Welcome to mastering sales team assessment! Even experienced sales managers fall into predictable traps when evaluating their team's development stages.
These systematic errors can undermine your sales results, but once you recognize them, you'll assess your reps with much greater precision.
Engagement Message
Recall a time you misjudged a sales rep's abilities. What early clue did you overlook?
The recency effect is the most common assessment mistake. We overweight recent sales results and underweight long-term performance patterns.
One lost deal makes you forget months of consistent prospecting. One great quarter makes you overlook ongoing closing skill gaps.
Engagement Message
Give one reason we tend to overweight recent sales performance when judging rep development.
The halo effect creates another dangerous bias. When a rep excels in one sales area, we assume they're competent everywhere.
"Tom's great at prospecting, so he'll be perfect at closing complex deals." But these are completely different skill sets requiring different development approaches.
Engagement Message
Name two sales skills you have that are totally different from each other.
Personality bias compounds assessment errors. We mistake communication style for sales competence level, as we covered in our last session.
The confident-sounding new rep gets complex accounts too early. The methodical closer gets too much hand-holding. Both setups hurt sales results.
Engagement Message
Which sales personality style do you find easier to assess accurately—aggressive or consultative?
Here's the speed trap: pressure to make quick assessments leads to shallow conclusions. You observe one sales call and think you understand their development stage.
But accurate assessment requires multiple data points across different prospects and sales situations.
