In 2024, a client of mine in the promotional products distribution business ran his sales candidates through a Predictive Index benchmark before he made an offer.
He built the benchmark. He ran the finalists against it. He hired the one who matched.
The man he hired could build rapport with anyone. Customers liked him. The team liked him. By every measure that benchmark was built to capture, he was the right profile.
He couldn't build trust. He couldn't sell value. And he would not hunt.
That's the gap nobody warns you about when you buy a personality instrument and start using it as the best sales assessment for hiring. If you're reading this thinking, he just needed more runway, we're not going to agree on anything that follows. Twelve months is not a ramp problem. It's a selection problem, and you paid for it.
I advised my client that the salesperson they hired was a great guy, but could not do the job the company needed him to do – HUNT for new business. And, never would. They moved him to an account management role, but he struggled to grow the share of wallet.
Stop Benchmarking the Break Room
Here's the belief that put him in that seat, and it sounds reasonable.
We used data. We didn't hire on gut. We benchmarked the role and hired to the profile.
You did use data. You used data about how a person behaves around at a social event. Unless you are compensating the rep to go to cocktail parties, probably a bad move. The benchmark doesn’t connect the job.
DISC and Predictive Index are well-built instruments. They are great at understanding who your candidate is and how they behave. Even better, how they need to be managed. They read social cues — pace, patience, how someone handles conflict, how much structure they need, whether they go quiet in a room or fill it. That information is genuinely useful after the sales hire. It tells a sales manager how to run a one-on-one with this person.
None of it touches the question you actually needed answered.
Will this person pick up the phone on Tuesday morning and call a company where nobody knows their name?
A social-cues benchmark cannot answer that. It was never built to. So you took an instrument designed to describe behavior in a room and asked it to predict behavior on a phone, and it gave you a confident answer to a question you didn't ask.
Count What the Miss Actually Cost
A failed sales hire costs $125,000. Salary, taxes, benefits, the territory that sat still, the manager's time, the recruiting spend to do it again.
That's the direct number. The one underneath it is worse.
Objective Management Group has assessed more than two million salespeople. The distribution holds across industries: 6% elite, 14% good, 20% above average, 60% mediocre to poor. Twenty percent of the people who apply to your open sales seat can do the job at the level you're imagining when you write the job posting.
Now put those two facts against each other. You are hiring from a pool in which four out of five candidates will fail, using an instrument that measures their agreeableness.
The personality profile didn't reduce your odds. It just made you feel like you'd done something about them. That's the expensive part — not the miss itself, but the false confidence that stopped you from looking for the thing that would have caught it.
Hiring accuracy in this seat can run at 20% or at 80%. The instrument you choose is a significant portion of that swing.
Measure What the Best Sales Assessment for Hiring Actually Measures
A sales-specific assessment asks a different set of questions than a personality instrument. Objective Management Group runs three layers, and each one predicts something a behavioral profile can't see.
Will to Sell
Desire, commitment, outlook, responsibility. Does this person actually want to sell for a living, or do they want a salary with a car allowance attached? Will they do the uncomfortable thing when nobody is watching?
This is the layer that decides whether hunting happens. Your promotional products hire scored — in real life, not on paper — as somebody who wanted the relationship part of the job and not the acquisition part. A benchmark that reads social style has no way to see that. It reads warm and calls it sales-ready.
Sales DNA
The wiring underneath the behavior. Six specific weaknesses OMG measures: need for approval, emotional involvement in the outcome, a money tolerance capped at your own comfort level, non-supportive beliefs, a weak commitment to a defined process, and how a rep handles rejection.
Need for approval is the one that ended your client's hire. A salesperson who needs to be liked will build rapport beautifully and will not ask a hard question, will not challenge a bad assumption, and will not press for a decision. He wasn't failing at selling. He was succeeding at being liked, which is what the benchmark hired him to be.
Sales DNA takes two things. One, the person must acknowledge the issue is real. Two, someone has to coach them up and that coaching must be consistent and top-notch. Think, an alcoholic. You can’t help them until they say they need help. Even then, it is hard. Why start there?
Skill Gaps
Hunting, consultative selling, qualifying, presenting, closing. What can this person do today, and how far is that from the seat you're filling?
Skills are trainable. That's exactly why they matter least at the hiring decision. You can build skill on top of the right DNA. You cannot build DNA underneath a nice person who doesn't want to prospect.
Use the Personality Profile for the Job It's Good At
Don't throw the instrument out. Move it.
A behavioral profile is a management tool. Run it after the offer is signed, and it will tell your sales manager how to work with this specific person — how much autonomy, how much structure, how they'll take direct feedback, how they'll behave in a room full of engineers.
Run it before the offer as your selection screen and it does something much worse than nothing. It hands you a number, and a number feels like evidence.
Two categories, and one does not convert into the other. Behavioral instruments describe how someone will act. Sales-specific assessments predict whether someone will sell. You need both. You need them in that order, and you need to stop asking the first one to do the second one's job.
You'll Say the Interview Told You Something Different
Here's the objection I get, usually in the second meeting, usually from an owner who is a genuinely good judge of people.
I've been doing this thirty years. I know a salesperson when I sit across from one.
You know a confident person when you sit across from one. So does everyone. The salesperson you're interviewing has spent a career learning to be compelling for forty-five minutes with a stranger who controls something they want.
That interview is a sales call and you are the prospect. He is very good at it. That's why you liked him. It's also the only part of the job you actually watched him do. Switch that up. The sales candidate is the prospect and you are the buyer. Act accordingly.
The second objection is quieter. *If I run a real assessment, I'll screen out good people.* You will screen out some. You are currently screening in the wrong ones at a rate of four out of five, and paying $125,000 each time the screen fails. Of the candidates who come through a recommended assessment and get hired, 91% rise into the top half of the sales force they join. Those aren't comparable risks.
Personality tells you how someone will act in the break room. It won't tell you who picks up the phone.
Hire the Data, Not the Profile
Picture the version of this where you got it right.
You're no longer the best salesperson in your own company. Is the forecast your sales manager brings to the Sales L10 is a number you'd hand the bank without a caveat attached? How much do you discount it?
The seat you've refilled three times in five years is filled by somebody who was going to work out before they ever walked in, because you knew what they were made of before you made the offer.
That's not a better interview. It's a different category of decision — one made with an instrument built for the question.
Two things to do with this.
If you want to know where your own hiring stands right now, take the free sales hiring readiness report (https://helixsalesdevelopment.com/waitlist/). It's a short diagnostic; you get the report, and you'll see which stage of your hiring is leaking before you spend another dollar on a candidate.
If you'd rather understand the whole machine first, read Inside Out: Why Strong EOS Companies Have Weak Sales Teams (https://helixsalesdevelopment.com/#insideoutbook). It's the argument in full: why companies that run every other seat on process run sales on hope, and what it costs them.
And if you want the data side of this — what the numbers actually say about the people already on your team — read the data-driven playbook for elevating sales team performance (https://helixsalesdevelopment.com/the-data-driven-playbook-for-elevating-sales-team-performance/) next.
Define success for the seat. Measure the mindset and skills. Hire the data.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best sales assessment for hiring salespeople?
A sales-specific assessment that measures Will to Sell, Sales DNA, and skill gaps — not a personality or behavioral instrument. Objective Management Group's assessment is built on more than two million salespeople and predicts whether a candidate will hunt, qualify, and close in your specific seat. Personality tools describe how someone behaves; sales assessments predict whether they'll sell.
Can you use DISC or Predictive Index to hire salespeople?
Use them after the hire, not before it. DISC and Predictive Index read social cues and behavioral style, which makes them genuinely useful for managing a person once they're in the seat. They were never built to predict prospecting behavior, and a benchmark built from them will hire the most agreeable candidate in the pool.
What does a sales assessment measure that a personality test doesn't?
Desire and commitment to sell, the six Sales DNA weaknesses that stop a capable person from executing, and the specific selling skills the seat requires. Need for approval is the clearest example: a personality profile reads it as warmth, and a sales assessment reads it as the reason that candidate will never ask for the order.
How much does a bad sales hire cost?
$125,000, counting compensation, the stalled territory, the manager's time, and the cost of running the search again. The number most owners underestimate is the twelve months of pipeline that never got built while the seat looked filled.
Does an assessment actually change hiring accuracy?
Sales hiring accuracy moves from roughly 20% to 80% when selection runs on a sales-specific instrument instead of instinct or a behavioral profile. Of the candidates recommended through that process, 91% rise into the top half of the sales force they join.
Walter Crosby | The Sales Integrator™ | helixsalesdevelopment.com
