As part of our process for creating EPIC sales improvement, Client Builder Sales and Marketing has partnered with Objective Management Group (“OMG”) to provide sales candidate screening tools, personal selling assessments and our Sales Force Effectiveness & Improvement Analysis.
OMG was the first company to develop a candidate screening tool that is truly sales specific and, since then, the company has built an outstanding reputation for providing powerful, insightful information for sales organizations of all sizes. Since its inception in 1990, OMG has evaluated more than 500,000 salespeople and sales managers from more than 8,500 companies in over 200 industries.
Over the last two decades, the assessments provided by OMG have undergone extensive testing by Correlation Research Inc., an independent firm that specializes in statistical analysis on issues related to causation. Correlation Research was asked to measure the accuracy and predictive validity of OMG’s sales candidate screening tool. The results of these rigorous, time-consuming studies are impressive.
OMG’s Sales Candidate Screening has been shown to predict whether a candidate will succeed in a specific sales position with 95% accuracy. This study, conducted in 2003, was based on the results of 500 sales applicants who had been given OMG’s sales candidate screening as part of the hiring process.
Of the 500 who were tested in this sample, 273 were “recommended” as good hires. Of those who were recommended, only 129 were actually hired. One year after being hired, their employers were sent a questionnaire which asked them to indicate how many hires had been retained for the past year, whether they had been recommended by OMG or not, and where they ranked in terms of their first years sales results. As shown in the table to the left, 95% of the candidates who were recommended by OMG were retained for at least one year and 92% of those were performing in the top half of their employer’s sales force by year’s end. Alternately, of the 24 candidates that were hired in spite of being “not recommended” by OMG, only six were still working for the company after one year. Of those, only two ranked in the top half of the sales force at the end of their first year.
One of the reasons why the OMG’s assessments are so accurate is that they are not one-size-fits-all. When used to screen sales candidates, they are tailored to fit a specific role inside a specific company within a specific industry. For each position being filled, management is required to complete a sales role specification form in which the parameters of the assessment are adjusted for 30 different variables ranging from how much prospecting is required and the length of the typical sales cycle, to the size and type of sale. When evaluating the existing sales force as part our Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis, management is required to complete several other components that address selling strategies, systems and processes in addition to the sales role specifications.
For the past seven years OMG has been recognized as the top provider of sales and marketing assessment tools by Top Sales World. In addition, in 2012, Dave Kurlan, the creator of these instruments and the founder of OMG, was elected into the Top Sales World Hall of Fame.
