If you’re considering Predictive Index (PI) for hiring salespeople and want to know whether it’s actually the best tool for predicting sales success, I’ve got you covered.

Let’s start by saying, The Predictive Index is a valuable tool. It has been around for decades, it’s validated and thousands of organizations use it. If you are using it for leadership development, team fit or reducing turnover due to role mismatch, you are using it well.

But after 20+ years in this field, I have seen a specific pattern repeat. A company adopts a tool, like Predictive Index, company-wide. It works beautifully for operations, finance and customer service. Then they apply it to their sales department and a year later, they are still hiring people who fit the culture perfectly but never build a pipeline.

This is not a PI failure. It is a sales hiring failure. And it is the reason “predictive index alternatives” is one of the most-searched phrases in this category.

TL;DR – What Are the Best Predictive Index Alternatives for Sales Hiring?

The best Predictive Index alternative depends on what you need the assessment to predict.

1. The DriveTest® by SalesDrive — Best for identifying Drive in hunter and new-business sales candidates
2. Objective Management Group — Best for an in-depth evaluation of sales competencies and Sales DNA
3. Criteria SalesAP and CCAT — Best for combining sales personality with cognitive aptitude
4. TestGorilla — Best for customizable sales skills testing
5. Wonderlic Select — Best for measuring cognitive ability, motivation, and personality together
6. HighMatch Berke — Best for customized job and organizational fit
7. Talogy Caliper — Best for enterprise hiring, development, and succession planning

Predictive Index remains a great tool for understanding workplace behavior, cognitive ability, team dynamics, and management needs. However, companies often consider alternatives to Predictive Index when they need a more direct answer to a sales-specific question:

Will this candidate consistently prospect, handle rejection, pursue difficult goals, and create new revenue?

Those outcomes are not the same as general behavioral fit.

Why Companies Look for Predictive Index Alternatives

The Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment measures four primary workplace drives —Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality. Its separate Cognitive Assessment evaluates verbal, numerical, and abstract reasoning. These tools can help employers understand how candidates are likely to behave at work and how quickly they may learn or adapt. The company also supports broader talent optimization, management, and employee development initiatives. The Predictive Index explains its assessment model here.

Those are legitimate and useful objectives.

The problem begins when a company assumes that a broadly applicable behavioral profile automatically answers every sales hiring question.

It does not.

A candidate can match a company’s preferred behavioral profile, communicate effectively, and learn quickly but still lack the internal motivation to prospect every day. Another candidate may be less polished or culturally familiar but possess the competitiveness, persistence, and goal orientation required to build a territory.

Sales hiring tools generally fall into several categories:

• Sales-specific personality and motivation assessments
• Sales competency assessments
• Cognitive aptitude tests
• General workplace behavioral assessments
• Job-specific skills tests and simulations
• Enterprise talent management platforms

And each category is designed to measure something different.

“Behavioral fit predicts tenure. Trait-level Drive predicts production.”

How We Ranked These Predictive Index Alternatives

This list ranks tools according to their usefulness for hiring revenue-producing salespeople, particularly candidates responsible for prospecting and generating new business.

The ranking considers:

• How directly the tool addresses sales performance
• Whether it distinguishes general workplace fit from sales-specific potential
• The type of data it provides
• Where it fits in the hiring process
• Candidate and hiring-manager burden
• Its usefulness for hunter, account management, technical, or enterprise sales roles

Disclosure: I developed The DriveTest. I have ranked it first because this article is specifically about sales hiring, especially hunter and new-business roles. If your priority is company-wide talent management, cognitive aptitude, or selling-skill demonstration, another tool on this list may be the better choice.

Predictive Index Alternatives Comparison Table

Tool	Primary focus	Best for	Sales-specific?	Important limitation
Predictive Index	Workplace behavior, cognitive ability, job fit, and team dynamics	Companies seeking an organization-wide behavioral framework	No; applicable across roles	Built to predict workplace behavior, not new business development
1. The DriveTest	Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, Optimism, and supporting sales skills	Screening hunter, BDR, outbound, territory, and new-business candidates	Yes	Sales roles only, no product knowledge, hard skills or culture fit
2. Objective Management Group	Will to Sell, Sales DNA, and tactical selling competencies	Deep evaluation of sales candidates or existing teams	Yes	Greater diagnostic depth may be more than an early-stage screen requires
3. Criteria	Sales personality and cognitive aptitude	Sales roles requiring both prospecting initiative and learning ability	Partly	Aptitude predicts ramp speed, not prospecting persistence
4. TestGorilla	Sales skills, aptitude, cognitive ability, personality, and custom tests	Recruiters who want a flexible skills-first screening workflow	Partly	The quality of the signal depends heavily on which tests are combined
5. Wonderlic Select	Cognitive ability, personality, and work motivation	Technically complex roles and multi-department hiring	No; uses role benchmarks	Does not directly isolate prospecting persistence or hunter motivation
6. HighMatch/ Berke	Personality, problem-solving, and customized job fit	Organizations wanting a role-specific success profile	Configurable	A customized profile is only as good as the role criteria behind it
7. Talogy/Caliper	Personality, cognitive ability, job models, and talent development	Enterprise selection, coaching, and succession planning	Broad, with sales job models	Longer and broader than many companies need for initial sales screening

The DriveTest® by SalesDrive: Best for Hiring Sales Hunters

The DriveTest was developed specifically for sales hiring. It measures what SalesDrive defines as Drive, a combination of three difficult-to-train characteristics:

• Need for Achievement
• Competitiveness
• Optimism

It also evaluates Confidence, Persuasiveness, Relationship Skills, and Organization.

The assessment contains 42 forced-choice questions and takes approximately 20 minutes. Candidates must select which of three positive statements is most and least like them. This format is designed to make the preferred answer less obvious than it would be in a conventional rating-scale personality test. Learn how The DriveTest works.

The DriveTest is particularly relevant when success depends on behaviors such as:

• Prospecting without constant supervision
• Competing for difficult opportunities
• Recovering after repeated rejection
• Pursuing demanding goals
• Maintaining activity when results temporarily slow down
• Creating business instead of waiting for leads

BEST FOR: BDRs, SDRs, outside salespeople, account executives, territory representatives, recruiters, and other hunter-oriented roles.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Companies seeking one platform for every department, leadership succession, workforce planning, or detailed sales-skill simulations.

The DriveTest should not be used as the sole hiring decision. It is strongest when combined with a structured behavioral interview, reference checks, and a realistic sales exercise.

For a direct feature-by-feature discussion, see Predictive Index vs. The DriveTest for sales hiring.

Objective Management Group: Best for Deep Sales Competency Analysis

Objective Management Group (OMG), is another sales-specific Predictive Index alternative. OMG evaluates candidates across 21 sales competencies organized into three groups:

• Will to Sell
• Sales DNA
• Tactical Selling

Its assessments can be configured for hunting, farming, account management, telesales, channel sales, major accounts, sales management, and sales leadership. Its candidate reports provide a Recommended or Not Recommended result based on the requirements of the role. Review OMG’s sales candidate assessment.

Compared with The DriveTest, OMG offers a broader diagnostic view of how someone approaches selling. It can explore mindset, potential weaknesses, tactical competencies, and coachability in considerable depth.

BEST FOR: Companies that want a comprehensive sales-specific evaluation of finalists or an extensive assessment of an existing sales team.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Employers that primarily need a focused, early-stage screen for internal Drive before committing substantial time to interviews.

The choice between OMG and SalesDrive is therefore less about which assessment is better and more about how much detail you need and where you need it.

Criteria SalesAP and CCAT: Best for Sales Personality Plus Cognitive Aptitude

Criteria offers several assessments that can be useful in sales hiring, most notable the Sales Achievement Predictor (SalesAP). While Criteria utilizes other proprietary engines like Illustria for general job fit, SalesAP serves as their dedicated sales personality inventory. It evaluates areas such as:

• Achievement
• Cold-calling initiative
• Competitiveness
• Sales closing
• Sales disposition

The SalesAP contains 140 items and produces an overall sales recommendation supported by 15 subscales. Criteria states that it has been validated against sales performance and includes validity scales intended to detect exaggerated or overly favorable responses. See the official SalesAP overview.

Criteria can also pair a sales personality assessment with the CCAT, its 15-minute cognitive aptitude test. That combination can be useful when the salesperson must master complicated products, analyze customer problems, or navigate a technically demanding sale.

BEST FOR: Technology, financial, industrial, medical, and other sales positions in which learning speed and problem-solving ability matter alongside sales disposition.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Employers that want one short assessment centered specifically on hunter Drive.

Criteria highlights an important distinction: the motivation to sell and the ability to learn a complex sales environment are related hiring questions, but they are not the same. Determine your hiring needs before deciding which assessment will be the best fit for you.

TestGorilla: Best for Customizable Sales Skills Testing

TestGorilla is a broader pre-employment testing platform that allows employers to combine multiple assessments into a custom candidate evaluation.

Its sales testing options include a 10-minute Sales Aptitude assessment covering sales communication, relationship building, sales techniques, problem-solving, and adaptability. It is important to note that TestGorilla’s Sales Aptitude test operates primarily as a situational judgment test (SJT)—measuring practical knowledge and scenario-based tactics rather than an underlying behavioral drive. TestGorilla also offers tests for B2B outside sales, lead generation, account management, negotiation, critical thinking, and other relevant capabilities. Explore TestGorilla’s Sales Aptitude test.

This flexibility is TestGorilla’s main advantage. A company could create an assessment that combines:

• Sales aptitude
• Critical thinking
• Written communication
• Negotiation
• Personality
• Culture contribution
• Custom company questions

BEST FOR: Recruiting teams that hire across multiple departments and want to test several sales skills in one configurable workflow.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Employers looking for one specialized psychological model of sustained hunter motivation.

The risk with customizable assessment platforms is test accumulation. Adding more tests does not automatically improve the decision. Every component should answer a defined hiring question. Otherwise, the process becomes longer without becoming more predictive.

Wonderlic Select: Best for Cognitive Ability, Motivation, and Personality

Wonderlic Select combines three types of candidate information into a job-fit score:

• Cognitive ability
• Personality
• Work motivation

Wonderlic describes these dimensions as whether a candidate can do the work, how they are likely to approach it, and whether the work interests them. It also provides job-specific benchmarks and structured interview guidance. See how Wonderlic Select works.

This multi-measure approach can be valuable for sales positions that require quick learning, adaptation, and sustained interest in the actual work.

For example, an enterprise technology salesperson may need to understand a sophisticated product, manage a long buying process, coordinate multiple stakeholders, and remain motivated by consultative work. Cognitive ability and work interests may matter considerably in that environment.

BEST FOR: Complex sales roles and employers seeking one general pre-employment assessment across multiple job families.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Companies whose central question is whether a candidate will initiate new-business activity and persist through sustained rejection.

HighMatch/Berke: Best for Customized Job Fit

Berke, part of HighMatch, is a configurable assessment that measures personality traits and problem-solving ability. It compares candidates with the specific requirements of a role and can generate personalized interview guides. Review the Berke Assessment.

This customized approach can be useful when two sales positions with similar titles require very different behaviors.

An inbound account executive receiving qualified leads does not perform the same work as a territory representative building a pipeline from nothing. A generic “salesperson” profile could miss that distinction.

BEST FOR: Companies that want to build role-specific profiles reflecting their sales motion, organization, and performance expectations.

NOT IDEAL FOR: Employers that do not yet have a clear definition of success for the role.

That limitation is easy to overlook. Customization does not fix a bad success profile. If your current top performers benefit from better territories, inherited accounts, or unusually favorable market conditions, modeling them without examining those variables could institutionalize the wrong hiring criteria.

Talogy/Caliper: Best for Enterprise Talent Management

Historically known as a standalone benchmark, the Caliper Profile is now part of Talogy’s broader assessment portfolio. It combines personality and cognitive ability items to evaluate job fit and future performance.

The assessment measures 21 personality traits plus abstract reasoning and supports job models for sales, management, leadership, and other roles. Talogy also offers selection reports, talent analytics, development reporting, consultation, and succession-planning applications. The assessment typically takes about one hour. Review Talogy’s Caliper assessment.

BEST FOR: Larger organizations that want assessment data to support hiring, onboarding, coaching, leadership development, and succession planning.

NOT IDEAL FOR: A smaller company that needs a quick, specialized screen for a limited number of hunter sales candidates.

Caliper provides substantially broader talent insight than a narrowly focused sales assessment. That breadth is valuable when the company will use it. If the only decision is whether a candidate has the motivation to build pipeline, the additional complexity may not add enough value.

When Predictive Index May Still Be the Right Choice

Predictive Index (PI) remains a strong option when you want to:

• Use one behavioral framework across multiple departments
• Improve communication and team dynamics
• Understand management and motivational needs
• Compare candidates with a behavioral job target
• Combine behavioral and cognitive information
• Use assessment data after hiring for coaching and development

Choosing an alternative does not always require abandoning Predictive Index.

A company could use PI to understand behavioral fit and management needs while adding a sales-specific assessment for revenue-producing positions. The tools are complementary when each has a clearly defined purpose.

Which Predictive Index Alternative Is Best for Your Sales Role?

The most useful answer depends on your specific hiring needs. For:

• Hunter, outbound, or new-business sales: The DriveTest by SalesDrive
• Detailed sales competency and Sales DNA analysis: Objective Management Group
• Sales personality plus learning ability: Criteria SalesAP and CCAT
• Custom sales skills testing: TestGorilla
• Cognitive ability, motivation, and personality across many roles: Wonderlic Select
• Customized role and organizational fit: HighMatch/Berke
• Enterprise selection and talent development: Talogy/Caliper

For account management or customer-success positions: relationship skills, organization, patience, and service orientation may matter more than aggressive prospecting.

For technical sales: cognitive aptitude and problem-solving may deserve greater weight.

For high-volume outbound sales: the ability to tolerate rejection and consistently initiate activity becomes more important.

There is no defensible universal sales profile. The assessment must match the work required.

Six Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Sales Hiring Assessment

1. What sales role are you actually hiring?
   Define the work, not merely the title.
   
   
2. Is the position primarily hunter, farmer, or a hybrid?
   The traits required to create new accounts may differ from those required to grow existing relationships.
   
   
3. What data is missing from your current hiring process?
   Motivation, personality, cognitive ability, selling skills, or organizational fit?
   
   
4. Where will the assessment appear in the hiring process?
   An early screening tool and a finalist-level diagnostic serve different purposes.
   
   
5. How much candidate and administrator burden can you justify?
   Longer and more detailed is not automatically more useful.
   
   
6. What business outcome must the assessment help predict?
   General workplace success, retention, learning ability, team fit, or consistent revenue generation ability?

Final Verdict

Alternatives does not mean replace. In practice, most of the companies I talk to are not in a position to disengage PI entirely. HR-deployed it org-wide. It is wired into the ATS. Several different departments depend on it. So, instead of looking at this from the “what should I replace PI with” lens, ask yourself “what should I add for sales-specific hiring?”

Predictive Index is useful when you need broad workplace behavioral insight and an organization-wide talent framework. It may not be sufficient by itself when your main hiring problem is distinguishing true new-business producers from candidates who merely look like good salespeople during an interview.

For hunter sales hiring, The DriveTest is the most focused alternative on this list. For a deeper sales competency audit, consider Objective Management Group. For skills testing, consider TestGorilla. For cognitive aptitude and multi-measure job fit, consider Criteria or Wonderlic. For customized or enterprise-wide talent programs, HighMatch/Berke and Talogy/Caliper deserve consideration.

Whichever tool you select, do not ask one assessment to prove everything. A stronger and practical sales hiring stack looks like this:

• Resume and AI screening – to organize the top of the funnel
• A job-relevant assessment – to eliminate candidates who will not succeed in the role
• Your existing behavioral tool – to assess team fit and inform onboarding for finalists
• A structured behavioral interview – to add the most predictive power
• Thorough reference checks – on the specific behaviors flagged in the hiring process

And remember, the best assessment is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one that predicts the result your business depends on. If you’d like a deeper look at sales hiring tools, including a few assessments not on this list, check out our broader 2026 sales assessment tools comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

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About the Author: Dr. Chris Croner is a clinical psychologist and Principal at SalesDrive, LLC. He developed The DriveTest® sales assessment and is co-author of Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again. He has helped more than 1,500 companies worldwide identify and hire top-performing salespeople. Connect with him on LinkedIn.