Sales IQ Plus

Sales IQ Plus Assessment

Most people know that the measure of a salesperson’s success is their ability to make sales. However, how can a sales manager or organization determine a sales professional’s current skill level and how can sales professionals effectively identify their own areas of improvement, while finding practical solutions for correcting them?

As with any profession, there are a multitude of skills, behaviors, knowledge and attitudes involved in successful selling. To improve sales performance requires periodically examining all of these areas. The Sales IQ Plus assessment offers an objective analysis to answer the question, "What is keeping this person from selling more?"

Measuring Sales IQ

The Sales IQ Plus assessment is an objective analysis designed as a starting point — a type of ‘personalized map’ for your sales knowledge at this moment in time. It tells you where you are, why you are there and how to improve by offering specific insights and responses based on your assessment results.

This assessment takes approximately 30 minutes to complete and consists of 48 questions that guide you in assessing each of the eight primary sales competencies. From this, you will be able to accurately and more easily:

• Develop a plan to overcome challenges
• Simplify sales training
• Focus on areas that produce results
• Build confidence
• Determine strategies that are needed to sell a specific product/service in a given market
• Identify every new sales applicant’s strengths and weaknesses
• Address specific training or management needs of a salesperson or sales team

The Eight Primary Sales Competencies

A sales "competency" is a category of selling proficiency that contains a number of different skills and knowledge components. By assessing your effectiveness in each of these areas, you will gain critical insight into your sales competencies:

Preparing

Preparing for the sale and preparing yourself. You can be well prepared with information and sales tools, but if you are not in the appropriate frame of mind, or if you do not appear professional to the buyer, you might not get the sale.

Targeting

Targeting explores the markets or groups you may target as prospective buyers. Then, we focus on the individuals with whom you will make contact. This includes the sales strategies and tactics you select for each target market.

Connecting

Connecting is the initial sales contact step, where you must appeal to people intellectually so they will see you as a credible resource, and emotionally so that they will trust you. Without either, you may be inhibited from learning enough to effectively help them and make the sale.

Assessing

Assessing needs and wants seeks to uncover what to sell and how to sell it, primarily through asking the right questions and listening for the answers. As they say, “In sales as in medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.”

Solving

Solving the buyer’s problem, or fulfilling their need, is where most sales attention has been placed in the past. During this step, you present your ideas and solutions, tell your stories, and demonstrate your product to show how your solution best meets their needs.

Confirming

Confirming is the sales phase where you gain the prospect’s commitment to buy. Confirming is achieved only after you have shown the ability to solve the prospect’s problem. Historically, this has been known as “closing” the sale.

Assuring

Assuring clients that what they’ve been promised will be received is critical to customer retention. This is where relationships are built - customer loyalty is earned when you give more than expected, simply because it’s in the best interest of your customer.

Managing

Managing is the final phase of the sales cycle, where you continue to manage the sales process, the account and yourself. Ultimately, you are your own ‘sales manager’. This is the place where you must do what needs to be done to follow through.

Real Sales Strategies Used By Today's Sales Force

The Sales IQ Plus report will provide feedback on an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. From this, you will be able to accurately and more easily:

• Develop a plan to overcome the individual’s weaknesses
• Simplify sales training
• Focus on areas that produce results
• Build confidence
• Identify the sales strategies that are needed to sell a specific product/service in a given market
• Identify every new sales applicant’s strengths and weaknesses
• Identify specific training or management needs of a salesperson or sales force

The Sales IQ Plus assessment is an objective analysis designed as a starting point — a type of ‘personalized map’ for your sales knowledge at this moment in time. It tells you where you are, why you are there and how to improve by offering specific insights and responses based on your assessment results.