Calculating the Cost of Low Performance
Eighty percent of sales are generated by twenty percent of the salespeople. In most cases, a good salesperson will out-produce a poor salesperson by a factor of at least four to one. The wrong hirer will be costly.

What Kind of Sales?
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck...it might be a pigeon. Not all sales jobs are alike. There are tangible and intangible products; long-term and short-term sales cycles; one-time and repeat clients; big dollar and small dollar sales; relationship selling and product selling; single and multiple buyer involvement; cold calling and referral selling; and so forth. The skills and motivations change significantly with each sales job — and so will job success or failure.

What's More Important?
Not all characteristics have equal value. A highly motivated, yet "un-smart" salesperson could be a recipe for disaster. Too much ego-strength leads to narcissism and the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of the organization (several political examples come to mind). Highly persistent people might not know when to stop wasting time on a lost cause. It's important to know which factors weigh the most for each job. One size does not fit all, and more is not always better.

How Do You Measure Sales Skills?
1. Past performance.
This is the domain of the interview. Interviews are filled with both strengths and weaknesses. Their strengths include flexibility and familiarity (everyone considers themselves interview "experts"). Interview weaknesses include total dependence on self-reported information and interviewer skills. The only accurate interviews are based on job analysis, structured questions, and either behavioural or situational interviewer techniques. Interviews that do not follow these guidelines tend to hire people who have a major chance of being low producers.

2. Present skills.
This is the domain of simulations, case studies, and pencil-and-paper tests. These are all methods of putting an applicant into a job-like situation and seeing how he or she performs. Think of them as flight simulators for business. Simulations are among the most accurate measures of selling, coaching, presentation, customer service, or teamwork skills. (If you are trained in behavioural interviewing techniques, it is because you control the situation, you observe the behaviour, and you evaluate the results). Case studies are business-like scenarios where people have to figure out problems and recommend solutions. They do not have clear-cut answers. Pencil and paper tests are usually measures of knowledge or mental ability.
Point to ponder: You can fake-good in an interview, but you can't fake-good in a simulation or test.

3. Future intentions.
This is where motivation, attitude, and interest tests fit. They are easy to fake, and give "hints" — not hard evidence — of future intentions. There is only about a two to eight percent relationship between scores on this kind of test and actual skills. As a rule of thumb, you can trust "bad" scores more than "good" scores.

Using the same metrics when choosing your own sales people as you do when you are selecting sales people for your clients will continue to strengthen your business. Make sure that you don't confine your internal recruitment on "gut feel" or industry hear say. Creating an internal hiring process around past performance, present skills and future intentions will pay dividends.