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Sales aptitude tests do not work when it comes to hiring sales people. Period. When my daughter was young and would bring me some wild eyed story I would sit down with her and ask her to give it the “common sense test.” The “common sense test” was to take what she already knew to be true and see if the claims even remotely matched up to that prior knowledge.

So let’s do that for sales aptitude tests.

1. Considering the cost of turnover in a sales department and the importance of sales in an organization, don’t you think that if there were a sales aptitude test that even remotely worked that everyone would be using it and the inventor would be seen as a sales god?
2. There are a million different sales aptitude tests out there, maybe more. One of them must work really well (and we just haven’t heard about it) or none of them are very effective. The fact that there are so many should be enough to scare you off.
3. Do any of them give any ironclad guarantee as to their effectiveness? Will they reimburse the new hire’s salary if their test gives you a thumbs up but their performance is a thumbs down?
4. Virtually all of these sales aptitude tests will tell you that the test results should only be considered a variable in the hiring decision. They will tell you to use the test results as only 10 – 50% of the decision making process.

Hiring sales professionals is too difficult and has too many variables to rely on just a written test. Save your money and use your time and resources in some other hiring areas that I will cover in future posts.

Tags: tests

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