Two sales teams, same product, same territory, same pricing. One does double the numbers of the other. Anyone who has run sales for a while has seen this and it is never really about the product. It is about the people and how they work together, and the gap between a good team and an ordinary one is enormous.

If you are hiring into a sales team, or trying to work out why yours is stuck, it helps to know what the strong ones actually have in common. These are the traits we look for when we are building a team for a client, and the ones worth screening hard for at interview.

They are coachable

Raw talent is nice. Coachability beats it over a full year. The rep who takes feedback on Monday and has changed something by Wednesday will overtake the naturally gifted one who thinks they already know it all. Ask a candidate about a time a manager told them something they did not want to hear. The good ones have a real answer and it does not end with them being proved right.

They actually listen

The old image of the great salesperson as the smooth talker is mostly wrong. The best ones talk less than you expect. They ask a question, then another, then they shut up and listen to the answer instead of waiting for their turn to pitch. You can spot it in the interview itself. Do they answer the question you asked, or the one they wish you had asked?

Resilience that is real, not performed

Sales is a job where you can do everything right and still hear no. A lot. The people who last are the ones who take the knock and pick the phone back up, rather than the ones who need a good week to feel okay. Everyone claims resilience on a CV. Ask about their worst quarter and what they did the following Monday morning.

They own the number

Strong salespeople do not hide behind marketing, or the product, or the economy. When they are down, they say so and they say what they are doing about it. The ones who always have a reason the miss was not their fault will still have a reason next quarter, and the quarter after that.

They lift the room

Here is something managers underrate. One rep with a rotten attitude drags a whole team down, and one positive competitor pulls everyone up. The best hires make the people around them better, share what is working, and do not sulk when a colleague wins. That is worth as much as their personal number.

They are curious about the customer

The top performers are interested in the businesses they sell to. Not in a scripted 'let me understand your pain points' way. They just find it interesting, which means they ask better questions and spot opportunities the box-tickers miss.

Organised enough to matter

Not obsessively. But a brilliant closer who never updates the CRM and forgets to follow up is leaking money everywhere. The best combine the people skills with just enough process discipline to not drop things. Rare combination, worth paying for.

They fit your particular business

And this is the one that gets missed. A rep who is a superstar selling enterprise software might sink selling a transactional product to SMEs, and the reverse is just as true. High performance is partly the person and partly the match between the person and the sale. Which is exactly the bit a good recruiter earns their keep on.

Getting all eight in one person is rare, and you do not always need all eight. But you do need to know which ones matter most for the specific role, and screen for those rather than hiring on charisma and hoping. If you want a hand doing that, here is how we build sales teams, and our piece on the psychology behind great sales hires digs into the screening side. Or just book a call and tell us what your team is missing.