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 people who close business.

1.) Hire for Drive First, then for Soft Sales Skills.

Soft sales skills can be trained. Drive is innate. Candidates with strong Need for Achievement set tough goals, hit them and then set even tougher goals the next time around. Those who are highly competitive push to win in real selling situations. And optimism fuels persistence through rejection, which is a daily reality in sales. 

When you hire for Drive first, you avoid bringing on reps who can talk about selling but struggle to do the hard work that produces revenue.

The DriveTest® measures these traits directly and reports them in plain language. Instead of guessing based on gut feel, you see whether a candidate’s Drive is strong enough to justify moving forward. That single change filters out expensive underperformers before they ever reach your sales team.

2.) Put a Validated Assessment at the Top of Your Hiring Funnel.

Most teams wait until late in the process to test candidates. That is backward. The assessment belongs right after the resume review, before the first interview. Our assessment uses a forced-choice format with a built-in consistency scale, which makes it harder to fake and helps you trust the results. It takes about 20 minutes to complete, so it fits neatly into your hiring flow without slowing things down.

Screening early saves interview time, reduces bias, and puts your managers in front of only the most promising salespeople. That is a direct cost reduction for every open role.

3.) Standardize the Interview to Confirm Job Fit.

Unstructured interviews invite bias and produce inconsistent results. Use the candidate’s DriveTest report to guide the conversation with targeted follow-ups. 

If a candidate shows strong Need for Achievement, ask for examples of self-set goals and how they were measured. If Competitiveness is average, probe into real win-loss stories and what they learned. If Optimism is low, discuss how they reset after losing a deal.

Pair these questions with a simple scoring rubric. Decide in advance what “move forward” looks like and hold each hiring manager to the same standard. This creates clarity for the team, improves fairness for candidates, and raises the bar for who gets an offer.

4.) Calibrate Scores to Real Performance of Your Sales Team.

Over time, compare Drive scores with ramp time, quota attainment, and retention in your own environment. You will see clear patterns. High-Drive reps typically ramp faster, book more qualified meetings, and keep momentum through long cycles. 

Use those insights to set a benchmark for future hires. For example, you may decide to advance only candidates who score green on Drive overall, or to treat yellow results as a caution that requires deeper follow up during interviews.

This feedback loop takes your hiring from only an opinion and turns it into an operating system. You remove waste by making fewer hiring mistakes and by building a bench that mirrors your top performers.

5.) Use Data to Protect Your Culture and Your Sales Pipeline.

Every mis-hire carries hidden costs: lost opportunities, manager time, morale drag, and client experience. Data-driven hiring reduces those costs. 

High-Drive salespeople lift the pace of the team, set the tone in pipeline reviews, and model the follow-through you want. When your culture rewards Drive, you retain the right people and attract more of them.

Create simple guardrails:

• Green overall Drive score, proceed.
• Yellow, proceed with caution with specific follow-ups.
• Red, stop and save the interview time for stronger candidates.

These rules keep everyone aligned and protect both your culture and your forecast.

What Makes SalesDrive Different?

• Built for sales roles. The assessment focuses on the traits that matter most in selling, not generic personality labels.
• Harder to fake. A forced-choice format and a consistency scale improve result quality.
• Fast and practical. About 20 minutes, easy to administer at scale, simple to read results.
• Clear guidance. Color-coded Drive scores, 1 through 5, with next-step recommendations that managers can act on immediately.
• Actionable follow-ups. The report includes interview prompts you can use the same day.

If you want the best tool for hiring salespeople, look for accuracy, speed, and usability in the hands of busy leaders. That is the standard SalesDrive is built to meet.

How to Hire Top Salespeople Today

If you are asking how to hire top salespeople, start by embedding Drive into each step:

1. Pre-screen with the DriveTest. Send it after the resume review to conserve manager time.
2. Run structured behavioral interviews. Use the report to confirm strengths and pressure-test gaps.
3. Assign a role-relevant exercise. For example, a short prospecting call plan or territory approach.
4. Reference check with purpose. Ask about persistence, competitiveness in tight situations, and self-set goals.
5. Onboard to momentum. Align early activities with the traits you hired for, such as daily prospecting targets for high Need for Achievement.

This sequence gives you a consistent signal at every stage, and it is simple enough for busy teams to adopt.

The ROI You Can See

Every avoided underperformer protects thousands of dollars in salary, benefits, lost pipeline, and manager time. A process anchored in Drive pays for itself by improving first-year retention, cutting ramp time, and stacking your team with people who thrive in the work environment that selling requires. 

When your hiring process delivers producers, marketing gets more feedback, product gets cleaner signals, and customers get a better buying experience. That is the compounding return CEOs care about.

Ready to Stop Wasting Money on Sales Hiring?

Put Drive at the center of your sales hiring process and run your next open role through the DriveTest. Start with one free assessment, review the report with your hiring manager, and see how much clearer each decision becomes.

FAQs

What is Drive?

Drive is the non-teachable characteristics shared by top-performing salespeople. Drive is made up of three innate traits: Need for Achievement – a person’s desire for excellence for its own sake, Competitiveness – the inner fire to want to win and Optimism – the ability to be unfazed by rejection. 

Why Should I Use a Sales Assessment in My Hiring Process? 

A sales assessment allows you to go deeper than the resume and interview. It gives you an objective, science-backed way to identify top-performing sales candidates, saving you time, reducing costly hiring mistakes, and ensuring your team is built with people who have the natural traits to succeed.

What’s Unique About The DriveTest® by SalesDrive?

Unlike traditional hiring tests, our sales assessment test, The DriveTest®, is patented and focused solely on Drive, which is the single most critical predictor of sales success. It uses a forced-choice format to prevent faking and delivers clear, actionable insights you can trust before you make a hiring decision.