How to assess sales skills that speak to your company values 

Every organization needs sales reps, but it is crucial that we don’t mistake that necessity as a rush to hire just anyone. We want more from our salespeople than just closing deals. We want them to represent the organization and be a true extension of the culture, even out in the field. Remember, these are the people who are the first impression of what your organization is, what you stand for, and the value of your products and services. As a result, it’s important to hire thoughtfully, ensuring those you place in these roles have the proper sales skills and determination to succeed.

By assessing traditional sales skillsets (i.e., negotiation, resilience) and capabilities alongside company values, companies can build stronger teams, offer more consistent customer experiences, and improve retention of both customers and employees.

Hire for the sales skills you can’t train

In more technical industries, the specs and quality of your products may be enough to win the client easily, but in others nothing can compare to the innate desire to be persuasive and negotiate. That competitive drive is usually something we assess as a critical component for sales representatives since it can be harder to train.  

Across all sales roles, success requires resilience. They must possess that rare quality to be the squeaky wheel and stand behind new ideas and novel strategies, even in a unified culture. When hiring for sales, organizations should seek out individuals with the courage to challenge the status quo.

Many sales skills can be trained or supported with outside resources, so companies should focus on the skills that are harder to train, like the desire to sell.

Some sales skills like eagerness or persevering spirit are more difficult to qualify. Those same qualities that enable someone to hit their numbers can also cause them to come across as pushy or self-interested to other team members within the organization. Thus, it is important to consider your specific company culture when assessing sales skills.

What sets your organization apart? 

People do not stay with a company just for the role itself, but instead for the culture, the manager, the team, the growth potential, and even the belief in the services the company provides. Similarly, consultative sellers will tell you that success is often less about the solution itself and more about who customers are buying from. For these reasons, you should be looking at the environment surrounding your sales teams before even looking at the individual candidates.

Customer loyalty is difficult to earn, but it is the prized return on your investment in company culture. The path to sale is eased when buyers put as much stock (or more) in the promise of your organizational values than any particular offering. To achieve this loyalty, you must harness the power of your company’s unique culture by clearly defining, reinforcing, and hiring for it.  

Distill your company’s cultural values into specific, observable concepts and competencies that are recognizable as your brand. Applying language to the intangible aspects of company culture makes them actionable. This branding allows you to build a strategy around how your brand is represented at every customer touchpoint, from the user experience on your website to branded ads and newsletters.

Codifying your culture ensures that what is internally experienced within the organization is also consistently felt by your customers. Talogy’s Caliper Competency Table includes over 50 competencies to focus on various skillsets and can serve as a sales skills assessment to determine what might align with your company needs.

What are the unique attributes of a salesperson vs. the rest of the organization? 

Here’s the catch: our sales teammates have to be disrupters at the same time as they convey our values. The organization relies on the sales group to push the envelope and take risks. How do we separate that willful spirit amid company values such as collaboration, relationship builders, or service focus? 

A key component many overlook is how salespeople operate within the culture of your organization. Ask yourself:

• Do they work very closely with other departments?
• Are other departments brought into the sales cycle before anything is sold?
• How much is sales involved with the client after a sale is made?

This high-level viewpoint can help you know how much you need your sales teams to have problem-solving abilities, as well as how critical active listening and information seeking might be. It can even help to know if their collaboration skills will come into play every day or just now and then.

For some organizations, the company culture and the culture of the sales team itself can be used as a tiebreaker between top sales candidates. The sales skills we all look for – like direct communication, resilience, and a desire to win – are then matched to that additional level of the company’s needs to help mold the perfect alignment. They speak to the organization’s cultural strengths. This matching boosts a salesperson’s connection to the products they’re selling. Clients can tell when their sales rep truly believes in what they’re selling, and it makes a difference.

Determining which sales skills to assess

When aligned with your culture, several key factors inform which competencies and skills to assess in sales positions. First, consider the length and complexity of the sales cycle. In long, relationship-driven cycles, your team must be active listeners, open-minded, and strategic thinkers. In shorter cycles, they should prioritize quick wins through direct communication, agility, and achievement motivation.

Highly competitive markets demand persistence and influence, where less saturated markets reward trust-building and partnership. That can even mean having different needs for sales teams located in different regions. Using sales skills assessments, like Talogy Caliper, that allow for comparative views of existing teams – by region, manager, or type of sales role – can help to make the right decisions for hiring.

In Talogy’s Analytics platform, we can support by looking at team data that can help make informed decisions on group trends, areas for improvement, and help visualize those sales skills comparisons. In the view below, a company’s sales teams are broken into groups, with each bar representing a different regional team. This view allows a company to understand where the team as a whole has strengths to lean on or opportunity areas for training. It will also help them diagnose why one region may be performing better than another.

How to assess sales skills

Once you’ve collected the background information for your sales role, it’s time to look at candidates. Sales roles can be even harder to hire for, as a salesperson is inherently motivated to get you to buy into them. Assessments can help reveal what someone is not going to share in an interview or on their resume.

The Caliper suite of Essentials reports includes nine different Sales models, from the standard hunter and farmer models to models for roles that require more technical or consultative approaches. Each one highlights different competencies that predict success in that type of sales role. All of them include the competencies Influence and Persuasion, Negotiating, and Relationship Building. Depending on the type of sales role, each model can include more competencies like Initiating Action, Business Acumen, or Composure and Resiliency.

Typically, we recommend using the Caliper assessment tool once you’ve narrowed down your candidates. This helps reinforce behaviors you may have noted during the initial interview and also provides hints on where to put your attention in the final interview. The Essentials for Selection report will highlight the candidate’s lowest areas of alignment and provide interview questions for the manager to ask. Those questions will help you see how self-aware the candidate is and what compensating behaviors they already have. In essence, it gives the manager a little more comfort in how much oversight may be needed during the onboarding phase.

We’ve also spoken a great deal about company culture, the manager’s style, and team dynamics. The Essentials for Selection report comes with the Preferred Styles of the candidate. This will highlight how the person prefers to operate when it comes to communication, interpersonal dynamics, problem solving and decision making, and planning and priority setting. It’s a ‘user’s manual’ to understanding the generalities of that person. When you’re between two great sales candidates, this section may be the tiebreaker to say who is a better fit for your team, managerial style, and organization.

How do we train new sales reps? 

Even if we find the perfect assessment scores, training and onboarding are still massively important. Many sales reps are excited to jump right in, but everyone benefits from training. Their personality isn’t suddenly irrelevant now that you’ve hired them. Rather, it gives you a cheat sheet on how to best motivate, support, and develop the employee. An easy first step would be to match sales reps with a mentor or accountability partner. Some sales skills assessments allow you to match scores against each other, showcasing how similar or different the pair may be.  

When you have the scores of your entire sales team, you can use those to make informed matches based on styles and personalities. The one rep who is brimming with competitiveness may benefit from learning from a successful sales rep who is more methodical in their approach. Another may work best with someone who has a matching style that can help warn them of possible roadblocks.

The view above showcases two employees’ personalities against the competencies identified for the role. Dots that are closer to the outer edge of the circle indicate a more natural motivator, while dots closer to the center of the circle indicate weaker motivators. In this example, Edward (purple) appears more motivated by relationships and can help Scott (green) learn how to build rapport. Scott, on the other hand, might be able to help Edward prioritize Analytical Thinking, as it is a stronger competency for Scott.

Talogy’s Caliper Analytics platform provides easy-to-read comparison graphs that look at how multiple people are similar or differ based on selected competencies, behaviors, or even job models. That kind of analysis provides practical onboarding assistance to newer recruits, as well as training opportunities for seasoned team members.

Sales is a tricky role that has its incumbents battling between wanting to rise within the organization and the desire to be in the field. After onboarding, keeping your team engaged is key. Thankfully, the same resources you used to assess them can also help you retain them.

Redefining career growth for sales teams 

Finding the best salespeople requires more than assessing for sales skills alone. Like any other role, it’s common for team members to want to feel like they’re progressing in their careers. For some, that automatically conjures up the desire to rise in the organizational ranks. Sales reps don’t always see it the same way. Many like the autonomy of their roles and the ability to have a sense of ownership over their own commissions.

Instead, organizations are looking for ways to help show their salespeople that they are still valued in that role. Giving mentorship opportunities with newer recruits or even looking at different sales markets are both options that organizations should explore.  

Different markets, client bases, regions, etc. all can require different sales skills and styles. Your organization may have a need for several of those sales models, which can be a springboard for employee development. Perhaps a sales rep starts their journey in Inside Sales. From there, they move to Outside Sales. Another step could be to focus on bigger accounts that require more strategy or longer-term relationship building.

Sales management is always an option, but look for resources that can help you develop a more robust sales development path. This will give your team options for recognition and growth without being the simple ‘incumbent to manager’ path.

In the view below, we’ve shown a possible career path with multiple options for a sales rep to keep them engaged, supported, and feeling ownership over their own development. It also gives the manager a chance to prepare for any opportunity areas as they help their team members grow. The higher scores, coded in green, represent more natural alignment. This indicates that the needs for this type of role match with the natural tendencies and motivators of that person.

The lower scores, coded in red, represent weaker alignment. It does not mean the person cannot do that role, but that they will likely need to rely on learned skills, compensating behaviors, or external support. In our reports and through the support of our consultants, we can identify how to best support employees who may not be strongly aligned with their roles.

Ensuring your sales team is built for the future

So, how often should you reevaluate sales competencies and skills? We highly recommend reassessing the skills needed to be successful within your sales roles every few years. The role of the sales rep has changed so much in the last few years alone. Job descriptions should be continuously updated. Performance metrics should be freshly considered for validity and added as key elements to the hiring process.

Of course, your company culture could also change and evolve over time. Keep those metrics in mind as part of the process for assessing your team’s sales skills. If you’re not sure what those metrics should be, work with Talogy to look at your existing teams and see what’s been working and what might not fit within your organization. Developing a strategy on how to assess sales skills both in the hiring process and throughout an employee’s career will position your people and your organization for long-term success.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Why AI ROI depends on more than adoption metrics and how organizations often mistake usage for transformation.
• The human factors behind successful AI collaboration, including critical thinking, judgment, learning agility, and decision quality.
• The risks of overlooking workforce readiness, from over-trust and AI misuse to inconsistent performance across teams.
• Talogy’s Human AI Collaboration Model, which helps organizations understand how people interact with AI, how collaboration evolves over time, and how it influences business outcomes.
• How to align talent strategy with AI strategy to maximize productivity, innovation, and organizational performance.