'Online review, interview key to building winning sales team'

Online assessments and structured interviews are key to hiring competency-based talent, yet 60 per cent of organisations do not use them to hire the perfect sales executive, says a report.
According to a research conducted by Mettl and Society for Human Resource Management India (SHRM), competency-based hiring is a key factor in building a winning sales team, but the short point is the organisations do not prioritise it.
Nearly 60 per cent employers do not go for online assessments to hire the perfect sales executive and only 22 per cent use competency-based structured interviews to identify a high performance sales team, the research that covered over 1,600 sales professionals said.

"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," SHRM India CEO Achal Khanna said.
To assist HRs in finding the right sales executive, Mettl and SHRM have developed a scientific model based on three factors to zero in on the behaviour and cognitive competencies that determine success at work for varied sales job roles.
"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," Ketan Kapoor, co-founder and CEO, Mettl said.

Kapoor further said, "We are very keen to replicate out the success of our research and experience of 1500 plus happy customers with companies looking to adopt scientific methods for their sales hiring."
The research, which began in January this year, has surveyed over 1,600 sales professionals across eight industries and interviewed over 65 sales leaders to find out the industry perspective in detail.