November, 2016 | Cengrow

Sales Skills Assessment With Unleash Employees Sales Potential

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New trends in sales force selection and development have now made it easier for organisations to recruit the right talent for the right profile. There are now psychometric tests including a sales skills assessment and other methods that acts like a benchmark to allow employers to choose an employee with the personality traits that a company desires for its job positions.

Every organisation wants its employees to be self-driven, self-motivated and a go getter. For an organisation solely relying on its sales & marketing division, choosing an employee that has energy, innovative selling skills and resilience will prove to be an asset to the company.

Selecting candidates after an initial screening with a sales skills assessment makes the organisation employ better and increase its work efficiency and overall job performance.

A sales skills assessment or a sales aptitude test helps employers look beyond the candidate’s appearance and personalities and hire them on the basis of their mental abilities and talents. These tests are designed and developed in a series format that are easy to comprehend but are different from the usual interview questions that come up during hiring. It helps employers measure if the applicant is fit for the job position and will succeed in a sales profile.

A sales aptitude test is ideally divided into three categories, namely –

Cognitive: Relating to brain function, it is a unique and personalised analysis based on our natural personality traits and instincts including human relations, challenge, adaptability, persuasiveness, intuitive decision, self-control, availability, analysis/evaluation and anticipation.
Behavioural: This includes our approach towards taking initiative, social behaviour, strong mental & emotional state, being assertive and how disciplined an individual is.
Interest based: This relates to the professional dimensions including Sociability, Assertiveness, Composure, and the Ability to analyse.

These tests are aligned with other sales force development programmes and help employers employ better and also help identify and dramatically improve the already hired employees to perform better. So whether it is identifying yours or your employer’s key personality traits related to sales or discovering where your sales potential lies, it is recommended to take the sales aptitude test for a successful career in sales and marketing.

Cengrow, a reputed and experience management and business consulting firm located in Gurgaon design and develop unique, customised and interactive sales aptitude tests and sales competency assessment reports that cater to your organisation needs. Their strength comes from well-researched models and accredited consultants with a vast experience in international organizations, industries, NGOs and management consulting.

Consider what a difference can be made if the sales force is chosen with the right mindset and the right aptitude tests. Companies that like to outperform their competitors and strive to become a better place to work. The aptitude tests may differ depending on the kind of work environment the company has and the roles being applied for, but most psychometric tests will focus on personality or situational judgement tests. This method helps organisation see increased sales and also find performance dynamically increasing with genuine market value and proven results.

Personality Tests Importance

we-provide-best-possible-business-solutions-cengrow-1 Our personality is what reflects are behaviour towards ourselves and how we approach or react to people and situations around us. Personality is also an important factor while considering someone for a job. Undergoing a personality test helps understand your personality and behavioural style of thinking and working practises and that influences an employer’s decision for choosing the right candidate.

A personality test is a self-report questionnaire that has a set number of questions relating to your own personality and situational based questions that require your response on how well you reflect on that statement. More the information available, better and more efficient the recruiter can be with referrals. Personality predicts how a person will work—diligently, intelligently, cheerfully, and cooperatively

Assists in Decision Making While Hiring

Remember, there is never a right or wrong answer while giving a personality test. The key lies in selecting a candidate with the right attitude and then having him trained for the required skillset needed for the job. This also helps the employee adapt well to the organisation and with its work culture.

It analysis and measures your behaviour in certain situations and how your peers think about you. As an employer, your objective of conducting a personality test is to establish

What the employee can do at work
How will he conduct himself at work
Will he be the right choice at work

Enhance & Drive Performance

Improving the quality of your organisations workforce is always a challenge. Training & development is vital and so are the on-going mentoring, coaching, and employee-assistance programs. But are you able to comprehend the employee’s behaviour or values that help you understand him well. An employer may want to gauge the mental stability for a police department profile or the introvert/extrovert tendency for someone applying for sales and marketing job.

Aptitude and practical-skill tests have been in common practise and with changing work styles, more and more companies are now including a pre-employment test or psychometric profiling tests that help and assist employers to evaluate how a candidate would react to situations and instils problem solving skills to handle challenges better in their work-related activities. It could be leading others, coping with stress and work pressure and solving project challenges in a practical manner.

As an individual too, you can take this test to learn about what your strengths and weaknesses are and if your skills are relevant to the job you applied for. It is a great way to measure your persanlity traits, temperament or dispositions. It also assists you in overcoming your weaknesses with a broader mindset.

Cengrow designs and develops unique personality tests and psychometric profiling tools that can be tailored to your organisations need. Being an online test format, these tests are short and easy to follow and focus on delivering all you need for success.

360-degree feedback Helping People Grow And Developing Better Employees

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People need feedback to develop and improve and a 360 degree feedback helps companies understand employees better to foster collaboration and improve productivity within the organisation.

Helping People Grow

Most organisations that focus on employee engagement and development use the 360 degree feedback tool to assess their potential and enable them to perform better with valuable feedback. It enables employees to create a career roadmap for themselves and make the right professional decisions too. It helps people grow their strengths and work towards their weaknesses to make them become better.

Exchanges Ideas for Improvements and Performance

A 360 degree feedback creates an open exchange of ideas for improvement and provides leaders with the right set of information on their employees that can help them become more effective in how they perform. Usually used for employees at middle and senior level, this method uses multiple questions that assist each employee an opportunity to receive performance feedback and uses appreciative inquiry from his or her supervisors, peers, staff members, co-workers and sometimes from customers too.

Besides sharing a meaningful assessment and assisting in making administrative decisions such as a pay appraisal or a promotion, a 360 feedback system is also a perfect way to bring together people without blaming anyone or naming anyone and work towards concluding organisations key highlighted objectives. A 360 degree performance appraisal has four integral components:

A Self Appraisal
Superior’s Appraisal
Subordinate’s Appraisal
Peer Appraisal

Offering a comprehensive view towards employee’s performance, a 360 degree appraisal is a powerful tool that tracks changes in other’s perceptions about each other and hence recommended to be adapted on a regular interval at an organisation. Not only does it help assess their leadership skills but will also let them understand their management styles. With a focus on teamwork, character and leadership effectiveness, a 360 degree feedback program also addresses skills including listening, planning and goal-setting.

Numerous methods including a 360 degree survey, quality reports and even a 360 degree performance appraisal tool can help companies a secure and comprehensive way to understand and help people reach their potential.

Experienced and accredited consultants like Cengrow understands the importance of knowing your employees for better productivity and provides integrated solutions for all kinds of assessment and psychometric testing requirements that help organisations understand their people better. They offer organisations a fully customized 360 degree feedback solution which is a comprehensive web service for groups or projects of all sizes and is easy & flexible to use, strictly confidential and quite cost effective. In fact Cengrow is also the only agency in India that deploys psychomotor tests for manufacturing and service set-ups.

Critical Reasoning Tests – Helping Organizations Recruit Better

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With increasing demands on recruiting people with intellectual skills, a flexible skill set and diverse sources of knowledge, organisations are now adapting methods and tools that involve the employees taking a critical reasoning test.

How Critical Thinkers Thinks

Remember a critical thinker will raise relevant questions, gather & access information, interpret everything with a well-reasoned conclusion, thinks open-mindedly and communicates effectively to figure out even the most complex of issues. It is an important skill that can be learn and applied to life situations that calls for reflection, needs thorough analysis and planning. This trait helps you make the right choice, decide better and solve problems in a very effective manner.

Critical thinkers are an Asset to the Company

Critical thinkers examine their actions and see why they make the decisions they do. And that is what makes them an asset to the company. This person can think well and solve problems systematically. They have an open mind that is flexible to change with changing environment and can change their views based on new acquired knowledge. Most of all they can figure the difference between facts and opinions.

Critical thinking helps form better communication as it helps the person understand other’s views, thoughts and experiences clearly. In a fast changing workplace this helps enhance work relations and benefits in working with different people belonging to diverse backgrounds.

Critical thinking refers to being able to make out judgements with reasons that are logical in nature and are well-thought out. It helps employees and managers to look at a situation from all view points and weigh down possible solutions before concluding or coming up with a final answer.

Critical reasoning tests are held to understand the mental activity of the person rather than just his emotional sense. Undergoing this test helps activates flow of ideas, symbols and associations and involves a complex process of reflection and analysis that bring forth concepts and reasons. This way, an individual does not simply accept all arguments but also questions such arguments or questions and helps in concluding the right answer.

How to Improve Your Critical Reasoning Scores:

There are numerous ways to master critical reasoning but the top three tips that help improve a critical reasoning test performance involves giving the simplest of answers that the test makers can understand, expressing the answers in clear concise manner that uses easy to understand language and most importantly to understand what is being asked. Once you can adopt these tips, you can crack your scores perfectly!

An experienced company like Cengrow (Centre for Growth Alternatives) is one among global leaders in management consulting firms and has transformed businesses in all sectors and regions in India and across the planet. They offers a range of capability enhancement solutions that are designed and conducted to meet an organisations objective on improving competencies of people on behavioural sciences and objective-based skill training in technical, functional and cross-functional areas.

Competency Mapping: Importance for Employee Selection

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Competency Mapping is a process that helps identify key competencies for a particular position in an organisation or for using it for training, recruitment, performance management and succession planning. It is a behavioural trait and not a skill or an ability that defines an individual’s competencies that make him meet the job demands within the parameters put by the organisation.

High in Demand

Competency Mapping is not a new concept, but in recent years it has been in high demand and many organizations use competency models as a basis for their performance management systems. Today, the organisations and businesses have understood its importance for employee selection as a process.

Encompassing professional, personal and technical competencies, competency mapping is highly flexible and can be customised as per the client’s needs. Moreover, it can even be built upon an already existing competency map of an organisation.

Benefits of Competency Mapping

The benefit of competency mapping is that it creates standards for employee training and development specifically tailored to your organizational needs.

It is a quick and efficient method that focussed and analyses how employees work and usually takes 1 or 2 days time period.

Creating a competency map helps to drills down to the skills, knowledge, abilities, and behaviours required for each unit of work. This approach makes the competency map a very useful and practical tool for organizations.

Another benefit is that it creates a comprehensive list of specific skills required to be performed on a job. This forms the basis of a competency assessment that focuses on how an employee performs at work in relation to the specified performance standards. In fact a competency mapping also provides ongoing employee performance coaching in lieu with the assessed employee’s acceptance. This not only benchmarks employee performance but also helps organisations target performance deficits and highlights skills that require additional trainings or specialised courses. Furthermore, it avoids the pitfalls of cumbersome documentation and complicated methods that often result in generic competency statements.

A competency model can be used for selection, placement, redeployment, performance management and evaluation, planning training & development, career role mapping and separation. Competency models are also useful as they not only communicate what is important to an organization but also provide a stable foundation for developing integrated human resource systems such as staffing, training, promotion, succession planning and performance management.

Should you be interested to use competency mapping, you should get assistance from experienced management and business consulting firm like Cengrow. With more than 30 years of expertise in management consulting globally, Cengrow provides end-to-end solutions for all your business challenges and adds value to your organisation’s performance, people and process. They help organizations identify key competencies and define associated critical behaviours that are linked to their strategic objectives and key success factors of their business.