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Most organizations already use a behavioral, personality, or cognitive assessment that HR has vetted and approved, and extending it to sales hiring feels like the logical choice. Tools such as DISC, the Predictive Index, and cognitive ability tests measure communication style, behavioral drives, and reasoning ability well, but they were designed for every role in the building rather than the specific demands of selling. Objective Management Group’s 2026 Criterion Validity Study, conducted across more than 3,000 salespeople, found that all three components of its sales-specific assessment (Tactical Skills, Sales DNA, and Will to Sell) have a statistically significant link to on-the-job sales performance. OMG assessment data also shows that only 27% of salespeople have strong Sales DNA, the belief layer that explains why a salesperson avoids certain behaviors even after training. This article examines what general assessments measure, why sales requires a different lens, why coaching without the “why” rarely sticks, and the two models smart companies use to evaluate and hire sales talent. 

The assessment already on the shelf 

Most sales leaders have lived some version of this. A sales role opens up. HR sends over the link to the company’s standard assessment, the same one finance, operations, and customer success candidates complete. The results come back with a style profile, a few communication tips, and a general read on fit. The candidate interviews well and gets the offer. By month six, the pipeline tells a very different story than the profile did. 

Nothing malfunctioned. The assessment did exactly what it was built to do: it described how the candidate tends to behave. It was never designed to tell a hiring manager whether that candidate can qualify an opportunity, hold firm on price, or keep prospecting after a week of rejection. 

Pre-employment assessments are now a standard part of hiring. SHRM research found that 56% of employers use pre-employment assessments to evaluate applicants’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, and 78% of HR professionals surveyed said the quality of their organization’s hires has improved as a result.¹  That adoption means the more useful question for sales leaders is which assessment is answering which question. 

Why the company-standard assessment becomes the default 

There are good reasons organizations extend their existing assessment to sales roles, and most of them come from HR doing its job well. 

The assessment has already been vetted. It has cleared procurement, been reviewed for legal and fairness considerations, and been approved for use in hiring. The results live in the HR system alongside everyone else’s. Managers across departments already speak its language, so a “high D” or a “strong extrovert” means the same thing in sales as it does in engineering. The licenses are paid for. And a single instrument makes it easy to compare candidates across the organization using one consistent standard. 

Adding a second assessment for one department can look like unnecessary cost, extra administration, and one more vendor to review.  

The problem is when a tool built for consistency across every role is asked to evaluate the one role whose success is measured almost entirely in individual, visible outcomes. Organizations that default to the company-standard tool for sales are often choosing the assessment that is easiest to approve over the one best matched to the job. 

What the most common assessments measure well 

The assessments organizations rely on most deserve credit for what they do. Each one answers a legitimate question. 

DISC 

DISC is a behavioral style model built around four dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Its publisher is direct about its scope. DiSC measures dimensions of personality and does not measure intelligence, aptitude, mental health, or values. It describes patterns of behavior without making judgments about alignment with a skill set or job classification, and Wiley describes it as “a tool for dialogue, not diagnosis.”² 

That is exactly where DISC shines. It gives teams a shared language for communication, helps managers adapt how they deliver feedback, and eases friction between people who work differently. In a sales context, it can help a salesperson recognize and adapt to a buyer’s communication style. 

Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment 

The PI Behavioral Assessment measures the amount and intensity of four behavioral drives: Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality.³ The resulting behavioral pattern can be interpreted by recruiters, managers, and co-workers for purposes ranging from hiring to talent development.⁴ 

PI is widely used to define behavioral targets for a job, build teams with complementary working styles, and help managers understand what motivates the people they lead. Those are valuable, organization-wide applications. 

Cognitive ability tests 

Cognitive assessments, such as the PI Cognitive Assessment or the Wonderlic, measure general reasoning: verbal, numerical, and abstract problem-solving, along with how quickly someone can learn. They are among the most studied tools in personnel selection. In the most recent large-scale re-analysis of selection research, cognitive ability tests lost their long-held top position but, at a validity of .31, remain a meaningful indicator of job success.⁵ They are especially useful for roles that require rapid learning of complex products or technical information. 

Each of these tools answers a real question well. How does this person communicate? What drives their behavior at work? How quickly do they learn? Those questions matter in sales, too. They are simply different from the question a sales leader most needs answered: can this person sell in this role, and if they are struggling, why? 

Sales is a different job, so it needs a different lens 

Few roles in an organization combine the pressures sales does. Salespeople face rejection daily, often alone, in real time. They are expected to ask direct questions about money, challenge a buyer’s thinking, and push for a decision when the easier path is to wait. And their results are measured in numbers that everyone can see. 

Those numbers vary more in sales than almost anywhere else. OMG’s analysis of 318 sales teams found that 30% of teams relied on a single salesperson for more than half of their revenue, and top producers generated 10x more revenue than bottom producers on average.⁶ When the gap between the best and worst performers in a role is that wide, a general read on style or reasoning leaves too much unexplained. 

There is also a structural hiring challenge: salespeople are skilled at being interviewed. They manage first impressions for a living, which gives them an advantage in exactly the settings where most hiring decisions are made. 

Decades of academic research point in the same direction. In a foundational meta-analysis of sales performance, Churchill and colleagues concluded that enduring personal characteristics were not the most important determinants of sales performance, and recommended that researchers focus on “influenceable” factors instead.⁷ A later meta-analysis focused specifically on salespeople found that general cognitive ability correlated .40 with supervisor ratings of performance but only .04 with objective sales results.⁸ And the most comprehensive modern review of sales performance drivers found that selling-related knowledge and adaptiveness showed the strongest relationships with sales performance.⁹ 

Broader selection research reinforces the pattern. Job knowledge tests carry a validity of .40, well above conscientiousness at .19, in the same re-analysis cited above.⁵ The closer an assessment gets to the actual work, the more it tends to tell you about performance in that work. When the job is this specific, the evaluation has to be just as specific. 

What a sales-specific assessment measures 

OMG’s assessment is organized around three interconnected layers, each capturing a different piece of what separates strong sales performance from average or poor performance. 

Tactical Skills 

The learned, executable parts of selling: qualifying, prospecting, presenting, negotiating, closing, and following a structured sales process. This is the layer most sales training targets. 

Sales DNA 

The beliefs and behavioral tendencies that determine whether a salesperson uses those skills under pressure. This includes need for approval, comfort discussing money, how a salesperson handles rejection, and how their own buying habits shape what they will accept from a prospect. 

Will to Sell 

Desire, commitment, outlook, motivation, and responsibility. This layer determines whether a salesperson will consistently do the difficult things success in sales requires. 

OMG tested this structure in its 2026 Criterion Validity Study, the largest validity study in the company’s history, covering more than 3,000 salespeople.¹⁰ Rather than relying on manager opinion alone, the study measured performance as a composite of company performance rating, win rate relative to expectations, number of closeable opportunities in the pipeline, and contribution to total team revenue. All three competency groups showed a statistically significant relationship to sales performance, with less than a 1 in 1,000 chance the results occurred by chance.¹⁰ Tactical Skills showed the strongest link, consistent with the independent research on selling-related knowledge.⁹ 

The study also tested how well OMG’s hiring criteria separate strong performers from weak ones in practice. At the recommended moderate difficulty setting, the criteria filtered out 74.2% of bottom-quartile performers.¹⁰ 

The three-layer structure matters for a reason beyond hiring accuracy. It is what makes diagnosis possible. 

The what versus the why 

Consider three salespeople on the same team. All three wait until the proposal stage to bring up budget. All three watch deals stall once pricing is on the table. On a behavioral profile, all three might even look similar: accommodating, relationship-oriented, patient with buyers. 

A behavioral assessment accurately describes what they are doing. A sales-specific assessment shows why, and the “why” is different for each of them. 

The first salesperson has a tactical gap. They were never taught how to raise budget early in a qualifying conversation, or how to quantify the cost of the prospect’s problem. The fix is training, role-play, and reinforcement. 

The second salesperson has a Sales DNA issue. They know how to have the budget conversation and have probably been trained on it. They avoid it anyway, because they believe money questions make buyers uncomfortable and they would rather be liked than risk the tension. Another round of skills training will not change that belief. 

The third salesperson has a Will to Sell issue. They understand the conversation and are comfortable having it, but their commitment to doing the uncomfortable parts of the job is low. The right next step is a direct conversation about goals, motivation, and whether the role is the right fit. 

The same outcome can have three very different root causes. Which will require three completely different coaching plans. A manager working only from a style profile would likely hand all three the same solution, and two of the three would not improve. 

OMG assessment data shows how common the hidden layer is. From 2023 to 2025, only 27% of salespeople demonstrated strong Sales DNA overall. Just 16% held supportive beliefs about selling, and only 19% demonstrated a supportive buy cycle.¹¹ In other words, most salespeople carry beliefs that quietly work against them, and those beliefs rarely show up in a behavioral profile or an interview. 

Why old behaviors creep back 

Most sales leaders have seen this cycle. A team goes through training. For a few weeks, the new behaviors show up in call reviews and pipeline meetings. By the end of the quarter, most of the team has drifted back to the old habits. 

Organizational psychology offers a clear explanation. Harvard’s Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey found that even people who are sincerely committed to changing often direct energy toward a hidden competing commitment, and that without understanding those competing commitments, efforts to change employee behavior are virtually futile.¹² 

In sales, the competing commitment is often a belief. A salesperson can sincerely commit to asking about budget in the first meeting while holding a stronger, unspoken commitment to never making a buyer uncomfortable. Under pressure, the stronger commitment wins. Training addressed the visible behavior. The belief driving it was never identified, so it was never coached. 

OMG data shows the cost of focusing development on what is easiest to teach. 88% of salespeople are already proficient at handling rejection.¹¹ Because the skill is so widely taught, it rarely separates top performers from everyone else. The belief-driven competencies are far less common and far more closely linked to results. 

The encouraging part is that beliefs can change when coaching targets them directly. Salespeople in the highest tier of Comfort Discussing Money showed roughly $90K higher median revenue than lower tiers, and salespeople who improved in this competency after coaching and training showed the largest revenue gains among evaluated groups.¹¹ 

The diagnosis determines whether development sticks. Without the why, coaching treats symptoms and the pattern returns. 

Two ways smart companies use a sales-specific assessment 

The organizations getting sales hiring right have stopped debating whether to replace the company-standard assessment. They have settled on one of two models, and both start from the same premise: a sales role deserves a sales-specific evaluation. 

Model 1: A sales-specific assessment as the primary tool for sales roles 

Sales-led organizations, and companies without an entrenched enterprise assessment, often use a sales-specific assessment as the primary instrument for evaluating sales candidates and existing sales teams. The assessment goes early in the process, before interviews, so hiring managers know where to probe. The interview that follows is structured around the specific strengths and weaknesses the assessment surfaced. 

That sequence is well supported by selection research. Sackett and colleagues found structured interviews to be the strongest single method of those studied, and suggested treating them as the focal method against which others are evaluated.⁵ Pairing a structured interview with a job-specific assessment is one of the strongest configurations in the selection literature. 

Model 2: The company standard plus a sales-specific assessment 

Many organizations keep their existing assessment exactly where it is and add a sales-specific assessment for sales roles. HR keeps its consistent, organization-wide standard for communication, team building, and leadership development. Sales leaders gain the diagnostic layer the general tool was never designed to provide. 

In practice, each tool answers its own question. The company-standard assessment tells a manager how to communicate with and lead a specific person. The sales-specific assessment tells that manager whether the person can sell in the role, where the gaps are, and what is causing them. A manager might learn from DISC that a salesperson prefers data before discussion, and learn from the sales-specific assessment that their budget avoidance is rooted in need for approval. The coaching conversation is then delivered in the right style and aimed at the right cause. 

For sales leaders working with HR on Model 2, the conversation tends to go more smoothly when the sales-specific assessment is positioned as additive rather than a replacement. HR teams also respond well to validity documentation, which is exactly the evidence a criterion validity study provides. 

Both models share three habits. Neither asks a general tool to answer a sales-specific question. Both place the assessment early and follow it with a structured interview. And everyone involved in the hiring decision works from the same sales-specific criteria and following a system. 

What high-performing organizations are doing differently 

The strongest sales organizations don’t stop using the assessment once the offer letter is signed. They evaluate their existing teams with the same sales-specific lens, so every salesperson has a development plan built around their actual root causes rather than a generic training calendar. A salesperson whose gap is tactical gets skills coaching. A salesperson whose gap is belief-driven gets coaching aimed at the belief. A salesperson whose Will to Sell is low gets an honest conversation about fit. 

These organizations also separate “can’t” from “won’t” before they invest in development. That distinction alone changes how training budgets get spent. Money that would have gone to a third round of skills training for a salesperson with a Sales DNA issue goes instead to coaching that addresses what is actually holding them back. 

Finally, they measure change. Re-evaluating salespeople after coaching shows whether the underlying competency has moved, rather than relying on a few weeks of improved activity that may fade by the next quarter. When the data shows a belief has shifted, leaders can be far more confident that the new behavior will hold. 

Final Thoughts 

The assessments most organizations already use are valuable, and sales teams benefit from them. DISC, the Predictive Index, and cognitive ability tests help people communicate, work together, and learn. Sales leaders don’t need to abandon them to get better answers. 

What those tools were never built to provide is the root cause behind a salesperson’s results. Sales performance lives in three layers at once: what a salesperson knows how to do, what they believe about selling, and how committed they are to doing the hard parts consistently. Without visibility into all three, managers coach the behavior they can see, and the behavior they can’t see eventually brings the old patterns back. 

The companies building the strongest sales teams have already made the adjustment, either by using a sales-specific assessment for sales roles or by pairing one with the tool HR already trusts. Every hiring decision and coaching plan they make starts with the why. 

References 

1. Staffing Industry Analysts. (2022, September 22). Most employers use skills assessments; 28% say high scorers likely to get short listed without minimum educational requirements. https://www.staffingindustry.com/Editorial/Engineering-Staffing-Report/Sept.-22-2022/Most-employers-use-skills-assessments-28-say-high-scorers-likely-to-get-short-listed-without-minimum-educational-requirements 
2. Wiley. (n.d.). DiSC FAQ: What does DiSC measure? DiSCProfile.com. https://discprofile.com/what-is-disc/faq 
3. The Predictive Index. (n.d.). Transcript: PI Foundations. https://www.predictiveindex.com/learn/support/transcript-pi-foundations/ 
4. The Predictive Index. (n.d.). What is the PI Behavioral Assessment? https://docs.predictiveindex.com/hire/assessments/what-is-the-pi-behavioral-assessment/ 
5. 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 
6. Barsby, K. (2025, August 27). The ROI of sales training: What the data really shows. Objective Management Group. https://www.objectivemanagement.com/research-blog/research/the-roi-of-sales-training/ 
7. Churchill, G. A., Jr., Ford, N. M., Hartley, S. W., & Walker, O. C., Jr. (1985). The determinants of salesperson performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Marketing Research, 22(2), 103–118. 
8. Vinchur, A. J., Schippmann, J. S., Switzer, F. S., III, & Roth, P. L. (1998). A meta-analytic review of predictors of job performance for salespeople. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(4), 586–597. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.83.4.586 
9. 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://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0211-8 
10. Barsby, K. (2026, September 2). What actually predicts sales performance? Objective Management Group. https://www.objectivemanagement.com/research-blog/research/what-actually-predicts-sales-performance/ 
11. Matt, S. (2026, March 20). Belief patterns that separate high and low sales performers. Objective Management Group. https://www.objectivemanagement.com/research-blog/research/belief-patterns-that-separate-high-and-low-sales-performers/ 
12. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2001). The real reason people won’t change. Harvard Business Review, 79(10), 84–92.