Why The Timing Of The Ask Is Critical To Selling

Every strong salesperson will tell you that intuiting your client’s needs, knowing when to make an ask, and recognizing what size of an ask to make is critical to finding success in the industry and retaining customers for the future. This success is the result of highly developed soft skills that require a good sense of empathy, attentive listening, and communication. Making the ask at all further requires self-confidence and assertiveness that does not tip into aggression as pushiness can put clients off. If the timing is wrong however, salespeople can suffer rejections to their asks unnecessarily.

When hiring new sales employees, not being able to intuit where a client is at can cost them their targets and yet it’s so difficult to determine whether they’ll be able to follow through on sales calls by simply interviewing them. Empathy for clients and intuition are also virtually impossible to learn on the job; they must inherently be a part of an applicant’s sales personality. This is why so many companies use sales aptitude tests as a way to make the essential sales qualities more transparent to a hiring committee before the interview process even begins. This way they can save company time and resources by mitigating hiring risk, while also saving candidates time when they aren’t going to be a good fit for a certain position.

Thankfully there are selling tools available to help companies find the best salespeople, the ones that’ll know how and when to make their asks. They are called sales personality tests and are available through providers like SalesTestOnline, designed to show clearly which soft skills a candidate possesses and which they do not. If you’re hiring someone to close deals, they must absolutely have good empathy, sociability and instinct; the testing company will then create a target profile that reflects this.

Putting the test at the beginning of the hiring process, before you invite any cover letters or resumes to be sent over will allow ill-suited applicants to focus their energies elsewhere while on the hunt for a job, and it will also save companies the energy they would be spending wading through countless resumes on revenue generating activities. More importantly it prevents the hire of candidates for a just a few short months only to see them get let go – resulting in having to start the arduous hiring process all over again. This proves that when trying to get a glimpse of a candidate’s core traits is so elusive, it pays to get expert help.

When introducing new closers to your salesforce, be sure the timing of their asks will be right even before you sit them down on calls to observe them. By including a sales personality test at the beginning of the job application that has a 90% accuracy rate, you can rest assured that the person you’re hiring who achieved the highest score will likely remain with the company for a long time, hitting the targets expected of them, and inspiring customers to come back for more.