How to assess business development skills

So your business is ripe for expansion, and you’re looking to hire a business development representative.

Whether you use internal recruitment or outsource this process, evaluating your candidates’ skills is a significant component of the hiring process to ensure you objectively zero in on the best candidate. Hiring representatives with exceptional proven business development skills and knowledge is crucial to helping your company grow.

Administering a skills assessment will help you determine which candidate has the ideal capabilities for your role, but which tests should you consider including in your assessment? 

In this article, we’ll share our recommended tests and methods to assess business development skills for your next hire.

What is a business development skills assessment?

A business development assessment can evaluate various candidate skills, such as:

• Team management 

• Business-client relationship nurturing

• Prospect research abilities

• Negotiation skills

• Business strategy development

• Business intelligence skills, such as analyzing business data

• Project management  

With TestGorilla, your skills assessment can also feature situational judgment and personality and culture tests. Combining these tests in one assessment lets you assess if candidates can use business judgment skills to make strategic decisions, such as improving lead generation.

The results will also determine your candidates’ ability to build a network of potential customers, which could help them receive client referrals and identify opportunities for new prospects.

A business development skills assessment is the best method for evaluating candidates objectively. It provides an overview of your candidates’ skills, helping you select only the most qualified talent to invite to the interview phase. 

Why are business development skills important?

Hiring business development representatives with relevant skills is crucial for your company for many reasons. Let’s explore three of them below.

1. Negotiation opens chances of exploring new markets

Representatives with strong negotiation and networking skills can help your business explore new markets, which often involve creating partnerships. For example, if you are a clothing retailer, your representative might use networking skills to communicate effectively and find agreements that are mutually beneficial for you and the partner.

Your company could then partner with international distributors so you can expand your customer base. The result of these new partnerships is greater growth and company profits.

Negotiation skills, like influencing decisions and driving discussions, are fundamental for business development representatives. These skills help them to:

• Negotiate the terms and conditions of potential partnerships

• Secure better contracts and agreement terms with business partners

• Resolve disputes with new business partners – or prevent them from happening

For example, a study compared the negotiations of two groups: Group one had strategic preparedness skills, and group two did not. Group one achieved a 26.7% higher sales value than the other group. Their strategic planning and persuasion skills led to beneficial agreements and enhanced business relationships.

2. Analytical thinking develops strategic planning

Strategic planning relies on analytical skills, enabling business development representatives to set achievable goals, predict outcomes, and evaluate progress. Analytical skills help professionals to review data like sales figures and market engagement statistics. They can take this information and forecast sales directions compared to business objectives, such as a yearly sales target. 

Analytical skills also help professionals assess potential downfalls, such as poor client communication or decreasing customer retention, enabling them to create key strategies to solve these issues. 

For example, they may write weekly email newsletters with unique promotions for repeat customers to encourage ongoing sales. They might also collaborate with other departments to determine the content of the email and how to best share the strategy across the business. 

3. Business development skills improve business reputation

Top talent with strong business development skills can enhance the reputation of your company by making improvements to marketing and branding. For example, they can align your company’s messaging with current campaigns or establish specific strategies that match the company’s target audience.

The likely result of these actions and skills is an increase in conversions and greater company revenue. 

Which skills and traits are important for business development?

Business development skills are fundamental to business growth, but which specific traits and abilities should you consider in candidates? Here are some essential skills we recommend looking out for during your talent search:

Market research and marketing 

Market research skills, such as managing quantitative information, can help representatives understand trends and data. They can then determine which actions they should take in line with the insights they gather. With their actions, they’ll achieve increased brand awareness and reach more prospects, especially if they can:

• Understand existing consumers and clients

• Define objectives suited to expanding the company’s client base

• Develop business strategies that align with the market research

These skills could help your brand gain customers. For example, in the case study of Sodexo and their company development support, the company needed to learn how to influence their buyers from the beginning of their journey. They also needed to learn about customers’ pain points, emotional needs, challenges, and motivations.

Market research contributed to their understanding of buyer journeys. Sodexo was able to create value propositions after 100 customer interviews with the representatives' support. They completed these interviews over the phone with customers and prospects, which told them more about:

• The specific personas to target

• The best opportunities in each sector

The company could then use key messaging architectures that resonated with prospects, investing their resources correctly and matching their client’s needs to their services. This shows that market analysis and marketing skills are crucial for business development. 

Therefore, it’s important to consider some of the following marketing skills when hiring a business development representative:

• Outreach correspondence knowledge

• Consumer and audience persona use

• Management of social media

• Email marketing

Critical thinking

Business development representatives need critical thinking skills to identify new prospects and opportunities to enter new markets. These skills will ensure your candidates can:

• Determine which factors are important for businesses when entering new markets

• Identify risks such as economic downturns

• Identify partnerships and ways to improve them

Critical thinking skills can also make a difference in completing client needs analysis in line with specific markets. For instance, high-performing candidates will know that some markets might be worth exploring and others less valuable to your clients. With these skills, candidates can work with your business to ensure its products or services meet your client’s demands. 

Problem solving

Multiple challenges can arise in a business development representative’s role, such as meeting the changing needs of clients. Representatives with specific problem-solving skills, such as data analysis and excellent decision making, will be well-placed to help your company meet these challenges.

For instance, if your representative notices that your company’s sales have declined in a specific location, they will be able to:

• Consider particular reasons for the decline in sales

• Create a plan to increase sales

• Execute target lead generation specific to that area

• Improve locational brand awareness

Problem-solving skills can also help your representative to notice when increased competition is contributing to fewer sales. Hiring candidates with deductive reasoning abilities will ensure they implement the best strategies to handle various challenges. 

Project management 

Project management skills help representatives set clear goals. They’ll be able to map an achievable journey while considering potential risks and how to deal with them, reducing possible obstacles to business growth. 

Several of the skills candidates need to be good at project management are the same as others required for business development, like monitoring lead generation improvements, identifying better outreach activities, and optimizing sales approaches. Communication, active listening, proactivity, and analytical thinking are also necessary for completing complex business development projects.

Representatives can use these skills to make crucial decisions confidently. The main outcomes of checking these project management qualities and skills include:

• Greater revenue for your business

• Faster decision making for your business

• Enhanced customer service

Collaboration 

Collaboration skills can help business development representatives communicate strategies like increasing sales margins or streamlining internal operations to deliver better customer service. Some key collaboration skills include:

• Verbal and written communication

• Active listening

• Planning

• Resource allocation

• Analytical thinking

• Observation

Representatives with a collaborative work style will communicate key objectives and milestones clearly. They’ll mention the requirements of involved parties, which may include different departments or leaders. They’ll also lay out plans on how to achieve the set goals. 

A collaborative mindset means representatives will use their initiative proactively to consider elements like resource allocation. Here are some other benefits:

• Improved team culture, as collaboration promotes support

• Strengthened team relationships

• Enhanced partner, customer, and client satisfaction

Effective collaboration ensures that representatives can identify their clients’ pain points and ensure their products or services match these needs. 

Skills and traits tests to assess business development representatives

Evaluating your candidate pool with a skills assessment will ensure your shortlisted candidates have the right skills before you interview them. 

With TestGorilla, you can include up to five tests in your custom assessment. Below we share some of our recommended skills tests for finding the right business development representative. 

Market research

Try our Market research skills test to assess your candidates’ ability to:

• Gather numerical data in surveys

• Complete qualitative research methods, such as conducting interviews

If your candidates perform well on this test, they will know how to explore opportunities with your team to help the business grow. They’ll also understand how to interpret market data and propose recommendations to make your business more successful.

Negotiation

Our Negotiation skills test will determine whether your candidates have: 

• Influential expertise

• Ability to control and lead the dialogue

• Methods to leverage emotional intelligence in negotiations

• Skills in closing deals

• Ability to negotiate effectively when building partnerships

This test will reveal how well candidates handle the counterparty’s emotions during negotiations and assess how candidates steer conversations to focus on positive outcomes for both businesses.

Problem solving

The Problem solving skills test will check if your representatives can:

• Identify problems preventing business growth

• Determine strategies to solve problems

• Create a schedule to implement a strategy

• Execute strategies according to a plan 

• Analyze information to solve business-related issues

This test is ideal if you’re seeking candidates who can handle issues in a constantly changing environment.

Critical thinking

With our Critical thinking skills test, you can assess whether candidates can:

• Understand which factors lead to business success 

• Make excellent judgments from analytical skills 

• Create innovative strategies to handle complex challenges

• Use deductive reasoning

• Identify and challenge assumptions

Use this skills test to learn if your candidates have the right critical thinking skills to help your business break new ground.

Project management

Our Project management skills test is the perfect evaluation method if you want to assess the following abilities: 

• Project budget estimation skills

• Effective communication skills throughout the project

• Project work management and delivery

These results will help you check whether prospective candidates can plan strategically, manage their time well, and communicate effectively when completing projects.

Business development skills assessment FAQs

Are you looking for more information about business development skills assessments and how to make your own with TestGorilla? Read on for answers to some frequently asked questions.

What should a business development skills assessment include?

The combination of tests you use may assess hard skills like marketing ability, soft skills like communication, or cognitive and situational judgment abilities. 

You can also include custom questions, which may be essay, multiple-choice, or video-response style questions.

What kinds of questions are asked in a skills test?

The tests may ask situational or behavioral questions indicating how candidates react in a certain scenario. Other questions might have single answers, such as defining a relevant term. 

The answering style depends on the question’s focus. Subjective questions may use short- or long-text style options, and exact answer questions use true/false or multiple-choice formats.

How do you make a skills assessment?

The easiest way to make a skills assessment for business development representatives is to make an account with TestGorilla and then select “Create new assessment” on the “My assessments” link. 

From this page, you can create an assessment name, select the language for your assessment, choose the role you want to find tests for, and then pick the tests. To complete the process, you can add custom questions to the assessment.

How TestGorilla can help you find a skilled business development representative

When hiring a business development representative, there's an easy way to make your hiring process faster and bias-free. TestGorilla will help you achieve these hiring goals among other additional benefits:

Improve the rate of offer acceptance

Our skills assessments enhance the candidate experience by creating a smooth and fair evaluation process. Candidates can take the assessments on any device, making test-taking more convenient. By offering a convenient and objective candidate evaluation process, you can increase your rate of offer acceptance.

Hire a team of diverse representatives

Since skills assessments are bias-free, you won’t be inclined to defer to candidates with the same cognitive approaches as your current team. 

Skills assessments can reveal a wide range of candidates with the necessary skills, and you can also include "culture add" strategies in your assessments, which let you zero in on traits that will enhance your team's culture.

Save resources

Instead of using resume screening tools that rely on candidate honesty, you can save resources with skills assessments. TestGorilla’s assessments will streamline the hiring process and help you target candidates with the right skills in just a few steps. 

Our platform is also easy to navigate and doesn’t need to be combined with other screening tools or extra resources. 

To incorporate TestGorilla into your hiring process, use a simple four-step approach:

1. Create an assessment and invite sourced candidates to take it

2. Use the assessment percentages to compare candidates and create a shortlist

3. Complete interviews with your shortlisted skilled candidates 

4. Hire the best candidate, and complete onboarding and training with the facts you learn from the test results

Find the most skilled business development representatives with TestGorilla

TestGorilla can significantly improve your hiring process. We have several tests you can try for free when you sign up with us, and you can find many more in our test library. 

Whether you want to evaluate hard skills like business intelligence or soft skills like communication, you can find the best tests to support your hiring process with TestGorilla.

Try our free demo to learn more about our unique features and user-friendly approach.