How talent intelligence can help you hit sales targets

By Jodi Cachey | January 30, 2023

Workplace dynamics have evolved immensely over the last decade. The workforce has also changed a lot during that period. 

Today’s revenue teams are no longer content with the workplace culture of yesterday. Extrinsic motivators that propelled productivity decades ago are no longer enough to motivate employees. And competitors are always lurking, ready to capitalize on sales mistakes. 

To get the best from your team, you must be able to determine the core behavioral competencies of individual contributors and assign them roles that best fit their behavioral profile to drive their productivity. But how exactly can you do this? With talent intelligence.

What is talent intelligence?

Talent intelligence leverages behavioral surveys to identify an individual’s actions. In a corporate context, a behavioral survey represents an effective tool for gauging how someone works without going through hours of interviews or spending days working with them. 

Talent intelligence can help you determine a seller’s communication, result orientation, team spirit, conflict management, goal setting, and decision-making styles. It is highly outcome-oriented and can help you accurately match a rep’s behavioral dispositions with job demands. Depending on requirements, you can also design surveys based on specific job functions and simulate the realities of that particular role with questions that reflect actual workplace situations.

But how does this all add up? How exactly can talent intelligence help your team hit sales and growth targets?

Use talent intelligence to uplevel your sales team

Talent intelligence can help you improve sales performance in a variety of ways, including:

Recruiting the best for the job

One bad hire can ignite serious problems in a sales organization, and several bad hires can run it into the ground. That is why recruitment methods are so critical to success. 

Unfortunately, traditional recruitment is instinctive, non-objective, and time-consuming. While educational qualifications and a few professional traits are heavily weighted, organizations too often neglect cultural fit.

Talent intelligence can help you determine how professionally and emotionally fit a sales candidate is for the role.

While recruiters have grown smarter, it is still difficult to accurately assess role suitability indicators via the traditional interview process. It just doesn’t just provide enough information to make objective hiring decisions. 

With talent intelligence, teams can ground hiring decisions on hard facts and reliable data rather than instinct. Since the behavioral surveys focus on how someone behaves in their professional context, it can provide practical insights into how a candidate will behave in a particular situation, even before they encounter it.

Identifying training and development needs

Talent intelligence provides an in-depth analysis of a seller’s behavioral profile. That includes their strengths and weaknesses relative to the role. 

Business organizations can harness this information to provide targeted training and coaching to improve rep performance. If individuals exhibit problematic behaviors, behavioral surveys can help you understand the “why” behind their actions. It is a very effective tool for identifying skill gaps based on objective performance data. You can then customize development to help sellers close gaps.

That’s not all. Behavioral surveys can also reduce bias in a nine-box process and help you identify high-potential reps that can be groomed for critical management or leadership roles, thereby creating a reliable pipeline to fill core company positions. The alignment that this offers can help reduce turnover costs and spur efficiency and productivity.

Giving sellers reliable insights

Talent intelligence is not just beneficial for decision-makers. It also helps sales hires gain insights into their abilities. 

Because it is data-driven, candidates who apply to open roles and employees vying for leadership positions gain a realistic preview of the job before they start. Additionally, reps who understand how they react to specific triggers can better prepare to handle them.

Promoting the right leaders

Leadership is just as critical to a sales organization’s success as its recruitment practices — perhaps even more critical. To grow revenue, the people calling the shots must be good at their jobs. 

An employee’s behavioral profile is usually the strongest predictor of job performance. With talent intelligence, candidates will know how they’ll potentially act rather than merely how they think they’ll act. Decision makers will understand an employee’s big-picture thinking, team spirit, work delegation, and conflict management — all of which are critical to the role of a leader. 

Behavioral surveys remain indispensable tools for filling leadership positions and identifying development needs, especially for first-time leaders.

Your sales reps’ behavior has an enormous impact on your ability to hit sales quotas. That’s why high-performing organizations leverage talent intelligence to drive hiring, mobility, and development decisions based on data, not instincts. 

Want to learn more about talent intelligence and the impact it can have on sales performance? Find out how it fits into Mediafly’s data-driven sales enablement platform here.

Jodi Cachey is the Vice President of Content Strategy & Growth Marketing at Mediafly, where she is responsible for the strategy and execution of all content marketing initiatives to drive traffic, demand, and growth. With over a decade of experience in the tech space, her previous roles include sales, business development, sales enablement, and product marketing. Jodi attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Media Studies.

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