What You Need to Know
The sales profession is rife with psychometric models that profess to identify and measure various personality traits supposedly advantageous to success in sales. Many of the most popular fall short of their claims. This research note delves deeply into two experiments testing fundamental hypotheses implicit in DiSC, one such personality test.
What Is DiSC?
In case you are unfamiliar with the DiSC assessment tool, here is a brief description: “DiSC is a personal assessment tool used by more than one million people every year to help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity in the workplace.” The DiSC acronym stands for: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance.
Disproving the Utility of DiSC
Regarding sales skills, DiSC purports to aid sales professionals by helping them to understand and adapt to their customers’ styles. It does not represent itself as a pre-hiring tool. Despite this, many apply DiSC in their decision-making to hire salespeople, and still others place much stock in its ability to predict or explain salespeople’s performance. Yet an analysis of DiSC, which this report presents and describes, provides powerful evidence of the lack of impact DiSC profiles have on sales professionals’ knowledge or performance. The findings come from two sales onboarding programs comprising excellent sample sizes, different populations, and different knowledge and performance measures.
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