The American sales research company that conducted the survey, Texas-based Behavioural Sciences Research Press (BSRP), says that the findings are applicable to a wide range of people. Most sales staff cannot, will not or simply don't know how to sell, BSRP says. They call this Sales Call Reluctance and have identified about a dozen different types, the main ones being:
So how do you identify these personality types before hiring them? One of the less effectively used routes is preliminary psychometric testing. A validated and widely-used tool in other parts of the world is SPQ*GOLD, and now Drake International is introducing the application to the South African market. Speaking about this technology, Roy Henderson, a senior corporate consultant at Drake Assessment Technologies, is adamant that huge amounts of money in lost sales every year can be saved by simply ensuring that you have the right people in the right jobs, from the very start.
