Do You Really Know the Salespeople in Your Sales Team?

Most businesses know how much their salespeople sell.

They know their targets. Their pipeline. Their conversion rates. Their average deal size. They probably know how many calls they make and how many opportunities they have open.

But ask a much more fundamental question:

What type of salesperson are they?

Surprisingly few businesses can answer it.

And that could mean salespeople are being recruited into the wrong roles, developed in the wrong areas and trained in exactly the same way as colleagues who are completely different from them.

We assess performance. Why don't we assess the salesperson?

There are millions of people working in B2B sales around the world, yet there is no reliable global figure showing how many have ever completed a sales-specific persona assessment.

We do know that general behavioural assessments have achieved significant adoption. Everything DiSC, for example, reports more than 45 million users across 75 countries.

But general personality profiling isn't the same as understanding someone's natural approach to selling.

Our estimate is that well under 10% of B2B salespeople worldwide have completed a meaningful, sales-specific assessment that identifies their selling persona, strengths and development areas.

It may be considerably lower.

Think about what that means.

Businesses invest enormous amounts in CRM, sales technology, data, methodology, training and management — while potentially knowing surprisingly little about the person actually doing the selling.

Not every salesperson sells in the same way

This sounds obvious, yet much of the sales industry behaves as though they do.

Consider two successful salespeople.

One thrives on opening doors. They enjoy prospecting, move quickly, challenge customers and aren't particularly concerned by rejection.

The other builds extraordinary long-term relationships. Customers trust them, retention is excellent and they are brilliant at developing existing accounts.

Both can be excellent salespeople.

But interchange their roles and you could get very different results.

Put the natural relationship builder into a high-volume new-business hunting role and they may struggle.

Put the natural hunter into an account-management position requiring patience, consistency and long-term relationship development and the same thing could happen.

The problem isn't necessarily the salesperson. It may be the fit between the salesperson and the role.

Imagine seeing the shape of your entire sales team

This is where understanding Sales Personas becomes particularly powerful for a sales leader.

Instead of looking at your team simply as eight Account Executives or five Business Development Managers, imagine being able to see the natural sales characteristics sitting underneath those job titles.

Within My Sales Persona, we identify four primary Sales Personas:

The Maverick — bold, fast and fearless.

The Strategist — data-driven and analytical.

The Connector — relationship-focused and empathetic.

The Steady Builder — process-driven and consistent.

These can also combine to reveal characteristics associated with personas such as The Challenger, The Storycaster, The Adaptive and The Systems Architect.

None is inherently better than another.

That's important.

The objective isn't to discover who your "best" salesperson is.

It's to understand how somebody naturally sells.

Now apply that across an entire sales organisation.

You may discover that the team responsible for winning new logos is heavily weighted towards relationship builders.

Your Account Management team might contain people naturally suited to new-business acquisition.

You might discover that everyone on the team approaches customers in broadly the same way — creating a capability gap that wasn't visible from your CRM reports.

Suddenly, a Sales Persona isn't simply an interesting individual assessment.

It becomes a sales management tool.

It could change recruitment too

Sales recruitment has always been difficult.

Part of the problem is obvious: salespeople are professionally trained to communicate, build rapport and persuade.

Those skills can also make someone very good at interviews.

But being impressive in an interview doesn't necessarily tell you whether someone's natural behaviours align with the sales role you're recruiting for.

Research supports using more structure in recruitment rather than relying solely on interview impressions. Meta-analytic research has found structured interviews to be more predictive of subsequent performance than unstructured approaches, while contemporary personnel-selection research increasingly considers combinations of assessment methods rather than relying on a single hiring signal.

This is where a Sales Persona assessment could add another piece of evidence.

If you're recruiting a salesperson whose primary responsibility is opening completely new accounts, what characteristics does that role require?

If you're recruiting someone to manage 30 strategic customers worth millions in recurring revenue, is that the same profile?

Probably not.

The assessment shouldn't make the hiring decision for you.

But it can create better questions.

Does this person's natural selling style align with the job we're asking them to do?

That's considerably more useful than simply asking:

"Do I like them?"

Then there is sales development

This could be the biggest opportunity of all.

Traditional sales development frequently starts with the programme:

"This quarter we're training everyone on negotiation."

Why everyone?

Your top performer might already be an excellent negotiator but terrible at prospecting.

Another salesperson might generate opportunities brilliantly but struggle to qualify them.

Someone else may understand every stage of the sales process but lack confidence challenging a senior decision-maker.

Yet we put all three in the same room, give them the same content and call it sales development.

The logic is backwards.

Development should start with the individual, not the course.

There is already considerable recognition within professional development that personalised learning can address specific capability gaps more effectively than assuming everybody starts from the same place. ATD has also argued specifically for sales development to be personalised around the salesperson's responsibilities and competencies.

A Sales Persona gives us the opportunity to take this much further.

Assess → Understand → Develop

Imagine completing your Sales Persona assessment and discovering that you're naturally a strong Connector.

You build trust quickly. You listen. You understand customers. You develop relationships exceptionally well.

Fantastic.

We shouldn't train that out of you.

We should build on it.

But perhaps your assessment also identifies that you avoid difficult conversations, don't challenge assumptions strongly enough or delay asking for commitment.

Those become your development priorities.

Another salesperson might be a Maverick.

They don't need another course telling them to be more confident.

Their development might instead focus on slowing down, discovery, listening, qualification or following a consistent process.

A Strategist might need something different again.

And so might a Steady Builder.

Now sales development becomes:

Who are you?

Where are you naturally strong?

Where could your selling style create weaknesses?

What should you work on next?

And crucially:

What development should we prescribe specifically for you?

That is very different from putting 20 people through exactly the same sales course.

Stop trying to create identical salespeople

The objective shouldn't be to turn everyone into the stereotypical "perfect salesperson".

There probably isn't one.

A great sales organisation needs different capabilities.

Hunters.

Relationship builders.

Analytical thinkers.

Challengers.

Storytellers.

Process people.

People who create momentum and people who make sure important details don't get missed.

The opportunity is not to eliminate those differences.

It's to understand them and put them to work.

That's why we created My Sales Persona within Salespuzzle.

It isn't designed to put somebody into a box.

It's designed to give the salesperson — and, where appropriate, their manager — a better understanding of how they naturally approach selling, where their strengths lie and where development could make the biggest difference.

For the individual, that creates self-awareness.

For the manager, it creates visibility across the team.

For recruitment, it adds another layer of information about role fit.

And for development, it creates the foundation for moving away from one-size-fits-all sales training towards something far more useful:

individual sales development built around the individual salesperson.

Because before we tell someone how to become a better salesperson, perhaps we should first understand what kind of salesperson they already are.