Someone we have been working with came to us recently with a situation that I have not been able to stop thinking about, and I thought it might be worth sharing some of what we have been doing with them. They are a newly appointed sales leader, brought into a business that has shifted strategy, and they have inherited a team of account managers from the previous chapter of the company's growth. The team was built for a different job. The leader knows it. The team, in their own way, knows it too.
The account managers were originally hired to win new business. Fast pace, high autonomy, a strong appetite for risk. The kind of profile that suits a company in its early growth years, and the kind of profile that has served this business well. The strategy now asks for something quite different. It needs people who can stay with clients post-sale, manage implementation projects with care, and grow revenue across longer engagement cycles. It is a fundamentally different job from the one most of the team signed up for.
The leader is thoughtful about it. They do not want to make hasty calls based on over a short period of time. They also do not want to spend a year being patient with the wrong people in the wrong seats.
The questions sitting on their desk are the ones that always sit on the desk in this kind of moment. Who is genuinely suited to the new model. Who could adapt with the right support. Who, in fairness to everyone involved, needs to move into a different kind of role. And if external hires are needed, what should the business be hiring for.
Start With the Job
The instinct in this kind of situation is usually to start with the team. We have been working through something different with them, which is to start with the job itself. This is how we gain alignment between the business goals and sales strategy.
Before any conversation about the people, we worked with them to build what The Predictive Index calls a Job Target. It is a behavioural and cognitive profile of what a successful person in the new account manager role would need to look like, built from the input of the stakeholders involved in the role.
That step surfaced something I think is worth sitting with for a moment. When we asked them to articulate the behavioural requirements of long-cycle account management in their own words, the picture that emerged looked nothing like the picture of a new business hunter. The conversation about the team changed entirely from that point on.
Measuring the Team Against the Role
Once the target was set, each of the account managers completed the PI Behavioural Assessment. It takes around six minutes. It measures four workplace drives that the science behind PI has refined over more than sixty years. What we found, when we plotted each person against the requirements of the new role, was a set of gaps the leader had sensed but had not been able to name.
Some of the team were wired in ways that suited the new model well. Some were wired in ways that would make the transition genuinely difficult, no matter how much coaching was put around them. One person had been overlooked because their natural drives were not valued in the old environment, and they turned out to be almost perfectly suited to where the business was now heading.
The part that has stayed with me is how often the data confirmed something the leader already half-knew, and how often it corrected something they would have acted on with.
The account manager they had been concerned about turned out to have been miscast all along. The top biller from the old model, the one everyone had assumed would carry the new strategy on their shoulders, was running on drives that the new role would slowly exhaust. That is a different kind of risk, and one that is far harder to see from the outside.
Building Team Awareness
The individual data is incredibly insightful. The leader could have stopped there and still made better decisions than they would have made without it. The point at which the conversation shifted entirely was when we moved into Team Discovery, which is the part of the tool that looks at the team as a unit rather than as a collection of individuals.
What the map showed was that this team had a collective personality that had served the company very well for years. The new strategy was asking that collective personality to do something it was not built to do. People can flex into adjacent ways of working with reasonable effort, particularly with the right support around them, and the team had a handful of people who sat comfortably within that range. There were others whose natural drives sat at the opposite end of the map from where the strategy now needed the most coverage. That is the hardest stretch anyone can be asked to make. It is also the place where, in our experience, you most often see disengagement, burnout, and the kind of resignation that does not show up in performance reviews until it is too late to do anything about it.
Why This Matters For You
Around 75% of companies make people decisions based on what we call the briefcase. The qualifications, the CV, the visible track record. Around 95% of firing decisions are made on work behaviour and a lack of fit. Sales is the function where the gap between those two numbers is most punishing. The validity studies that have built up across decades of PI data show top behavioural-fit performers outselling bottom behavioural-fit performers by factors that genuinely surprise people when they see them for the first time. Same company. Same product. Same training and the same compensation in place.
Mike Zani, the former CEO of The Predictive Index, said it in the way I have heard it said best. In almost every other function, behaviour is one of several inputs into future performance. In sales and customer-facing roles, behaviour is the single biggest factor.
The leader we have been working with has not made any of their decisions from the map alone, and I think that is worth noting here. What the data has given them is a common language and an objective starting point for a conversation that would otherwise have been shaped by gut feel and a degree of internal politics that no one would admit to having. The map shows where the risk genuinely sits. The qualitative evidence they already hold either confirms it or challenges it. The two together have given them something they can defend to themselves, to their board, and to the people on their team.
If you are sitting with a team that was built for a different chapter of the business, or if you are curious about how this kind of work might apply to what you are seeing, reply to this email. We can have a chat about where it might be useful.
Best of luck with your next hire.
Dave Crumby
Founder at 360 Talent Solutions | Certified PI Practitioner