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High-Drive sales candidate advancing beyond résumés toward a rising revenue chart, illustrating how to hire salespeople who produce revenue.
Sales Interviewing & Hiring

Why Most Sales Hiring Advice Is Wrong — And What Actually Works

You’ve probably experienced this: The candidate walks in sharp, confident, and prepared. Their resume looks strong. They know the language of sales. They answer every question well. By the end of the interview, the hiring team is nodding — “this one feels like a winner.” Then they get hired. And within a few months, the truth starts to show. The pipeline is thin. Prospecting is inconsistent. Rejection slows them down. Follow-up gets soft. The same person who sold you so well in the interview cannot seem to sell consistently in the role. This is where most companies get sales hiring
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Hiring manager reviewing candidate results with the message that broad personality tests do not reliably predict sales performance.
Sales Assessments

Why Personality Tests Often Fail at Sales Hiring (And What to Use Instead)

Personality tests like DISC and Myers-Briggs fail at sales hiring because they measure broad traits — communication style, temperament, how someone interacts with others — instead of the traits that actually drive revenue. They’re also self-reported, which means candidates can answer the way they think you want to see rather than how they actually behave. What actually predicts sales success is Drive: the combination of Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, and Optimism. Drive shows up in behavior — consistent follow-up, persistence through rejection, initiative — which makes it harder to fake than a personality questionnaire. I’ve spent over twenty years building
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Sales Assessments

How Sales Managers Can Use Assessments to Improve Sales Team Performance

You know the feeling. You look at your sales dashboard and see two reps with identical activity levels but vastly different results. One is closing deal after deal, while the other is struggling to get past the initial discovery call. Your gut tells you it might be a confidence issue, or maybe they just “don’t want it bad enough.” But in sales management, gut instinct is often an expensive advisor. When you rely on intuition alone, you risk misdiagnosing the problem. You might send a low-Drive rep to a closing seminar when what they really lack is the resilience to
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two business people interviewing a salesperson using an assessment and behavioral interview to avoid costly sales hiring mistakes
Sales Assessments

5 Ways CEOs Can Stop Wasting Money on Sales Hiring Mistakes

Hiring salespeople should feel like an investment with a clear return, not a roll of the dice. The fastest way to protect your budget is to build your sales hiring process around what actually drives top performance – a salesperson’s natural Drive.  Drive is the trio of non-teachable traits that separates consistent producers from everyone else: Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, and Optimism. The right sales hiring tool helps you screen for these traits early, structure better interviews, and reduce costly mis-hires. Below are five practical moves you can make today to reduce turnover, ramp faster, and staff your team with
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Sales skills assessment test dashboard measuring candidate performance.
Sales Assessments

Sales Skills Assessment Test vs. Personality Questionnaires: Which is Better for Hiring Salespeople?

Hiring managers today face an overwhelming challenge: how to separate the sales candidates who will actually hit their sales targets from those who only look good on paper. Interviews alone rarely cut it—candidates polish their stories, rehearse answers, and sometimes know exactly what you want to hear. That’s why structured assessments have exploded in popularity. But not all assessments are created equal. The two most common approaches are sales skills assessment tests and personality questionnaires. While both can provide useful insights, they measure very different things. Understanding the distinction could be the difference between building a championship sales team—or dealing
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