Sales leaders face a persistent challenge: How do you maximize performance and achieve ambitious goals with the team you already have?
While hiring has slowed and employee turnover has stabilized, the pressure to deliver results hasn’t diminished. This reality has sparked interest in an overlooked strategy: using sales assessments to truly understand and optimize existing sales teams.
The Business Case for Sales Skills Evaluation
Recent research from the University of Chicago Business School reinforces what assessment-driven organizations are discovering. The study identified that top managers excel at one critical skill: identifying employee skill sets and matching them to the right roles.
The results are compelling: Properly matched employees earn more money, stay with companies longer, and demonstrate higher productivity. Both the employee and the company win.
This finding validates what forward-thinking sales leaders already know: Success isn’t just about having talented people. It’s about having talented people in roles that leverage their natural capabilities.
Sales assessments such as The Brooks Talent Index®, which includes the DISC profile, reveal core personality drivers, selling styles, and success factors of new hires, current sales professionals, and entire teams.
The Growing Demand for Sales Team Assessment
Sales organizations increasingly recognize that understanding their current talent is just as important as hiring new talent. The people you already have represent untapped potential waiting to be unlocked.
From enterprise companies to mid-sized organizations, leaders need to know:
- What’s the actual makeup of my team?
- How can I maximize each person’s capabilities in the right type of sales role?
When to Assess Your Sales Team
Several telltale signs and milestone events indicate it’s time to take a closer look at your team’s composition and core selling competencies.
Underperformance Against Goals
If your team struggles to hit targets despite your best efforts, or if some team members excel while others consistently fall short at the same tasks, an assessment can reveal why you’re getting the results you’re seeing—or not seeing.
Communication Breakdowns
When teams aren’t collaborating effectively, when there’s persistent conflict, or when team members consistently aren’t responding as expected, these communication issues often stem from fundamental differences in how people are wired to work and interact.
Sales Strategy Shifts
Any time you change direction in your overall strategy, assessment becomes critical. Organizations that hired account managers to maintain existing relationships may now need aggressive new business development.
They’re discovering their teams may not be naturally suited for the pivot. If you’ve been extremely successful doing things one way and now need your team to do something else, understanding their natural capabilities is essential.
Restructuring Initiatives
Before reorganizing roles or splitting responsibilities, assessment data helps you match people to positions based on their natural strengths rather than making arbitrary assignments.
Mergers and Acquisitions
When company structures change or teams merge, understanding capabilities and communication styles across the newly combined organization prevents friction and accelerates integration.
From Hunters to Farmers: Aligning Sales Roles and Capabilities
One of the most valuable uses of assessments addresses the age-old challenge of hunters versus farmers.
Some organizations are taking single, generalist sales roles—where people handle everything from prospecting to account management—and segmenting them into three distinct positions:
- Business development representatives focused on prospecting and lead qualification
- Outside salespeople managing the sales process
- Strategic account managers handling large enterprise relationships
This kind of restructuring succeeds only when you understand which team members are naturally wired for each type of role. Assessments reveal who thrives on the hunt for new business, who excels at building deep client relationships, and who performs best in a more service-oriented capacity.
Beyond Sales: Breaking Down Silos
While assessments work well for understanding sellers, their value extends throughout the organization. Many companies struggle with departments such as sales, marketing, operations, and customer success that feel siloed—working in parallel rather than in concert.
For sales teams that must collaborate closely with other departments, or organizations with multiple offices that need to communicate effectively, assessment helps people understand each other’s communication styles, work preferences, and motivators.
The result? Reduced conflict, improved interdepartmental communication, and better organizational harmony—all of which directly impact the sales team’s ability to serve customers effectively.
What Happens After Assessment
The assessment process itself is just the beginning. A comprehensive Sales Team Insights report provides leadership with an analysis of their team’s strengths, areas of opportunity, and development needs, and how different profiles manifest in various roles.
Assessments also highlight which sales team members may not be the right fit for the role. This isn’t about labeling people as good or bad. There’s no profile that can do everything well, and no profile that’s inherently wrong.
For interdepartmental communication challenges, team dynamics workshops deliver assessment results through engaging sales training programs. For sales teams, group debriefs led by assessment consultants help everyone understand what their results mean and how to apply the insights.
The key is transparency and positive framing. Sales leaders should position assessment as an investment in employees’ development and the organization’s success—never punitive, always constructive.
The Sales Coaching Advantage
Perhaps the most practical benefit of assessment is its impact on sales coaching effectiveness. Consider the common scenario of an inside sales team—hired for customer service—that now needs to become more proactive with outbound prospecting and upselling.
Assessment won’t tell you to let people go who aren’t natural hunters. Instead, it provides actionable coaching strategies. Leaders learn which team members are naturally wired for incoming calls and service roles rather than proactive outbound activity.
For those who need development, specific coaching techniques emerge: role-playing to build comfort, starting with referral requests to warm up cold-calling activities, and tapping into individual motivators to encourage behavior change. It’s about dangling the right carrot rather than wielding a stick.
The Path Forward: Maximizing Sales Team Performance
In an environment where you need to accomplish more with the team you have, assessment transforms how sales leaders approach team development. It answers the fundamental question: Why am I getting these results from my team, or why am I not getting the results I want?
Whether you’re struggling with underperformance, navigating strategic change, or breaking down silos, or you simply want to maximize your team’s potential, assessment provides the roadmap.
It reveals the natural capabilities, communication preferences, and motivators that drive behavior—giving you the insights needed to coach effectively, restructure strategically, and ultimately build a more productive and harmonious sales organization.
The talent you need to succeed may already be sitting in your sales organization. The question is: Do you truly understand them well enough to help them thrive?
Find out how sales assessments from The Brooks Group can help you build and lead a high-performing team.
