Learn How You Sell Best With Sales Behavioral Assessments

When taking sales behavioral assessments, it's important to remember just how important they are to you as a person in the sales industry.

Can you truly be your best self, or know where you want to be, if you don’t know where you are (or even who you are) now?

Selling can oftentimes be a game of reading body language, building relationships, knowing when to talk, knowing when to listen, and knowing who exactly you’re selling to. But before you can do any of this, you need to understand yourself.

Your personality sets the context from which you will sell. It’s about understanding how others perceive you. About how you can leverage certain aspects of your personality to mesh well with buyers that have different personalities than yours.

Sales behavioral assessments make you more aware. They make other people’s behavior more relatable and understandable. While you might admire a sales manager that tells you what you’re doing wrong in a matter-of-fact way, there are people that are the opposite. In fact, there are people that wouldn't be able to work with a manager like this at all.  It’s not because they are better or worse, it’s just that they have a different personality.

Whether you are taking sales behavioral assessments to learn about yourself, your team, your managers, your clients, or your prospects, you’re taking it to learn. Personal development requires an in depth look at yourself. What’s a better way to do it than with an assessment?

Types of Sales Behavioral Assessments:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

This is the most common type of personality assessment. If you don’t already know what it is, you’re probably vaguely familiar with the four-letter personality types such as ENTJ, INFP, etc.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator indicates your likeliness of:

• Introversion vs. Extroversion (I or E)
• Sensing vs. Intuition (S or N)
• Thinking vs. Feeling (T or F)
• Judging vs. Perceiving (J or P)

This is a great place to start if you’re new with behavioral assessments. There are tons of free assessments online that will give you a basic overview. However, if you want an in-depth analysis of your type as well as what they mean for you and for your career, it’s best to purchase a full assessment and report.

Another reason why this such a great assessment is because there is so much research based around it. Once you take it, you’ll be able to find a list of famous celebrities, business people, politicians, or world leaders that share the same personality type as you!

DISC Assessment

DISC is a behavioral assessment based on the theory by the psychologist William Moulton Marston. This assessment focuses on four key behavioral traits: dominance, compliance, steadiness, and influence. The DISC assessment helps you to understand both your strengths and weaknesses in order to develop strategies to meet the demands of any environment you’re in.

DISC Assessments are focused on four dimensions of behavior:

1. how you respond to problems and challenges
2. how you influence others to your point of view
3. how you respond to the pace of the environment
4. how you respond to rules and procedures set by others

In the DISC Assessments conducted by us here at CFS, these four behaviors are centralized around selling. This way, managers can see how sales team members are likely to behave in relation to sales and business situations.

DISC Results:

The great thing about DISC assessments is that they are actionable. The results from your assessment don’t just tell you what your behaviors are. They tell you how to improve your weaknesses, how to communicate with someone of another specific behavior, and how to sell to different types of people using your strengths.

DISC is a great tool for an entire office to use. When you understand the behaviors of different types of people, you can relate to them and communicate with them more effectively.

Sales behavioral assessments help you understand humans. Even if you just take the assessments yourself, you will still have a clearer understanding of others. You will know how your personality stands out and what communication barriers you present. In sales, there’s a common notion that top sales reps are extremely aggressive, outspoken, extroverted and high energy. Assessments will show you that anyone can be a top player, as long as they leverage their strengths and make accommodations for their weaknesses.