The situation is even more intense given the hyper-competitive nature of most buying and selling journeys. Often, the difference between winning and losing is razor-thin — and sales talent can be the factor that separates you from the competition. In this context, the quality of your sales team becomes more than a differentiator — it becomes a defining factor of success.

Selection Matters More Than Ever

Hiring sales reps has never been easy. But in a tighter economy, the stakes are higher. Every new hire represents a significant investment — and every mis-hire costs more than just dollars. It costs momentum, morale, and market share. That’s why a rigorous, data-driven approach to sales rep selection and hiring is essential for building a high-performing sales team. It’s about more than resumes and interviews — it’s about identifying the capabilities, skills, tendencies, and motivators that truly drive sales performance.

Traditional and unstructured methods for evaluating what separates top-performing sales reps from average or underperforming reps simply don’t work.

Don’t Just Look Outside — Assess Inside

But the focus shouldn’t stop at new hires. Your current sales team holds untapped potential — if you know where to look. Sales assessment tools can help you gain deeper insight into your team’s skills, preferences, and strengths. Are they wired for complex consultative selling, or better suited to faster-moving, transactional deals? Do their behaviors align with your sales strategy? Are they being deployed in the right roles, with the right types of stakeholders and accounts?

Sales assessments aren’t about judgment — they’re about alignment. When you understand your team at a deeper level, you can deploy them more strategically, coach more effectively, and ultimately win more often.

The Players and the Playbook

Many organizations have invested heavily in sales methodologies, training programs, and playbooks. But even the best methodology or strategy will underperform if it doesn’t align with the people responsible for executing it. That’s why it’s essential to align the players and the playbook — understanding both what your salespeople are naturally good at and how to support them with the right tools, processes, and positioning. The right approach to sales assessment is critical.

A Smarter, More Strategic Approach

Winning in this market isn’t about working harder. It’s about working smarter — selecting the right people, understanding your current team’s strengths, and aligning your talent with your go-to-market strategy. That’s how you turn fewer opportunities into more wins. Because in a world where every at-bat matters, you can’t afford to leave performance to chance.

At Talogy, we have decades of experience helping organizations understand, predict, and enhance sales success — in all types of markets. We bring proven, science-backed solutions that have driven results for high-performing organizations around the world. Let us help you maximize your sales performance by aligning your talent and strategy for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

If you’re exploring ways to improve sales effectiveness, reduce mis-hires, or align your sales talent with business goals, we’d love the opportunity to talk with you. Learn more at talogy.com.

But how can you find and understand sales effectiveness beyond just sales KPIs?

Think #SalesEffectiveness is just about how many deals you win? @CaliperCorp says the things to focus on go beyond traditional sales KPIs:
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To help measure your sales teams for sales effectiveness, we’ve put together essential sales competencies and metrics every sales leader should look for to reach optimal performance amongst their team.

Uncover Core Competencies

The Caliper Profile is a powerful assessment tool that helps you better understand individual strengths and inclinations. Not just a tool for hiring, the Caliper Profile can be used to help get a better picture of the different strengths and abilities that exist on your sales team. Combined with our competency report, they paint a clearer picture of what actions you can take to develop successful salespeople.

Here’s an example:

Consultative Selling requires competencies like Active Listening and Information Seeking with a particular knack for approaching sales with a Service Focus. Do you have someone on your sales team who loves to build relationships with their prospects and provides guidance through the process? They might be well suited for a consultative selling role.

Examine the key roles within your sales team and how they align to the skill sets that your salespeople possess. Does your method of selling match up to the soft skills of your team?

Here’s another example:

Account Development differs from sales hunters or business development in that this role seeks to expand business within existing accounts rather than acquiring new clients. Account Development requires someone who has Organizational Savvy, meaning they are adept at gathering and assessing information about the organization and speaking specifically to their needs. Do you have a salesperson who doesn’t hunt particularly well but is very persuasive in an organizational context? It might be effective to move them from a new business role to existing accounts.

How to Develop the Right Talent, the Right Way

Once your sales manager has a better understanding of the competencies and potential of their team, it’s time to put it into context. How can managers train and develop highly effective salespeople with what they’ve learned in the Caliper Profile?

The Essentials for Coaching report provides a Competency Report that goes through each of the competencies considered important to sales effectiveness. Within the report are suggestions based on how an individual scores in each category. If they score low on the team building competency, for example, their report outlines which aspects of teamwork they should lean on— meaning the aspects of teamwork where they show potential—and it suggests possible challenges the individual might face when dealing with teamwork in aspects where they aren’t as skilled.

Conversely, If an individual has high potential in teamwork, there might be no challenges listed, and managers can identify that person as someone to tap when they know teamwork will be required or they need someone to help them rally the team around a cause.

The Competency Report helps put an individual’s traits and competencies into the context of their role and what will need to be coached, leveraged, or where they’ll need to focus to develop key traits. The report also includes recommendations for the manager to help them guide training and development goals and help boost their sales effectiveness while honing their skills.

How can personality and #competencies help you develop better #SalesTalent? @CaliperCorp shows you how with their latest blog post:
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Here’s an example:

Your Account Development Specialist shows strong Organizational Savvy. The competency report will recommend that the manager helps this person consider the outcome that they are hoping to achieve when they speak with clients. Client feedback helps the salesperson identify what their organization does well, where they want to improve, and what their desired outcome is. They can adapt their approach based on real feedback from clients, and you’ll find their sales effectiveness increases.

So, where do you begin?

Start with competencies where your salespeople have high potential. Leverage their strengths to target their challenges. With their potential competencies laid out, it should become clear how you move forward based on what they do well and how those skills can help them address others.

The Competency Report puts those competencies into a workplace context, allowing managers to see where their personal preferences lie and different strategies to avoid in order to implement better development objectives that fit into their work style and person inclinations. Managers can come up with tailor-made goals for individuals to increase productivity effectively and efficiently than singular training programs implemented across the board.

Sales effectiveness isn’t just the number of wins or closed deals; it goes beyond numbers and into personality. The Caliper Report can put crucial personality data into context and provide managers with insights that lead to better sales effectiveness across their team. Reach out to our experts today to learn more about the Caliper Profile or how a Caliper Subscription can help your sales managers transform their team’s effectiveness.

Beyond things like a healthy work/life balance and a supportive company culture, emotional intelligent employees will demonstrate a talent for managing work-related stress. High emotional intelligence is linked to a better ability to understand, perceive, and regulate emotions. The process of understanding, acknowledging, accepting, and acting upon stressors is what sets apart those employees who can manage stress and those who cannot.

How do #EQ and #SalesEffectiveness work together? @CaliperCorp demonstrates how emotional intelligence is necessary to sales success:
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The actions employees choose to take as a result of stressors is perhaps the most important part of stress management, particularly in a sales career. The choices a salesperson makes during stressful times has an impact on the greater objective. A salesperson with high emotional intelligence will be able to consider the best course of action and anticipate the outcome and its effects on everyone involved. Emotional intelligence is a critical necessity for sales effectiveness.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. More than just understanding oneself, an effective salesperson needs the empathy to understand how their prospects will react and the decision-making skills to respond accordingly. Relationship-building is key to sales effectiveness, and the ability to understand the emotions of others is the foundation to trust and loyalty between the salesperson and their client.

But emotional intelligence isn’t just one thing, it’s a marriage of many soft skills that can be trained amongst sales teams. These skills work together to build a stronger understanding of how one individual’s actions impact the actions of others.

Specific soft skills associated with an emotionally intelligent salesperson include:

• Mindfulness: Being present, focused, and ready to perform
• Self-awareness: Possessing a clear understanding of your emotions
• Self-Regulation: Evaluating your emotions in order to make a wiser decision
• Motivation: Using self-awareness to make choices that power fulfillment
• Empathy: Tapping into your understanding of your own emotions to understand those of others and their perspectives
• Social Skills: Using your understanding of others to relate and connect

Coaching for Emotional Intelligence

A good technique for coaching emotional intelligence is the acronym SBNRR, which walks an individual through critical steps for catching a hold of and managing one’s emotions. Coach your employees on how to Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect, and Respond carefully to stressful situations.

• Stop: Instruct employees on understanding when to stop or take a break from stressful activities.
• Breathe: Give your employees the opportunity take a few moments for themselves and take a few deep breaths when they’re feeling overwhelmed.
• Notice: Help your employees understand the stressors that trigger an emotional response and identify them accurately. Can you help them identify situations or conversations that are stressful for them?
• Reflect: Encourage employees to reflect on why their stressors get an emotional reaction out of them, and what those knee-jerk reactions are. Why do they think that happened? What outside insights can you provide to help them associate their reactions with their emotions?
• Respond: Coach your employees through the decision-making process that follows reflection. How do you act on your stressors, and what should be the outcome? How can you facilitate better responses when they feel stressed? How can you work together to create methods that recognize, process, and react to stress better?

Bonus Content: View the Essentials for Coaching Sample Competency Report

Want to unlock the secret to #sales success? @CaliperCorp says #EmotionalIntelligence is a key component to effective salespeople:
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Emotional Intelligence and Sales Effectiveness

When it comes to sales, soft skills are just as important as the hard skills necessary to sell. Emotional intelligence helps salespeople manage results rather than make excuses for what’s happening.

The confidence at the core of emotional intelligence is managed by grit and resilience, meaning that sales professionals are good at identifying and moving on from prospects that will never end in a win and recovering quickly from sales that have been lost.

A key skill that translates well into effective selling is the ability to separate the “what” from the “why.” When something fails, individuals with high emotional intelligence can learn lessons (Why did this result from what I did?) without taking the outcome personally. They see failure as an opportunity rather than a setback.

Sales effectiveness is attainable when the individual can separate what they do for a living from who they are as a person. The role is not their identity, and the more they can detach their self-worth from their role, the more effectively they can take on the myriad challenges in the sales professional. High emotional intelligence brings a self-awareness to the individual in which they can easily separate their personhood from the responses they receive from prospects.

Caliper can help you identify and coach emotional intelligence in your sales professionals so they reach their full potential and effectiveness. Reach out to our experts or start a Caliper subscription so you are always prepared for all of your talent management needs.

Guide your sales reps in developing these six habits of sales effectiveness.

Hyper-Focus

Maintaining focus is beneficial for any employee but is crucial in a salesperson. A sales job includes many facets like prospecting for leads, checking in on clients, preparing sales presentations, planning sales meetings and team meetings, and handling paperwork, etc. At times, it may be difficult for an employee to stay focused on what’s important. However, this is the habit that can boost an employee’s sales effectiveness.

You can coach your employees to hone their focus and achieve success. Help them outline which accounts they need to focus on by providing comprehensive guidelines, qualifying and disqualifying criteria, and reinforcing their understanding of the ideal buyer persona.

Set your sales reps up for wins by determining what works for them, which activities should be done when, and what tasks are highly essential to accomplish.

Active Listening

Individuals who tend to listen more than they talk accomplish more. This can be a hard habit to form though, so it may be difficult to find a candidate who fits this category. However, as a manager, you can train salespeople with the right questions and strategies, and reinforce them through coaching.

By listening fully and allowing your customers to answer thoroughly, your sales reps will learn additional and vital information. This information can drive your sales reps’ next move.

Networking Master

Salespeople who are continually building relationships go beyond just following up. These individuals take every interaction as an opportunity to strengthen trust and improve their relationships with customers.

As a coach and manager, you need to ensure your salespeople have strong customer relationship skills. This characteristic will benefit the customer and your team in the long run and could help turn them into a loyal customer.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

There’s no need to “reinvent the wheel” for every need. When a salesperson approaches each engagement as a brand new idea, they’re wasting time, energy, and resources when it’s not necessary.

Instead, subject-matter experts should create playbooks to help salespeople accomplish more in a timely manner. Sales techniques that work should be included in the playbook because typically salespeople who consistently use them will be more successful than those who take a more unstructured approach.

Plus, a consistent process will aid salespeople in staying focused on balancing their tasks. This will help avoid the effect of being too “busy” so they complete all tasks on time.

Adaptability

Exceptional salespeople pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. When faced with a new challenge, they adapt their approach to fit a marketplace change or a buyers’ behavior style.

Sales managers can help their teams get into these habits and coach them into improvement in these three ways:

1. Flexible Thinking – Deepen awareness and perspective by accessing different ways of thinking. This will lead to a greater understanding of how their customers think.
2. Plan Ahead – Instead of getting stuck into one solution, have a contingency plan in place for when plan A doesn’t work. Planning allows salespeople to examine the opportunities and threats in current and future situations, and understand what resources they have to fix them.
3. Be Curious – Curiosity helps to open the mind, enable growth, and encourage new ideas. By being curious, salespeople can develop unique approaches to problems and hopefully find the results needed.

Be Prepared

Building upon planning in adaptability, salespeople who take the time to prepare for every meeting tend to be more successful. They have a deeper understanding of the products they are selling, methods to overcome common objections, the ability to understand their customer’s needs, and what they want to accomplish in this meeting.

Managers can set clear expectations for customer meetings and coach each salesperson in specific preparation skills.

Enter every meeting with a purpose and be prepared to accomplish that purpose.

Need help moving from selection to skill development? With Caliper Precision Series, you can empower your teams with training on their specific development needs on a schedule that fits for them. What are you waiting for? Get started today!

These five traits of sales effectiveness separate the extraordinary salespeople from the rest.

Self Motivated

Top salespeople are continually learning and improving their processes to keep up with their customers and competition. They take time to understand the product, the company, and customers. With this new-found knowledge, they create a customer focused action plan. Want sales to grow? You have to stay ahead of the game, and top sales performers know this and are willing to put in the extra work to make it happen.

Did you know?

More than half of prospects want to see how the product works on the first call.

Remarkable salespeople have the focus and determination to strive for the best and more. They push past the distractions and set individual goals to be a top producer. They’re armed with a strategic action plan that guides them to reach goals and not let setbacks stand in their way.

Personable

Nobody likes to talk to someone who can’t hold a conversation or comes off cold. Every salesperson who has closed multiple deals and has a long list of clients has one thing in common – they’re personable. Customers are more attracted and likely to work with your company when your sales rep has a heightened level of emotional intelligence and can use it to create a connection with customers.

Your sales reps should be able to spark a connection and build a foundation between the customer and themselves. By doing this, your customers will feel valued and appreciated, and in the long run, will want to continue doing business with you. A benefit that comes with this is word of mouth referrals. Customers who have an incredible experience with their sales reps are likely to tell others, which can bring in more sales opportunities for your company.

Passionate & Optimistic

Top salespeople are typically positive and optimistic. They have a strong passion for the company and the products they sell. They typically have an upbeat outlook and tend to have a good sense of humor and overall fun aspect about them. While they still have those grounded traits, they make sure customers love working with your company. A top salesperson demonstrates passion every day, and it is clear that they believe in their product and their organization. This confidence and passion give customers a sense of comfort. They see their sales rep as authentic and trust what the rep is telling them.

Fast Fact:

“Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness.”

Optimism plays a huge part when you separate the average salesperson and the top performer. When your sales rep uses an optimistic approach, they know what they can achieve and they don’t allow one bad day or experience to tarnish their positivity or outlook on their overall goals. They focus on what they can control and take those bad experiences as learning opportunities to do better.

Resilient

Those top performers know the feeling of being told “no” over and over, but they also know how to bounce back fast and be persistent. They know how to get the job done and keep their focus. Bouncing back can tell you a lot about a salesperson’s attitude and personality if they can jump back into the game after being discouraged. They’re likely able to take constructive feedback well and are willing to put in the hard work.

Top performers don’t get discouraged when their numbers are lower than usual but instead look for opportunities. Those extraordinary salespeople have the tenacity to push through hardships and conquer any obstacles that might get in their way.

Problem Solver

The desire to create an ultimate experience for customers is a necessary quality for sales effectiveness. A great salesperson will look for new ways to solve customers’ needs, financially and emotionally. They are able to offer the right solutions based on customer needs and present it in a way that feels genuine and empathetic. By putting your customers’ needs first your organization is seen as capable and trustworthy.

Want to learn which core competencies your sales professionals possess? Get to know them with the Caliper Profile and see how to tap into their potential. To get started, reach out to our experts today.

Those are two different people. As much as hiring managers would love to cherry-pick personality traits in their applicants, that isn’t how human beings are wired. Many personality traits are negatively correlated, especially ones that support service motivation vs. ones that support sales motivation.

If you work in the insurance business, you know how hard it is to find an Account Manager who can fulfill service and upselling duties with equal aplomb. Or maybe you work in another field where service-sales hybrid roles are a cornerstone. Veteran recruiters and hiring managers understand that you have to aim for balance when filling such positions. But how do you find the right balance?

Fortunately, science has come to the rescue. Based on psychometric research and advances in job-performance analytics, we now know the six qualities that are most important for success in the service-sales hybrid role. For consistency, we’ll refer to such workers as Account Service Professionals throughout the remainder of this post.

1) A focus on customer service

An eagerness to help other people is a no-brainer when looking at Account Service Professional candidates. But there’s more to customer service than simply offering assistance. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, a good ASP strives to understand the needs of individual clients and customize responses. It’s also important to make sure the client receives undivided attention and is never made to feel like a burden. At the same time, the ASP has to balance the requirements of the customer with those of the company or agency.

2) The ability to persuade

As stated above, a big challenge for companies is hiring Account Service Professionals who are both service and sales oriented (the aggressive/persistent personality type associated with sales success is the inverse of the helpful/conscientious dynamic that typically drives service performance). Top ASPs are service oriented but not to the extent that they give things away simply to win approval from customers, and they are persuasive enough to promote the benefits of additional coverage without being so aggressive they make customers feel overly pressured. What they do best is use verbal and nonverbal cues from their clients to subtly transition the conversation from service to sales.

3) The ability to build relationships

Hiring managers sometimes mistake an outgoing nature for relationship-building skill. Gregariousness is effective for breaking the ice, but real relationship building flows from understanding clients’ needs, showing them undivided attention, and following through. Account Managers who position themselves as trusted advisors and partners are the ones who achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction and retention.

4) Professional poise

Because Account Service Professionals are often caught between the conflicting agendas of salespeople, management, and customers/business partners, it is especially important that they maintain their composure and professionalism and avoid personalizing criticism that, in many instances, should be directed elsewhere. If you’ve ever managed a service function, you’ve probably dealt with staff members who suffer hurt feelings and eventual burnout. Excessive eagerness to please isn’t necessarily desirable when looking at ASP candidates. Sometimes the ability to stand firm and deliver a confident “no” is a valuable attribute.

5) An attentive listening style

The attentive listener is one who puts the focus on the client, asks meaningful questions, and adapts to input in an open-minded manner. Many problems can be solved and even turned into productive exchanges through listening, encouraging the speaker to elaborate, showing empathy, and fostering collaboration on solutions. A good Account Service Professional avoids letting his or her own preconceptions and assumptions get in the way of a positive outcome.

6) Strong time management

If you’re a manager or supervisor, you’ve undoubtedly had a staff member who struggles with time management. In service roles like Account Service Professional, which require the worker to juggle ongoing administrative/project work with intermittent client interaction, this issue can be prevalent. Working on protracted assignments calls for someone with extended task focus who can avoid distractions, while client interactions are unpredictable in terms of duration and response, sometimes requiring adaptability and a willingness to shift direction.

In reality, finding applicants who shine in all six areas won’t be easy, and sometimes you’ll have to compromise in your hiring decisions. The good news is that, using the breakdown above as a guide, you can develop targeted interview questions to gain an understanding of your job candidate’s relative strengths and limitations. And when it comes to people already in position, this list can serve as the foundation for coaching and development.

Employment assessments are a valuable tool in helping you dig deeply into people’s intrinsic strengths and limitations and get around scripted interview answers. Just make sure you’re using an assessment instrument that has been scientifically validated for candidate selection. Happy hiring!

Even people who don’t care one bit about Star Trek (what!) know that Captain Kirk is a high-risk, high-reward type of leader and that Spock is his calm, logical sidekick. Spock may be good enough to provide statistical probabilities, but not good enough to make decisions. They even did an episode about it with Spock leading a landing party that turns into a disaster because of his calm, logical decision making. Only when he “learns” to be emotionally impulsive is the mission saved.

This is a terrible message. In a different episode, Captain Kirk is literally about to blow up the Enterprise and kill the crew just to call an alien bad guy’s bluff. Like, if my boss ever threatens to blow up my department unless accounting signs off on a budget increase, I’d like to be consulted first (I may want to work from home that day).

Onto the sports: Sports fans (#notallsportsfans) spend a lot of their spectating time being outraged about refereeing. They’re even more outraged when their team’s coach doesn’t throw a fit and start tossing water bottles and hockey sticks onto the ice in response to said refereeing (even when it’s basketball). “He’s a terrible coach! He doesn’t scream and turn red and get kicked out of the game!”

In real life, Spock would be a much better starship captain than Kirk, and coaches who keep their cool get better results over the long term. Why? Because calm, composed leaders inspire confidence and are better at handling unexpected complications.

Research into performance competencies shows that all types of supervisors, and Sales Managers especially, benefit from demonstrating composure. Shouting and histrionics might drive a very short term burst of performance improvement among staff members, but you know how “regression toward the mean” works. Performance will inevitably dip below the level that instigated the outburst in the first place, before finally leveling off where it was.

Sales leaders who exhibit composure give employees confidence that challenges can be overcome and that the work environment is stable and consistent. Try making a case that an emotional, reactive manager delivers better results.

But what about the individual sales professionals who report to the sales leader? Doesn’t being a fast-paced, competitive, and successful salesperson also involve a certain intensity that might sometimes manifest as emotional reactiveness?

Not really. Research shows that composure is a key success driver in sales too. Yes, Influence and Persuasion and Relationship Building remain core competencies for sales professionals, but the ability to stay composed when dealing with difficult personalities and running into obstacles turns out to be even more important to sales effectiveness than many believed.

In the competency-based approach to hiring and development that we advocate, companies place less emphasis on years of experience and more on applicants’ and employees’ intrinsic motivations and limitations. This means, in part, asking interview questions targeted at the uncovering the competencies deemed essential for success. A lot of companies already do this, but if they’re not addressing composure (sometimes framed as “resilience”) in the hiring process, they should be. If composure can be the difference maker in, hypothetically, 3-5% of sales opportunities, wouldn’t it be worth looking into?

When it comes to improving results across an existing sales force, it may be advantageous to incorporate coping strategies around composure/resilience into coaching plans. Focus areas could include developing better techniques for handling different personality types, finding ways to assess setbacks more constructively, and learning to see individual events in context of the bigger picture.

And remember to set the right example yourself. Employees who struggle with composure will experience setbacks. That’s not the time to throw hockey sticks. Really, you should never throw hockey sticks. Someone could get hurt, and frankly, they’re pretty expensive. The end.

Can you believe I went with the sports callback instead of Star Trek and passed up an opportunity to close with “Set phasers to ‘SELL!’”?

When it comes to making accurate predictions about business and world affairs, complex statistical analyses have supplanted the once-confident declarations of authoritative experts in almost every respect. If there were any doubt, look at the past few election cycles. How many times must statistician Nate Silver embarrass the talking heads on cable news networks before they admit their expertise is unsupported by any discernable history of being correct?

[Apparently their tolerance for embarrassment is limitless, since the bloviating continues unabated. Something about filling 24 hours of programming, one surmises.]

In an article that appeared Monday on Bloomberg View, Noah Smith, a finance professor at Stony Brook University, writes about the big data shift in economics. That is, how we’ve moved away from what he calls “elegant economic theories” and toward cold analytics, a change that has had ripple effects across every aspect of industry and finance.

Smith writes: “Where theorizing once dominated the journals and academia, empirics and data now comprise the majority [viewpoint].”

While he ultimately advocates for the big-data focused, empirical approach, he also recognizes that “it’s important to understand the power and limitations of [purely scientific] methods.”

In the World of Work, big data affects all of us, whether we work in HR, management, or as individual contributors. As someone employed by a talent-management consulting firm, I can attest to the degree with which statistical data has changed the employee-assessment industry. We have put in a massive effort on the R&D and technology fronts to create a new analytics platform and to develop complex, scientifically rigorous formulas around behavioral competencies. These leading-edge tools give clients far deeper insights into hiring for sales effectiveness, employee development, and team building than previously possible.

That said, the “human” in human capital isn’t going away anytime soon (at least not until the robots become sentient and take control). The people touch will always be a critical part of talent management. Software may be able to calculate accurate behavioral competencies and potential sales effectiveness for a manager and for a staff member, but it takes a person to look at the results and say, “Hmmm… these dynamics explain why they clash so often.”

An analytics platform gives managers unprecedented views of individual and team dynamics, but only people can take those views and use them for things like talent placement, building high-performing teams that exhibit greater sales effectiveness, and overall organizational development.

So while the future of big data in talent management is exciting and promises new and even more advanced ways of maximizing productivity and sales effectiveness in teams, it still takes humans to apply that data toward a meaningful talent alignment strategy and to support the best hiring and development decisions.

Of course, the sales profession didn’t perish; it’s just that the power now lies in the hands of the customer, and businesses are attempting to reshape their salesforces to align with a savvy buyer.

Caliper Director of Account Development Daisy Lambert notices that “consumers, because of such easy access to information—accurate or otherwise—are more informed. In sales, you have to be prepared and truly understand and believe your value proposition … you have to understand your consumer and your go-to-market strategy. Salespeople need to be more creative and knowledgeable.”

Relationship-building, persistence, and an ability to get one to “sign on the line which is dotted,” will always be crucial components of sales effectiveness. Now, though, sales teams are frequently being asked to take part in a more strategic process, one in which the customer can perform global price comparisons and research competitors’ products instantaneously.

“The relationship aspect has always been very important,” says Kai Faltot, Director, Account Development at Caliper, “but with the informed buyer, it holds that much more weight. The salesforce as a whole also has to be more intelligent. Not only did they always have to be quick on their feet, but they’ve got to have that ability not to lose the interest of the client in a world of immediate gratification.”

Just as Caliper must adjust to the changing needs of its clients, businesses are making similar course corrections with their sales teams. But how do you know where to turn and what transition to make, exactly? After all, success looks different in each field, and sales cycles, company cultures, and products are all unique.

Changing a business culture can be difficult, but Director of Account Management Anne Bartschat notes Caliper can guide a business, through the use of precision-based competency-driven reports, in getting to the heart of what drives success in a specific role.

“Sometimes, businesses have a competency model, but it reflects the current condition, not the future state they want to achieve, so we work with them to update the information and link our reports to the new competency framework,” Bartschat says. “When we see what their future state looks like, we can work with them to bring in the right people.”

Lambert notes that “Caliper can help in two simple ways. First and most important is helping a manager gain insight on the potential type of person they are getting. The second is the job match. We help you understand if a person’s personality and competencies align with the job’s business needs. The report/verbal consultation combo enhances the ‘Are they a fit?’ question with ‘Why or why not?’”

After using a more data-driven and culture-specific tool, you will acquire an even greater self-awareness, understanding your existing company culture and determining precisely what you need to look like in order to thrive. After marrying Caliper’s competency models to your unique business framework, you can develop the sophisticated salesforce you need in 2016 to engage with a more knowledgeable and savvy buyer.