how valid is sales talent assessment

www.salesassessment.com

Specification and Validity of Sales Talent Assessment

Taking a closer look at the details

There are two elements that together make up the validity of a talent assessment instrument. This document examines the Predictive and Structural validity components for Sales Talent Assessment, as well as the key underlying construct approach:

1. Introduction.

Sales Talent Assessment is a unique offering in the assessment space, bridging the gap between the cost and convenience of ‘cheap and cheerful’ psychometric tools and the rigor and predictive value of an intensive three-day assessment centre.

It combines the flexibility and ease of use of online delivery with an extensive but focused assessment of those factors which have been scientifically shown to be predictive of performance in a range of specific sales roles.

Sales Talent Assessment is different in the approach it takes to the assessment process and, as a consequence, is able to offer previously unheard of levels of accuracy in predicting performance potential within a specific sales role.

It is also more than an assessment: by delivering an in-depth development needs analysis for every individual, clients are provided with a solution to the issues identified by the assessment, whether this be retention, training, coaching or redeployment.

SalesAssessment.com has identified five factors relevant to performance in any sales role. Dubbed the ‘High Five’, these are:


1. Behaviour –individuals’ behavioural preference determines their comfort in performing a specific sales role.

2. Critical reasoning – tests the speed and accuracy with which individuals are able to analyse data and so is a measure of applied intellect within the business context.

3. Skills – functional skills determine how well an individual can perform a role.

4. Motivators – people have different motivators: motivation drives an individual’s desire to perform in a role; in turn, desire drives results.

5. Cultural Fit – determines an individual’s compatibility with a specific organization and familiarity with a particular industry sector.

Of these, the first four in combination offer a highly predictive insight into an individual’s performance potential in a specific sales role. These are what Sales Talent Assessment measures.

The fifth element, Cultural Fit is not a reliable indicator of performance potential on its own (Professor Mike Smith: ‘Calculating the Sterling Value of Selection’, Guidance & Assessment

Review, February 1988.), although it may be a relevant factor in any hiring decision. In the absence of other techniques, cultural compatibility with an organization or industry sector has been the element most commonly addressed by the traditional CV (résumé) and interview recruitment process.

Sales Talent Assessment does not measure an individual’s Cultural Fit with an organization or industry sector, because this element of the assessment is best carried out by a prospective employer using tried-and-tested interview techniques.

“…of these, the first four in combination offer a highly predictive insight

into an individual’s performance potential in a specific sales role. …”


2. How is Sales Talent Assessment different from other assessment products?

Sales Talent Assessment is a class-leading online assessment tool that delivers levels of predictive accuracy comparable with a three-day assessment centre – but at significantly lower cost, both in terms of expense, and in time to complete the assessment.

It is able to deliver these benefits thanks to a uniquely insightful approach to the assessment process. Sales Talent Assessment:

• works straight out of the box on a consistent basis – this ensure you can assess one person or 10,000, in one country or world-wide, and get objective like-for-like analysis, without requiring outside consultants or having to develop your own performance benchmark.

• is currently available in 8 languages versions – US & international English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Russian and Spanish (Castilian and Latin-American).

• is role-specific – assessment criteria are tailored to the specific role being assessed, rather than a generic, one-size-fits-all ‘sales’ role.

• is externally benchmarked role by role – individuals are assessed against the profile of a global High-Performer.

• uses lead (not lag) indicators – the benchmarks are continually realigned to evolving market conditions, ensuring the assessment process compares candidates with today’s global High Performer profile, not what good used to look like last year.

• is in-depth and comprehensive – the assessment methodology evaluates in depth all the relevant factors which influence revenue performance:

o Behaviour o Critical reasoning o Skills o Motivators

• has been externally validated and delivers consistent results across different geographies, roles and languages, making it extremely consistent and robust.

“..works straight out of the box on a consistent basis – this ensure you

can assess one person or 10,000, in one country or world-wide…”


Sales jobs are quite clearly not all the same. Whilst there are certain similarity between different sales roles – they are all customer-facing and share the common goal of clinching a deal – there are extensive differences between the skills, behaviours and critical reasoning ability between say, a retail assistant and a business-to-business Strategic Sales professional.

“Independently assessed by SHL in 2007 and found to be THE most

predictively accurate on-line assessment product on the market”


Research by the highly experienced SalesAssessment.com team originally identified 35 core sales roles and three critical supporting roles; further sector-specific roles also exist. This original research included extensive input from business, contributions from analysts and a study of the available academic literature.

Because each sales role is different – although some may share features in common – they require different behaviours, skills and levels of critical reasoning for individuals to perform at the highest level in the role.

This means that, while individuals may be suited to one specific type of sales role, it does not necessarily follow that they will be as well suited to a different one. The converse is also true: while individuals may not be suited to one specific role, they may have the right combination of competencies and skills to perform well in another.

This is an innate strength in the approach taken by SalesAssessment.com: because it is able to offer a considerable degree of granularity concerning the competencies and skills relevant to each individual sales role, Sales Talent Assessment is able to accurately predict an individual’s performance potential in the specific roles relevant to an employing organization.

Each Sales Talent Assessment is supported by a thoroughly researched role definition – based on a robust competency framework incorporating the relevant skills and competencies for that specific sales role. This underlying competency framework is defined with input from business in terms of their current and future requirements, specialist recruiters, partner organizations, analysts and the relevant academic literature (where available).

Creating role definitions is a rigorous and exhaustive process: it requires major investment in time and resource to complete each one. We currently offer 17 specific sales, sales management and leadership roles and are adding further roles on an on-going basis.

Each role defines the skills and competencies you would expect to find in a global High-Performer for that specific sales role, and is validated for its alignment to evolving market conditions. We define a High-Performer as being amongst the top 20% of individuals within a role globally, rather than the more common definition of the top 20% within an organization. And we aim to realign each role – and its supporting competency framework – to the market as frequently as every six months but at least every 12 months.

“..while individuals may be suited to one specific type of sales role, it does

not necessarily follow that they will be as well suited to a different one”


3. How do we define the relevant skills and competencies that drive sales performance?

We base our assessments around the four factors, discussed previously, which have been shown by reliable academic studies to drive performance. These are:

• Behaviour – this determines an individual’s level of comfort in performing a specific role.

• Critical reasoning – this measures applied intellect within the business context. • Skills – these determine an individual’s ability to perform a specific role. • Motivators – these drive an individual’s desire to perform.

Performance within a specific sales role is a complex issue. Whilst each of these factors has some level of performance predictability on their own, when taken together they reliably predict future performance to a level of accuracy comparable with that of a full three-day assessment centre.

A fifth factor – cultural fit – is much more commonly used by organizations when they seek to predict individual performance. This element is usually measured by employers as part of their traditional interview and selection process, and may be important in enabling individuals to mesh with a particular industry or organizational style. Nevertheless, cultural fit has been conclusively shown to be almost statistically irrelevant in terms of predicting individual performance (Professor Mike Smith: ‘Calculating the Sterling Value of Selection’, Guidance &

Assessment Review, February 1988.).

Wider talent pool

This is actually an advantage for employers because it means they can extend their search for high-performing sales talent beyond their traditional industry talent pool, sure in the knowledge that any candidates identified as High-Performers for a specific role have the potential to perform well in their industry. All they have to do is to supply the required depth of understanding and industry knowledge to enable the candidate to carry out the role – something which is relatively straightforward in today’s knowledge society.

“..it means they [employers] can extend their search for high-performing

sales talent beyond their traditional industry talent pool”


4. How do we measure the relevant competencies and skills?

We measure behaviour, critical reasoning and motivators using well-validated products from assessment industry leaders SHL:

• Behaviour. All role assessments use well validated psychometric questionnaires: one example is SHL’s OPQ32r, although others from the same stable, or similar, are used depending on the specific role under assessment. From the behavioural questionnaire, the results most closely aligned to the specific sales role being assessed are analysed: although the format is generally the same for all roles, the output is specifically aligned role by role, showing only the key competencies relevant to the role in question.

• Critical reasoning. All our assessments involve one or more critical reasoning tests, although the type and level of test vary according to role: one example being SHL’s Verify.

• Motivators. A Motivation Questionnaire is used to identify what drives an individual’s desire to perform: one example here being the SHL MQ.

• Skills. We test for relevant skills with SalesAssessment.com’s own detailed skills questionnaire specially developed for each specific role – capability for each role is rigorously tested using a battery of ‘professional’ and business-focused questions.

SHL psychologists have confirmed the validity not only of their own components but our entire assessment methodology, confirming that the additional skills element and the role-specific nature of the assessments considerably enhances the predictive capability of the Sales Talent Assessment approach. They rated it as the most predictively accurate on-line assessment available on the market today.

“SHL psychologists have confirmed the validity not only of their own

components but our entire assessment methodology.. and have rated it

as the most accurate on-line assessment on the market today.”


5. How is Sales Talent Assessment validated?

Sales Talent Assessment is rigorously validated in two distinct ways – in terms both of its structural validity (does it test what it says it does?) and its predictive validity (are the outcomes of the assessment consistent with what is happening in the real world?).

The assessment is extensively validated in terms of:

• Design of each specific sales role. • Analysis of the relevant competencies. • Design and validation of the assessment questions. • On-going realignment of the role assessment to meet evolving market conditions. • Further validity studies.

Here’s what some of our customers have said:

“The Sales Talent Assessment High Performer benchmark really does work – when a candidate’s Sales Talent Assessment results indicate that they are a High Performer – then their revenue performance fully backs that up; and vice versa.” AK; VP Global HR and People Development; QlikTech

“In deploying Sales Talent Assessment, we were able to gain the advantages that we sought without taking our team out of the selling day. The results were insightful, giving a detailed and accurate understanding of the team that immediately allowed us to better manage each individual member of the team and, therefore our company, more successfully”. PM, Director Sales and Marketing, Causeway Technologies Ltd

““Growing businesses need the best sales talent, with the right skills, in the right roles, with each sales person highly motivated at all times. Yet that is one of the hardest things to get right. Sales Talent Assessment delivers the means for any business manager to get that golden combination, whether you understand sales people or not. Whether hiring, or developing your existing sales people, Sales Talent Assessment can guide your investment decisions into the areas that will deliver the most return. I would recommend Sales Talent Assessment as the sales assessment tool of choice for all growing businesses.” PG, MD, Hopewiser, (the Address Experts)

“Sales Talent Assessment is rigorously validated in two distinct ways – in

terms both of its structural validity and its predictive validity.”


6. How do we ensure the structural validity of our assessments?

We design each sales roles based on extensive research in terms of the current and future requirements of business, specialist recruiters, partner organizations, analysts and also amongst the relevant academic literature (where available). This delivers a robust role definition and competency framework for each specific sales role.

We beta test each role with a client group. Prior to introduction, beta trials of each specific assessment role build a data set to confirm the validity of the initial research-based formulation.

We monitor the data from our assessments for structural validity. We continuously monitor the performance of our Sales Talent Assessment products – assessment by assessment – across all roles and for every language in which our assessments are available.

Anomalies are flagged early as part of the on-going monitoring process. Any departure from the expected normal distribution for a particular data set is investigated immediately to identify the source of that anomaly – whether this is a problem with the wording within a specific question set, an issue in the translation, or the positioning of the actual benchmark itself. With analytics running constantly in the background, we are able to monitor the performance of our assessments in real time: our approach enables the system to be self-correcting as part of a continuous refinement process driven by the growing data set.

We continually align the role definition and competency framework to evolving market conditions, at least every year but as frequently as every six months where possible.

“With analytics running constantly in the background, we are able to

monitor the performance of our assessments in real time.”


7. How do we monitor the predictive validity of our assessments?

SHL has validated and underwritten the methodology used by our assessment

process, not only in terms of the deployment of their own tools as part of our

assessments, but also in terms of the additional predictive power provided by using

them in combination with our own extremely rigorous skills assessment modules.

We feed real-world client experience back into the process. Continually checking

back with clients enables us to confirm that the High-Performers highlighted by the

assessment process do in fact correspond to the individuals they have identified as

the top performers within their organization.

We are initiating a further

detailed study of the validity

of our assessment

methodology, which is due

for completion in 2013. As

well as revalidating the four

original components

validated in a previous

study, this enhanced study

takes a holistic approach to

the validation of the

assessment process.

We are formalizing our on-

going predictive validation methodology across all sales roles and all clients. This will

enable us to move during 2013 from an interval-based methodology to continuous

validation, with a validity review undertaken on every candidate.

“We feed real-world client experience back into the process.”


8. How do we maintain the validity of our assessments?

We monitor the on-going validity of our individual assessments in terms of the relevance of the specific individual role and its alignment to evolving market conditions.

Customer & market expectations continually evolve over time: this, in turn, means our assessments (and their underlying role definitions and competency frameworks) also need to be realigned to keep them in step. We undertake this realignment exercise at least every 12 months and, where possible, as often as every six months – for instance, we are currently on Version 5 of our Strategic Selling assessment.

Updated versions of specific assessment roles are developed through detailed analysis of relevant competencies for each role through: > input from analysts; > research into the recruitment marketplace; and > detailed feedback from clients about the expectations of their

customers.

We continuously monitor the data from our assessments for anomalies and statistical validity.

Sales Talent Assessment from SalesAssessment.com is a unique assessment tool, focused entirely on the sales space.

It combines the flexibility and ease of use of online tools, with the relevance and predictive accuracy of bespoke assessment centres.

It provides the objectivity and performance improvement potential only available via a global High-Performer benchmark, coupled with unparalleled levels of predictive accuracy, thanks to the combination of factors it tests.

It can be targeted to the precise needs of clients and their customers because of the large number of specific sales roles we have defined.

It is continually future-proofed through on-going alignment of the factors being measured by the assessments to evolving market requirements.

It is continually and rigorously assessed in terms of its structural and predictive validity.

It is available in numerous languages; ensuring assessments can take place across all major geographies.

“We continuously monitor the data from our assessments for anomalies

and statistical validity.”


Making sense of sales talent

Head Office: Longcroft, Church Lane, Arborfield, RG2 9JA, UK

+44 (0)207 078 8818 www.salesassessment.com

how valid is sales talent assessment

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