Sales Intelligence Test (SI Test)

Sales expertise is a difficult thing to measure. You can interview your candidates about their sales experience and competencies, you can ask them to complete a biodata and personality survey or finally run a series of sales simulations (role plays) to see how they behave in  work related situations. All of these selection measures have their strengths and weaknesses. Job interviews, biodata and personality measures are easy to administer and saving time but also easy to fake. Role plays on the other hand are difficult to fake but at the same time very expensive and time consuming. One selection measure that combines the strengths of the above methods is the Sales Intelligence Test (SI Test) which is a situational judgment test measuring practical intelligence in the field of sales. Read this post to see what practical sales competencies it measures,  how valid it is and how to use it to chose better candidates for sales positions.

What is the SI Test?SI Test is a measure of practical intelligence or tacit knowledge in the field of sales. As Robert Sternberg puts it, it is the ability to solve real life problems in the realm of sales which sales agents face on a daily basis when working to hit their targets and achieve other goals, like sales volumes or customer satisfaction levels. SI Test consists of 19 descriptions of real life scenarios that are most typical of a sales job. For example:

A client interrupted Betty while she was presenting her offer and said that the price was too high and demanded a discount. Unfortunately company’s current policy does not allow sales agents to give clients any discounts. On the other side Betty is desperate to finalize a contract with that client. How should she behave in such a situation?

1. Tell the client that other companies from the same industry do can have problems accepting this price
2. Instead of a discount give the client other non-financial benefits, like faster delivery of goods etc.
3. Refuse the client now but assure that in the future discount will be more possible
4. Try to charm by client by saying that high prices are compensated by the beauty of the agents
5. Give the client a discount from her own commission
6. Instead of a discount give the client some extra service

Each of the six behaviors need to be assessed on the scale from 1 (very bad idea) to 9 (very good idea). Same for remaining 18 scenarios, which however might slightly differ in length and the number of proposed solutions.

All 19 scenarios depict sales situations which 1) happen frequently in the field of sales, 2) they are critical to success (the behavior of a sales person conditions achievement of one’s goals, like finalizing negotiations), 3) challenging (they present a problem that can be solved by many different ways of behavior but one never knows which one is most suitable; so it always takes effort to decide which behavior in a particular situation will help to solve the problem) and are 4) universal i.e. they enable to diagnose sales competency in different kinds of industry, type of client (B2B vs. B2C) or goods to be sold (products vs. services). Candidates’ task in SI Test is to read each scenario and assess the quality of different possible solutions (i.e. behaviors) that are presented with the scenarios. 

What does the SI Test measure?
Completion of SI Test allows a candidate to receive a two-fold feedback. One is the general score for sales intelligence and second are individual scores for 11 specific sales competencies. And these are:

1. Gathering information about clients. Ability to prepare to a meeting with a client by gathering all the necessary information beforehand 
   
2. Making one’s way to decision makers. Ability to identify and access the person or people on the client’s side who will make the final decision about a purchase of offered goods.
   
3. Making appointments with clients. Ability to arrange a meeting with a client even if initially he or she does not want to meet or insists on receiving an e-mail offer instead.
4. Identifying clients’ needs. Ability to ask clients the right questions at the right times, i.e. when presenting the offer, dealing with objections and complains or when one’s offer was rejected because of competitor’s better offer. 
5. Presenting an offer versus competitor’s. Ability to disencourage clients from learning more about competitor’s offer but done according to the highest ethical standards. 
6. Overcoming clients’ objections. Ability to deal with clients’ complaining about low quality of presented goods (products or services)
7. Defending price. Ability to resist clients pressure to reduce price based in a strong belief that price and discount are not the key factors influencing clients’ decision and loyalty. 
8. Dealing with clients who linger. Ability to motivate a lingering client to make his or her mind regarding the purchase of a presented good.
9. Determination to hit one’s target. Ability to self-mobilize to achieve one’s targets correlated with the ability to secure for oneself conditions that will maximize one’s productivity and efficiency.
10. Increasing clients loyalty. Ability to build a personalized relationship with clients correlated with awareness of what activities will give it a long term perspective.
11. Dealing with clients disappointment. Ability to talk about mistakes made by oneself or the company in a most diplomatic way ensuring that clients opinion and satisfaction are not hurt.

Both for the general sales intelligence score and the 11 sales competencies there are national norms that effectively allow to benchmark the candidates against the sales agents population from which they come from. In Poland the norms were established in a pool of 1,5 thousand candidates for various sales positions (sales representatives, sales agents, key account managers, business developers and so on). Eventually the general sales intelligence score in presented on a percentile scale (from 1 to 99) and the 11 sales competencies on a three point nominal scale: low – medium – high. 

How valid is SI Test?SI Test went through a long and thorough process of validation, thus meeting all methodological and psychometric standards. The validation pool was N=526 subjects (24,6% women and 75,4 men%). Average age was 28,2 years and average work experience 6,6 years. The subjects were candidates applying for various sales jobs.

Predictive Validity. SI Test significantly correlates with success criteria in sales and in general such as: promotions (rho=0,219; p=0,000), position in the organizational structure (rho=0,177; p=0,000), influence on company’s strategy (rho=0,088; p=0,042) and a number of clients in a portfolio (rho=0,2025; p=0,0035). An almost significant correlation was also found between SI Test results and sales commission of the subjects ((rho=0,126; p=0,058). It is worth mentioning as well that there was a significant correlation between SI Test scores and number of hours subjects spend weekly at work (rho=0,109; p=0,016) which suggests that the SI Test scores can indicate how hardworking and committed candidates are.

Criterion validity. To verify if the SI Test was a valid measure of the ability to solve difficult sales problems the raw SI Test scores were correlated with sales experience of the subjects measured as the number of years one’s worked in sales and the number of sales training one’s had. The correlation found was significant (rho=0,333; p=0,000 and rho=0,252; p=0,008 respectively) in both cases.  

Reliability. The measure of SI Test reliability was the test-retest run in a group of N=107 sales candidates who completed the test twice. Second completion took place within 3 to 9 after the first completion. Scores from the two completions correlated significantly at the level of rho=0,749; p=0,000.

Prevention of faking. Faking is always an issue when it comes to self-declarative measures of any selection variable, including biodata, job preferences, personality or sales intelligence. In the creation of the SI Test however an extra effort was taken to ensure that any possible faking can make no greater impact on the scale’s validity. The means undertaken were:  

• National norms for the SI Test were established in a pool of candidates (not job incumbents) for sales positions. That means that the norms include the tendency of the candidates to present themselves in an overly positive light.
• The SI Test consists only of items that significantly correlate with experience of the subjects and their occupational success. This proves that whatever candidates declare about in the SI Test finds its conformation in real life.
• There are two kinds of instructions that are used in situational judgment tests, like the SI Test. One is behavioral and the second is cognitive. It’s been well established in the subject research that the latter (asking candidates to assess the quality of proposed solutions) minimizes tendency to fake when compared to the former (asking candidates to tell how they would behave themselves in a particular situation).
• The SI Test has its protagonists, a she-sales agent (know as Betty) and a he-sales agent (know as Tom), like in the example above. That allows the candidates filling in the test to feel less like self-evaluating and thus to reduce their tendency to fake.

Why is the SI Test worth using?
For at least several reasons. 

The SI Test measures what other selection methods don’t. The SI Test focuses on competencies that are difficult to measure in any other way, like job interviews or personality surveys. Thus, it can provide unique information about candidates. As such, the SI Test is most useful when all other selection measures have been used and still some top candidates score very close to each other, making it impossible to differentiate them. Use the SI Test then to see which of the top scorers is really the best one.

The SI Test allows recruiters to save their time. Apart from sales scenarios the SI Test consists of bio-data questions which are usually asked during job interviews because they lack in candidates’ CVs, like how many clients are there in your portfolio, how many clients meetings a day do you have etc. Gathering all such information within the SI Test allows recruiters not to ask them during job interviews and thus shortens the time required to interview candidates.

How to run the SI Test?
The Test in only available online. You only need to send to your candidates a unique link. candidates are given 60 minutes to fill it in. After the completion of the test a recruiter will receive via e-mail a report with a candidates general score for sales intelligence and separate scores for the 11 sales competencies.