Why Personality Quizzes are a Must for Sales Teams
The more you understand your salespeople's unique personalities, the better you can manage them. Start with these quizzes.
Kristi Hines
Everyone loves to take online quizzes: That’s why they’re so popular on social media. But quizzes can also play an important role for companies and their sales teams. Personality quizzes, in particular, can help you identify the strengths of each member of your sales team so you can ensure they are being used in the best ways possible. In this post, we’re going to look at how personality quizzes can help your company best manage your sales team, and which ones out there are optimized for business.
How to Use Personality Quizzes for Your Sales Team
Before we look at your options, let’s review the variety of ways you can use personality quizzes to get the most out of your sales team.
Hire the right people from the start
Have you ever hired someone who aced the interview with flying colours, only to realize later that they didn’t mesh with your company culture? No matter how good of an interviewer you are or how complex your questions, there are plenty of guides that can help almost anyone pass an interview process.
Fortunately, there are personality tests that can help you before you onboard someone to your sales team. They can help ensure a candidate is the right fit for your company and the rest of your team. This will help you build a strong sales team and reduce costs associated with new employee training, high turnover, repeated job listings, and potential legal fees.
Find out where each member of your sales team will make an impact
How does your company make sales? Is it by…
- Sponsoring conferences and networking events where you meet potential clients, make sales pitches, and run demos at booths?
- Sending sales reps out to organizations to make sales presentations in one-on-one meetings or in front of groups?
- Having sales reps communicate with prospects via email or by phone?
If your company uses multiple sales tactics like the ones listed above, knowing the personality type of each member of your sales team will help you determine which sales environment is most comfortable for them. For example, your introverted sales team members will most likely prefer communication by email or over the phone, while your most extroverted sales team members will likely prefer selling to prospective clients in person at events and in boardroom presentations.
You may also find that you have introverted extroverts (or vice versa) on your sales team. These are people who love to sell at events, but need some downtime after the event to re-energize. You can send them to a conference and expect them to do an excellent job, but allow them time to communicate by email or over the phone in between these appearances to recuperate.
Make each member of your sales team feel valuable
Certain personality types thrive on public recognition. Others prefer a discreet bonus on their next cheque when they do a good job.
What’s more, some people want their managers to check in with them often to see how things are going. And others feel that constant check-ins mean that they are doing something wrong.
When every member of your sales team feels valued, their job won’t be just about closing deals and earning commissions, but about being a valuable asset and team member. The key is to make each person feel valued in the right way.
Most people think of personality tests as a way to reveal basic character traits, such as whether an individual is an introvert or an extrovert. But there are far more ways you can use these tests to help you learn how to make each member of your team feel valued. The more you learn, the more you can do to make sure you are doing your utmost to retain your top performers.
Help your sales team improve personally and professionally
You can offer personality quizzes as a recommendation to members of your sales team as a way to improve themselves personally and professionally. They can use them to identify how they can improve their interactions with others, including relationship building, persuasion, judgment, and a variety of other aspects. Your sales team can identify strengths and weaknesses, then use the results to improve upon them.
As a company, you can just suggest that each employee take these personality quizzes. In some cases, you can purchase credits for each member of your sales team to help them get started.
Personality Quizzes for Sales Teams and Professionals
Now that you know some of the benefits of personality quizzes, let’s look at some of the best personality quizzes, tests, programs, and assessments for the professional world.
Athena Assessment: Pre-Employment Testing
Want to ensure you hire the right people for your sales team from the start? Consider using the Athena Assessment, which allows you to learn about a potential candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, how those affect their job performance, and what you can ask in the interview to help you make your decision. The assessment itself takes 30 minutes or less; as an employer, you will get 10 detailed files that evaluate your candidate. Here’s an example of one of those reports.
The Athena Assessment
- Screens candidates for strengths and weaknesses
- Helps interviewers ask the right questions and hire the right people
Depending on how often your company is hiring, you can purchase assessments individually, in discounted packs of five or 20, or as a monthly subscription package. In terms of the return on investment, when you think of hiring the right person from the start versus hiring, firing, and starting the process all over again, it is absolutely worth it each time you are ready to hire. You can give the assessment a trial run for $12.50 by using discount code hiresmart to see how it works and what you can learn about potential employees.
Pilot Judgment: Online Self-Improvement Program
Judgment and decision-making skills are highly important when it comes to sales. Your sales team must make quick judgments and on-the-spot decisions on a daily basis when it comes to both closing deals and keeping customers happy. The Pilot Judgment program (by the creators of the Athena Assessment) starts with an assessment to see where you are in terms of these two skills, and it generally takes 45 minutes or less to complete.
Once you finish the test, you can watch videos that explain how the Pilot Judgment program and assessment work. In the left sidebar is a link to your own assessment results and scores. This document has three parts: your work side, your personal side, and your overall balance of judgment.
The Pilot Judgment
- Assesses judgment and decision-making skills
- A monthly service that provides weekly training to improve on any weaknesses
From here, you can click on the Development tab to review videos and documents specific to the areas you need to improve.
Unlike most assessments with a one-time fee, the Pilot Judgment is a monthly program aimed not only at showing you your weak spots, but also teaching you about each one of them, how they affect your work and personal life, and how to develop them into strengths.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Official Personality Assessment
This is probably the most well-known personality quiz. Its results answers questions such as:
- Do members of your sales team draw energy from others, or from their inner world of thought?
- Do they focus on the real and tangible, or take in the big picture?
- Do they use logical analysis, or consider the feelings of others involved?
- Are they flexible and spontaneous, or planned and orderly?
- What does that all mean to your company?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is an official online assessment. Your sales team member will answer a series of questions to determine which of the 16 personality types they fall into. In an individualized report, they can read a description of their type’s characteristics, how they interact with others, how they work, and what their blind spots are.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
- Learn which of the 16 personality types your employee is
- Each personality is based on four factors
- Extraversion vs. Introversion
- Sensing vs. Intuition
- Thinking vs. Feeling
- Judging vs. Perceiving
Once you get these insights from your sales team members, it will be easier for you to know which sales tactics would suit them best and how to better communicate with them.
MBA Inventory: Motivation by Appreciation
In the sales world, there’s a lot of talk about gamification and other ways to motivate your sales team’s performance. But if you really want to get in tune with what is going to work, you can try the MBA Inventory. It’s based on psychologists Paul White and Gary Chapman’s The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, an offshoot of Chapman’s series for couples on the five love languages.
This inventory takes 20 minutes or less to complete. Once finished, each member of your sales team will be able to tell you their primary and secondary languages. These languages dictate how they prefer you to communicate your appreciation, as well as their least valued language for expressing appreciation.
Motivation by Appreciation (MBA) Inventory
- Based on The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman, which include
- Words of affirmation
- Acts of service
- Receiving gifts
- Quality time
- The results show how that particular person likes to be shown appreciation
Ideally, you will find a language that most of your sales team will have in common. You may find that all but one prefers a language, or your most valuable sales team member needs something different that you can accommodate based on their performance.
Gallup StrengthsFinder: Lead with Your Strengths
Want your sales team to be more productive? Help them discover their core strengths. The Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment does this. Depending on the level of detail required by your sales team, tests will identify their top five strengths or evaluate a complete profile of all 34 strengths. Both options produce a report that describes these strengths, from most dominant to those that need improvement.
Gallup’s StrengthsFinder
- People who use their strengths every day are 6 times more likely to be engaged on the job
- Teams that focus on their strengths are 12.5% more productive
- This assessment will produce a report that shows the taker’s strengths ranked from 1
1- Intellection
People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussion.
2- Harmony
People who are especially talented in the Harmony theme look for consensus. They don’t enjoy conflict;rather, they seek areas of agreement.
3-Deliberative
People who are specially talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate the obstacles.
4- Consistency
People who are specially talented in the Consistency theme are keenly aware of the need to treat people the same. They try to treat everyone in the world with consistency by setting up clear rules and adhering to them.
5- Adaptability
People who are specially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to ”go with the flow”. ”They tend to be ”now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.
You will also receive an action guide on how to be aware of your top strengths, apply them to your personal and professional life, and use them to achieve your ultimate goals. It will also offer advice on how to improve in other areas.
As a sales team manager, having your team complete the StrengthsFinder will help you further determine better ways to use each of your sales team members in the most effective and productive ways possible.
In Conclusion
While many personality tests are for fun and games, these professionally focused assessments can be used for sales teams at every stage, from hiring to developing a stronger, more effective team. If you want to improve your sales team’s results, consider using one or more quizzes to help each team member improve both personally and professionally.
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