Building a sales team can often seem like a shot in the dark – check out their resume and past performance, bring them on and hope for the best. But that can lead to disengagement and turnover among people who aren’t truly a fit for the specific job and/or team.

Fortunately, there are tools to address this challenge: personality and behavioral assessments, which can inform hiring as well as training for existing teams in order to improve productivity and culture.

Mike Carroll, founder and managing partner at Intelligent Conversations, a Milwaukee-based sales consultancy focused on improving teams’ performance, culture and leadership, helps companies use personality and behavioral assessments, as well as sales-specific evaluations, when hiring new sales reps and to improve overall performance.

“We want to understand people’s communication patterns, underlying motivators, why they behave in certain ways,” says Carroll. “That’s super useful from a management perspective – they can change their communication style, how they present information and the pace of communication. All those factors go into connecting with each team member.”

In this episode of Promo Insiders, ASI Media’s Sara Lavenduski speaks with Carroll, the author of The Sales Team You Deserve: Why CEOs Tolerate Mediocrity and What You Can Do About It, about the different types of assessments, how they can be used fairly to evaluate potential hires and existing team members, and what sales managers often learn about their colleagues once they implement assessments.