What Is a Sales Print? How Hiring Beagle Scores Selling

A Sales Print is Hiring Beagle's profile of how a salesperson sells. It scores five selling skills from sales calls, each rated 1 to 5 against written behavioral criteria, rolls them into a 0 to 100 selling skills score, maps the rep's selling style on a radar, and shows a confidence band that narrows with more calls.

That is the short answer. The rest of this page explains each part, how the scoring works, what the research says about this kind of evidence, and, just as important, what a Sales Print cannot tell you.

What is in a Sales Print?

A Sales Print has three parts. Each one answers a different question, and they are never blended into a single mystery number.

1. Selling skills score (0 to 100). How well the rep sells, built from five skill ratings.
2. Selling style radar. How the rep sells. Style is description, not judgment.
3. Overall Sales Print score with a confidence band. The headline number plus an honest range around it.

You can see a full example on the sample Sales Print page.

The five selling skills

Each skill is rated from 1 to 5. The ratings are tied to written descriptions of observable behavior, so a 4 means the same thing on every call. Here is roughly what separates the top of the scale from the bottom.

These five map to the stages of almost any sales conversation, from the first question to the close of the call. A rep can be excellent at discovery and weak at next steps, and the Sales Print shows that split instead of averaging it away.

The selling style radar

The radar shows the shape of how someone sells: warm or direct, consultative or urgent, and so on. No shape is better than another. A direct, fast-moving style can fit a high-volume sales development representative (SDR, the person who books first meetings) role. A patient, consultative style can fit a long enterprise cycle. The radar exists so employers can match style to their buyers, not to rank people.

The confidence band

One 10-minute call is a small sample. A rep can have an off day, or a scenario can suit them unusually well. So every Sales Print shows a range around the overall score. With a single call the band is wide. Each additional call, AI or real, narrows it.

How is a Sales Print scored?

The starting point is a roughly 10-minute role-play sales call with an AI. Reps choose the version that fits the job they want:

• AE test for account executive (AE, the person who runs the deal and closes) roles
• SDR test for prospecting and meeting-setting roles
• New-grad test for people with no sales experience (covered below)

Reps can also add recordings or transcripts of real sales calls. Those calls are scored on the same five skills against the same written criteria, and they are the main way to tighten the confidence band.

The scoring itself is a rubric applied to evidence: did the rep ask about the buyer's timeline, did they check that an objection was resolved, did they set a dated next step. Because the criteria are written down, a rating can be traced back to specific moments in the call. Hiring Beagle explains how its AI scoring works on the how AI scores candidates page.

Why score a work sample instead of a resume or personality test?

Because watching someone do the work tells you more than a document about the work or a questionnaire about their temperament.

The best evidence comes from personnel selection research. In 2022, Paul Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher Berry and Filip Lievens re-ran the major meta-analyses of hiring methods after correcting a statistical error that had inflated earlier estimates. In a summary published by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), the top predictors of job performance were structured interviews (a mean validity of .42), job knowledge tests (.40), empirically keyed biodata (.38), work sample tests (.33) and cognitive ability (.31). Broad personality inventories did not make that top group, and the summary notes that personality questions framed around behavior at work did better than general ones.

Two things in that research matter for sales hiring:

• Structure is what makes an interview work. The same questions, scored the same way, against defined criteria. An unstructured chat about someone's background is a different tool.
• Doing the job beats describing it. Work samples and job knowledge both rank well above a resume skim, which is not a validated method at all.

Sales-specific research points the same direction. A meta-analysis of sales performance studies from 1982 to 2008 by Willem Verbeke, Bart Dietz and Ernst Verwaal found the strongest drivers were selling-related knowledge and degree of adaptiveness, meaning how well a seller adjusts to each customer. Adaptiveness is exactly what you can observe on a call and cannot read off a resume.

A Sales Print is built on that logic: a structured work sample (the same kind of call, scored on the same written criteria) instead of a gut read. To be clear about the limits of that claim: the research supports the method. It does not prove that any single product's scores predict performance, and that includes ours.

For a step-by-step version you can run yourself, see how to hire your first salesperson.

What does a Sales Print not measure?

A Sales Print does not predict quota attainment on its own. Nothing does. Here is what sits outside it:

• Territory and lead quality. A strong rep with a thin territory or bad leads will miss numbers a weaker rep hits in a rich one.
• Your product and market. A rep who sells a simple tool well may need real time to ramp on a complex technical product.
• Management and role clarity. The same Verbeke study found role ambiguity, not knowing what the job really is, among the strongest drags on performance. That is on the employer.
• Volume and persistence over months. One call shows skill, not whether someone will make 60 dials a day for a year.
• Pay plan and fit with your team. Compensation design and how a rep works with your team still need your own judgment.

Treat a Sales Print as strong evidence about one thing: how this person sells in a conversation. Combine it with a structured interview and reference checks, and read the confidence band before the number.

How does the new-grad Sales Print work?

New grads have no call recordings, so judging them on polish would only reward people who have done this before. The New-grad test is built differently:

1. The rep reads a short product brief. No industry knowledge is needed.
2. They run a role-play sales call.
3. They get one coaching tip on their weakest skill.
4. They run the same call again.

The gap between call one and call two shows coachability: how much someone improves after a single piece of feedback. For an entry-level hire, that is often more useful than their starting level. New grads are compared only with other new grads, never with experienced AEs.

If you are trying to break in, read how to get a sales job with no experience.

Who can see a Sales Print?

The rep controls it. A Sales Print is private until the rep says yes to a specific company. Employers browsing a shortlist see anonymous profiles, and the rep's identity is shared only when they accept an intro or apply.

A few more rules worth knowing:

• The resume is never scored. Reps can add a resume or LinkedIn details for context, but none of it goes into the score.
• The pitch is context, not score. Reps can add a short pitch of something they have sold. Employers see it as background only.
• Reps never pay. Getting a Sales Print, adding calls and being found are free.

How should employers and reps use a Sales Print?

If you are hiring, use it to decide who is worth an interview, then use the interview to test what the Sales Print does not cover: your product, your buyers, your pace. You can post a role free and get a ranked shortlist of reps open to that role type, or read how it works for employers first.

If you are a rep, it gives you proof that does not depend on your last company's logo or your quota luck. Add one or two real calls to tighten the band, and see how reps get scouted once your profile is live.