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 handle rejection. Or you might micromanage a high-performing Hunter who simply needs space to run.

This is where a data-driven sales team evaluation becomes your most powerful asset.

Most companies view assessments solely as a hiring resource. While assessment tools, like The DriveTest®, are critical for avoiding bad hires, their value doesn’t stop once an offer has been accepted. For a sales manager, these assessments are a diagnostic map. They reveal the hidden psychological wiring of your team, allowing you to move from generic “rah-rah” motivation to surgical, personality-based coaching.

Here is how you can use assessments to transform your current team’s performance.

Diagnose the Root Cause of Underperformance

When a salesperson misses quota, the standard reaction is to look at their skills. Do they know the product? Is their pitch polished? Are they using the CRM correctly?

But often, the issue isn’t skill. It’s will.

Skills are teachable. You can teach someone how to overcome an objection or how to demo software. You cannot teach Drive. Drive is the non-teachable combination of Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, and Optimism.

If you have a rep who crumbles after a few tough “no’s,” sending them to more sales training won’t fix the problem. They don’t lack knowledge; they lack optimism. An assessment gives you this objective data immediately. Instead of guessing why they are struggling, you can look at their profile.

• Low Need for Achievement: They might be satisfied with hitting the minimum and going home. No amount of commission capability will spark a fire if they don’t have that internal desire.
• Low Competitiveness: They might shy away from asking for the close because they don’t have the psychological need to “win the contest” against the prospect.
• Low Optimism: They take rejection personally. A bad morning ruins their entire day.

Once you know the source of the struggle, you stop wasting time on training that doesn’t stick. You can address the real issue or make the tough decision that they might be in the wrong role.

The “Hunter” vs. “Farmer” Alignment

One of the most common findings during a sales team performance review is that you have excellent people in the wrong positions.

We often see companies hire a candidate because they are friendly, organized, and great at building relationships. They put this person in a new business development role (a “Hunter” role) and watch them fail. The rep makes friends but never closes.

Why? Because they are wired as a “Farmer.”

Farmers excel at Service, Organization, and Relationship building. They are perfect for account management where the goal is retention and upselling. Hunters, on the other hand, often score lower on organization but off the charts on Drive. They are impatient, determined, and resilient.

Using an assessment on your current team allows you to audit your roster. You might find that your struggling “closer” has the perfect profile for an account manager role. Moving them doesn’t just save their job; it likely saves you the cost of replacement and plugs a hole in your client success team.

Customized Coaching with the Production Builder™

The “Golden Rule” (treat others how you want to be treated) is terrible advice for sales managers. If you are a high-Drive, aggressive manager, treating a methodical, relationship-focused rep the way you want to be treated will likely crush them.

Effective coaching requires the “Platinum Rule”: Treat them how they need to be treated.

This is where the Production Builder™ Report becomes indispensable. Included with The DriveTest®, this report is designed specifically for you, the manager. It takes the raw data of the assessment and translates it into a coaching manual for that specific individual.

For example, let’s say you are managing a sales rep who scored high on Need for Achievement but low on Confidence.

• The Mistake: You might try to motivate them with public praise or contests.
• The Data-Driven Approach: The report would tell you that this person is internally critical. Public praise might actually embarrass them if they feel they haven’t “earned” it yet. Instead, they need clear, challenging goals and autonomy.

Or consider a rep with high Optimism but low Organization.

• The Mistake: You constantly nag them about their CRM data, causing friction.
• The Data-Driven Approach: You accept that their brain moves fast. You pair them with an admin or set up automated tools to handle the details, freeing them up to do what they do best: sell.

This level of customization turns a standard sales manager’s assessment of the team into a strategic development plan. You stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

Improving Retention of Top Producers

High-Drive salespeople are high-maintenance. They are like thoroughbred racehorses; they are built to run, and if you keep them in the stable too long, they will kick the stall down.

Assessments help you identify who these people are before they quit. A top producer with high Competitiveness needs a constant challenge. If they hit their annual goal in October and you don’t give them a new mountain to climb, they will get bored. And a bored Hunter starts looking for a new hunting ground.

By reviewing their assessment profile, you can proactively structure their environment to keep them engaged. Maybe it’s a higher commission tier, a contest against another top rep, or a mentorship role. The data tells you exactly what levers to pull to keep them locked in.

Benchmarking Your Current Sales Team for Future Growth

Finally, if you want predictable sales growth, you must first understand your current sales team. When benchmarking your team, the starting point is rarely a blank slate—it is almost always a bell curve.

In most organizations, Drive is distributed like the general population:

• A small group of true high-Drive salespeople on the right
• A core of average performers in the middle
• A cluster of low-Drive reps on the left

This distribution explains why many companies feel stuck at a revenue plateau. They are managing a mixed population instead of engineering a high-performance sales force.

Conservatively, high-Drive salespeople outperform low-Drive salespeople by at least 30%, and often much more. This isn’t a soft, qualitative insight. It has direct, measurable financial implications.

The Revenue Impact of Benchmarking Your Sales Team

Let’s translate Drive scores into numbers. Assume a 10-person sales team:

• Low-Drive reps generate: $500,000–$600,000
• Average reps generate: $700,000
• High-Drive reps generate: $800,000–$900,000

Under the typical bell-curve distribution, total team revenue may land around $7 million.

Now consider a strategic shift.

If you replace just three low-Drive salespeople with high-Drive performers:

• You remove three $500–600K producers
• You add three $800K producers

Total revenue increases to approximately $7.9 million. That’s nearly $900,000 in additional revenue—without increasing headcount.

This is an opportunity most companies ignore. But once you see your real Drive Curve, the strategy becomes clear: shift the curve to the right.

Benchmarking your sales team is a revenue optimization strategy. When you intentionally move from a mixed distribution of Drive to a concentrated group of high-Drive performers, you create:

• Higher per-rep productivity
• Lower management drag
• Increased predictability
• Stronger hiring confidence
• Real scalability

By assessing your current team, plotting your true Drive Curve, and committing to a strict, repeatable hiring process focused on high-Drive candidates, you turn your recruiting strategy into a growth strategy.

Summary

Your sales team is a complex engine. You can’t tune it properly if you don’t know what’s happening under the hood.

Assessments are not just a hiring filter. They are a management tool. They provide the objective clarity you need to evaluate your team, restructure roles, and coach with precision.

Stop managing based on personality and start managing based on psychology. The data is there. You just have to use it.

Frequently Asked Questions