Sales Temperament Assessment
— What It Is
The Sales Temperament Assessment is a simple and easy-to-complete online sales assessment test that:
- Determines whether the person is suited for sales in the first place
- Indicates what types of selling situations the candidate is best suited for
- Describes a person's sales temperament
Basically, the Sales Temperament Assessment is used to determine whether a person is temperamentally suited for a particular selling situation.
There's no foolproof way of finding top sales performers. When hiring a salesperson, you are basically looking for three things:
Ability: Can the person do the job?
Character: Does the person have the drive, desire, and discipline?
Temperament: How will the person do the job?
The interview process can usually help you find the answers to the first two qualities. The third ingredient for selling success — temperament — is harder to assess. Because not every person is temperamentally suited for sales, our sales assessment can help you make the right choice.
The Sales Temperament Assessment is a sales test designed to measure the basic temperamental qualities that make up a successful salesperson:
- Competitiveness
- Sociability
- Drive
- Independence
Temperament vs Character vs Personality
What, you might ask, is "temperament" and how does it compare to character and personality?
Temperament - traits we are born with; it is predisposition, hardwired in from birth.
Character - habits we acquire; developed through the interaction of temperament and the environment; it is disposition, developed over a lifetime.
Personality - your unique personal style; a combination of temperament and character.
Put another way, your brain is like a computer system where:
Temperament = hardware
Character = software
Personality = computer system (hardware + software)
Why Sales Temperament is Important
Because temperament is basically fixed at birth, it's important that a person has the right temperament for sales. Different selling situations require different temperaments.
The same temperament that allows a person to naturally do cold calls, open new accounts, or pioneer new sales areas isn't appropriate for a sales situation that requires a soft sell approach, team selling, or a high degree of client service.
If a person has the right temperament for a particular selling situation, it will be natural for the individual to do what is required to succeed. If the right temperament is combined with proper sales and product knowledge training, he or she can be a top sales performer.
Some people simply shouldn't be in sales. Their temperament is such that it's unnatural for them to do what must be done to succeed in sales. Even with proper training, these people will succeed only by forcing themselves to do the job. When you hire these people you often hire a problem.
Our easy-to-use online sales assessment can help you avoid costly hiring mistakes and improve your chances of hiring top sales performers.
Try our sales assessment for free!
"The Sales Temperament Assessment has been a huge help to us in that it has not only confirmed our impressions of many candidates but, more importantly, it has flagged those that were not a fit with us. I look at the Sales Temperament Assessment a bit like an insurance policy against making a potentially 'fatal' business decision."


Temperament is the traits we are born with; it is predisposition, hardwired in from birth.

