Scientific Selling: Creating High-Performance Sales Teams Through Applied Psychology and Testing

Chapter 9

How Scientific Is It?

Since the late 1980s, the academic study of personality and the application of personality theory toward the solution of key organizational challenges has undergone a marked renaissance. Interest in personality has also expanded past traditional domains such as personnel selection and hiring to touch upon diverse areas such as the influence of personality on team performance, leadership, organizational culture and climate, entrepreneurship and innovation, stress and well-being, work motivation, job satisfaction, and a host of others. Hundreds of empirical research studies, conducted in a wide variety of settings, have conclusively demonstrated the quantitative connection between personality and job performance.

—Todd Harris, Director of Research, PI Worldwide

When the concept of scientific selling is presented to sales groups, the question inevitably comes up about the scientific validity of the entire concept. This is not surprising, considering that many sales professionals have already been exposed to books or programs that use a patina of scientific language in order to create a false credibility.

The methodologies described in this book are quite different from the junk science that's become all too common in the sales training world. The purpose of this chapter is to explain the concept of scientific reliability and validity, and to show how behavioral assessment and skills assessment are measured, and why those measurements are scientifically ...