Competency-based hiring key factor for building winning sales team: Mettl & SHRM India Research
New Delhi: While setting up appropriate incentive structures and effectively on-boarding your new sales hire are instrumental for better sales performance, these are not the most important activity as felt by sales leaders in India.
A research conducted by Mettl and Society for Human Resource Management India (SHRM) has revealed that ‘Hiring the Right Talent’ ranked as the top most important factor determining high sales productivity, as felt by a whopping ~57% of 1600+ sales leaders. Additionally, it was found that 73% of high performers focus on competency-based hiring when compared to 56% of low performers. In an alternate scenario, 45% of respondents (who think hiring is critical) don’t know why their top performers are successful, while 60% of surveyed sales organisations don’t use assessments at all.
To assist HRs in finding their next sales super-hire, Mettl & SHRM developed a scientific model based on 3-factors to identify the behaviour and cognitive competencies that determine success at work for varied sales job roles. The model coverage is right from selling a simple shoe to selling a complex IT solution.
The research, which began in Jan 2017, has surveyed over 1600+ sales professionals across 8 industries and interviewed over 65 sales leaders to find out the industry perspective in detail.
Commenting on the research, Mr. Ketan Kapoor, Co-founder and CEO, Mettl said, “As sales organisations focus more on the human side of sales acceleration, sales competencies are being prioritised as the foundation to better hiring, training and development of sales executives. To help our clients take better people decisions, we will use this study henceforth to classify and customise assessments for all sales job roles, across various industries, customer types and company sizes. We are very keen to replicate out the success of our research and experience of 1500+ happy customers with companies looking to adopt scientific methods for their sales hiring.”
Mr. Achal Khanna, CEO, SHRM India commented, “In high-growth organisations where reps are hired quickly, sales competencies are a great method to establish a common language, process and benchmark for hiring in sales. Hence, the objective of this study is to classify and break down sales job roles, and identify competencies that are common as well as different for these job roles, in order to help improve sales hiring.”
Mettl has served over 1,500 global corporate clients in 80+ countries, 24 skill councils/government departments and scores of educational institutions. Offering a wide range of technology-driven solutions for online assessments, real-time grading, and online proctoring, Mettl has emerged as a market leader among global and domestic players in the L&D (learning and development), talent analytics, IT & sales recruitment domains.