toward completing the instrument.

One of the scales, the "Brake" score, is a statistical composite derived after aggregating scores from all 12 diagnostic sub-categories. The Brake score provides a succinct overall view of an employee’s effort which, instead of prospecting for sales, is diverted to non-productive coping behaviors intended to reduce emotional discomfort associated with prospecting for new business.

For any sales-oriented entity, whether government, business, academics or any other, sales assessment testing is an absolute necessity, for which SPQ* Gold is a valuable aid.

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SPQ*Gold’s Sales Preference Questionnaire is a limited purpose self-descriptive instrument that can be used to effectively assess the presence, predisposition, and degree of sales call reluctance in candidates for sales positions. What is more, it also finds application to provide assessment-based support for training and developmental applications with current sales people.

There is often a toss-up between necessity of sales assessment testing and leaving it aside. While properly-formatted sales assessment testing would entail pressure on resources (in terms of time and money), many companies give it a go-by hoping to tide over any crisis, if and when that happens.

But such a crisis does not occur all of a sudden so that your second line of defense becomes immediately activated. In most cases, the disease of incompetent sales performance creeps in slowly, almost unnoticed till ultimately it is written all over. At that stage there is nothing much that can be done and no amount of disaster planning can come to rescue. It is for this reason that there is an increasing awareness for the need for sales assessment testing prior to hiring sales people.


Sales assessment testing holds the key to evaluate and correct the strengths and weaknesses of sales force. Do your salespeople have skills to judge a selling chance and convert it into sale? Are they sincere in attending to buyers’ queries and concerns? Do they understand the process of closing sales in your company? How do they come across in first appearance when approaching a prospect? These are several other factors responsible for successful selling come to the fore in sales assessment testing.

Many sales organizations by default accept the ‘inevitability’ of what is known as the ‘80/20 rule’. As if this is something that is so sacrosanct that no effort can alter it. The 80/20 rule subscribes to the concept that 80% of all products and services are sold by just about 20% of the sales force. While in-depth industry-wide analyses have indeed proved so, it is nevertheless a wrong policy to succumb to it. Doing so would mean that sales assessment testing have no real value whatsoever.

On the contrary, sales assessment testing provide sufficient information and easy-to-follow indicators for evaluating sales people as they approach prospective buyers to explain and sell products and services. A perfect example is SPQ*Gold’s Sales Preference Questionnaire. This ubiquitous tool is a great help for business owners, consultants and executives to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses of job-seeking sales persons before they are hired. How does SPQ*GOLD help?


Little wonder then that SPQ*GOLD is considered today as one of the most validated applications for sales assessment testing. Its current applications are based on not less than 300,000 administrations internationally, making it the most widely used diagnostic instrument for conducting sales assessment testing in the world.