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Many hiring decisions still lean on instinct: does this candidate seem sharp, driven, likeable? But sales performance is not one trait, it is a combination of distinct capabilities, and OMG’s assessment is built around three of them: Sales DNA, Will to Sell, and Tactical Skills. OMG’s 2026 criterion validity study, conducted across more than 3,000 salespeople, found that all three competency groups have a statistically significant relationship to on-the-job performance, with Tactical Skills showing the strongest link. Independent academic research identifies similar predictors to the ones captured by OMG’s competency structure. This article breaks down what each competency group measures, how OMG tested whether the scores hold up against real performance data, and what the results mean for organizations building a hiring or development process around them. 

The Trait Trap 

Most sales leaders have a mental shortcut for evaluating talent. A candidate who interviews well, has the right résumé, and radiates energy gets the offer. Six months later, their pipeline is thin, their ramp is behind schedule, and the excuses start piling up. 

The shortcut fails because it treats sales ability as a single immeasurable quality instead of what it actually is: several distinct competencies that can be measured. Importantly, these competencies do not necessarily coexist. A candidate can have a real desire to succeed and still lack the tactical know-how to execute a sales process. They can have strong skills and still lack the underlying beliefs to sell consistently under pressure. Research on employee selection has consistently found that assessments built around the specific demands of a role outperform general measures of personality or intelligence when it comes to predicting job performance.¹

That distinction is the foundation of how OMG evaluates salespeople. OMG’s assessment is organized around three competency groups, each capturing a different piece of what separates strong sales performance from mediocre performance. 

The Objective Management Group Competency Structure 

Independent, peer-reviewed research offers a useful check on this structure. The most recent meta-analysis of sales performance predictors found that a small handful of factors mattered more than the rest: selling-related knowledge, adaptiveness, role ambiguity tolerance, cognitive aptitude, and work engagement.² Almost all of these corresponds to content in each of OMG’s three competency groups. 

Sales DNA  

Sales DNA captures the underlying, often unconscious factors that shape whether a salesperson can handle the emotional demands of the job: comfort with rejection, self-limiting beliefs, and tolerance for the ambiguity and unpredictability that come with a sales role. This is the disposition layer, the wiring that determines how someone responds when a deal falls apart or a prospect goes cold.  

Will to Sell 

Will to Sell measures motivation and commitment: how badly someone wants to succeed, and how much they are willing to do about it. This is closest to what the research calls work engagement, a documented predictor of performance in its own right. Desire alone is common. Sustained commitment through a long sales cycle is not, which is part of why this competency group is important. 

Tactical Skills 

Tactical Skills covers the learned, executable parts of selling: qualifying, negotiating, closing, and adapting an approach to a given buyer and situation. This is where selling-related knowledge and adaptiveness live, and in the independent research, those two factors were the strongest predictors of sales performance of any measured.² OMG’s own study reached the same conclusion: Tactical Skills showed the strongest relationship to job performance of the three competency groups. 

How OMG Tested Whether These Measures Hold Up 

Criterion validity is the standard for determining whether an assessment score is meaningfully connected to a real-world outcome, in this case, job performance. It is the primary analysis used to decide whether an assessment is useful. OMG’s 2026 validation study was a concurrent criterion validity analysis, meaning assessment scores and performance data were collected at the same time from salespeople already working in role. 

The study drew on data from OMG’s Sales Effectiveness and Impact Analysis, a sales team evaluation that captures performance data on active salespeople. Performance was measured as a composite of four independent factors: company performance rating, win rate relative to expectations, number of closeable opportunities in the pipeline, and contribution to total team revenue. 

Very few validity studies include objective performance data of this kind. Most rely entirely on manager ratings, which are useful but subjective. By blending objective sales metrics (contribution to team revenue, opportunities in pipeline) with subjective ratings (company performance rating, win rate relative to expectations), OMG’s composite gives a more rigorous and direct test of whether assessment scores actually connect to real sales outcomes, and it allowed the study to distinguish top performers from adequate ones with more precision than earlier approaches could manage. 

The sample: more than 3,000 salespeople, the largest validity study OMG has conducted, using the same correlation-based methodology recognized as standard practice in organizational science. 

What the Validity Study Found 

The study tested validity three ways: correlation, whether scores and performance move together; regression, how much of the variation in performance scores explain; and frequency, how well OMG’s hiring criteria separate strong candidates from weak ones in practice. All three methods confirmed a meaningful relationship. 

Correlation. All three competency groups showed a statistically significant relationship to performance, with less than a 1 in 1,000 chance the results occurred by chance. 

Assessment Component Correlation (R) Significant

Tactical Skills showed the strongest relationship of the three, consistent with the independent research finding that selling-related knowledge and adaptiveness are the top predictors of sales performance.² 

Regression. Sales performance is shaped by variables no assessment can fully capture: territory, product, manager quality, and market conditions among them. What the study does establish is that OMG assessment scores account for 5.7% of the variation in performance across more than 3,000 salespeople, a statistically meaningful signal for a single test. Tactical Skills explains the most of that variation, Will to Sell is second, and Sales DNA’s contribution overlaps with the other two given how the competencies are structured. OMG’s own analysis suggests that figure could approach 10% as the assessment is refined further, by removing competencies with weak or negative relationships to performance and reducing overlap between components.

Frequency. OMG’s hiring criteria were tested at three difficulty settings against the top and bottom performance quartiles in the study, and all three were statistically significant. 

Stricter criteria filter out more low performers but shrink the available candidate pool. Moderate Difficulty is recommended for most hiring situations as the setting that balances those two outcomes. 

Using the Data as Part of a Bigger Picture 

None of this means an assessment should be the only input into a hiring decision. Research on selection systems is consistent: combining multiple validated tools produces better outcomes than relying on any single tool alone. Adding a structured interview to a job-specific assessment measurably increases the accuracy of selection decisions, and structured interviews consistently rank among the highest-validity tools available on their own.¹ Paired with a job-specific assessment, that combination is one of the strongest selection configurations in the research literature. 

This is consistent with OMG’s existing guidance to use the assessment early in a hiring process, then use a structured interviews focused on the strengths and weaknesses unearthed by the assessment.  

It is also worth being careful about direct comparisons to other assessments’ validity figures. Because OMG’s composite performance measure blends objective sales metrics with subjective ratings, and most other validity studies rely solely on manager ratings, a side-by-side comparison of raw validity numbers is rarely an apples-to-apples exercise. 

A few other caveats are worth keeping in mind. Revenue contribution as a performance metric does not currently distinguish between salespeople who built their own book of business and those who inherited one, something future iterations of the underlying evaluation will capture more precisely. A handful of individual competencies, including Responsibility, the legacy Sales Technology measure, and Coachability, showed weak or negative relationships to performance in this study, and OMG is investigating whether that reflects measurement issues or real nuance across different sales environments. And because this analysis reflects aggregate results across a large, international sample, it is not a substitute for an organization reviewing performance patterns in its own data.  

Final Thoughts 

The most useful thing a validity study can do is answer a narrow but important question: is this test useful for measuring performance? OMG’s 2026 study, run against the largest and most rigorous sample it has assembled to date, answers that question in the affirmative across all three competency groups. That the assessment’s structure lines up so closely with what independent, peer-reviewed research identifies as the strongest predictors of sales performance is not a coincidence. It reflects an assessment built from the start around what the sales role actually demands. 

None of this replaces judgment, and it was never designed to. A validity study tells you a tool carries real signal, not that it eliminates uncertainty. Used as one input in a broader process, alongside a structured interview and an organization’s own performance data, that signal is exactly the kind of thing a hiring or development decision should be built on. 

References 

1.  Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994.
2. Verbeke, W., Dietz, B., &Verwaal, E. (2011). “Drivers of Sales Performance: A Contemporary Meta-Analysis. Have Salespeople Become Knowledge Brokers?” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.39(3), 407-428. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-010-0211-8.