In Brief:
Sales hiring is barely more accurate than a coin flip. Unstructured interviews predict the right hire just 57% of the time, annual rep turnover runs at 35%, and replacing a single departure costs roughly EUR 100,000. The industry keeps searching for better filters. JR Butler, former CRO and founder of Shift Group, took a different approach. He built a company around hiring athletes and military veterans into sales, not because of their CVs, but because of what their previous lives forced them to develop: resilience, coachability, curiosity, and the ability to start from zero without ego. He sat down with Aira CEO Daniel Wikberg to explain why character beats credentials, why his curriculum is a humility filter disguised as training, and what happens when you stop trying to predict sales talent and start screening for it.
Hiring is just one of those things that every leader or would-be leader expects to be good at. Very few people see themselves as a poor judge of character, particularly if those people work in sales. When asking sales leaders how they choose team members, most will respond with something like “we hire for attitude”, “we look for track record”, or “we hire those that are solution oriented”. These filters are not wrong, but with the cost of replacement or poor performance being so high, these stipulations need to stand up to scrutiny, and the data suggests that, in most cases, they don’t.
Daniel sat down with JR Butler, founder and CEO of Shift Group, to discuss what JR built when he accepted that most hiring processes are broken and wanted something better than looking for a better crystal ball.
57% accuracy. That is the bar the industry is trying to beat.
A 1998 meta-analysis by Schmidt and Hunter, one of the most cited studies in industrial psychology, found that unstructured employment interviews predict the right hire just 57% of the time (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Barely better than the toss of a coin. Google examined tens of thousands of their own interviews, compared scores to actual performance, and found no meaningful relationship at all. Two thirds of hiring managers regret their interview-based decisions (DDI).
The signals sales leaders rely on most are no better. A 2022 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that years of experience ranked behind 22 other selection criteria as a predictor of job performance (Sackett et al., 2022). The first thing most hiring managers look at on a CV is statistically one of the least useful data points available to them.
And the cost of getting it wrong compounds fast. Annual sales rep turnover runs at approximately 35%, nearly three times the all-industry average of 13% (HubSpot). Replacing a single rep costs around EUR 100,000 in recruitment, onboarding, training, and lost pipeline (Salesforce). Average tenure is 18 months. Average ramp is 3.2 months. That leaves roughly 14 months of productive selling before the cycle restarts. For a 10-person sales team losing 3.5 reps a year, that is EUR 350,000 in replacement costs alone, before you count the revenue missed due to phones undialled.
The performance distribution among those who stay is just as stark. Ebsta’s 2025 GTM Benchmarks Report found that 14% of sellers generate 80% of revenue. That is an 11x gap between top and bottom. Most sales organisations are running on two of six cylinders and hoping the next hire will be the one that gets the engine turning.
Butler’s thesis: screen for what a CV will never show you
JR Butler spent sixteen years in B2B sales and sales leadership. Prior to that, he had been an elite ice hockey player. At Turbonomic (a software infrastructure provider), he helped scale the company from under 50 to 650 employees and from 200 to 3,000 customers before its acquisition by IBM for approximately $2 billion. He has hired hundreds of salespeople. He has also got it wrong more times than he would like, which is part of why he started Shift Group.
Shift Group places former athletes and military veterans into sales careers. The premise is not that athletes are automatically good at selling. It is that their previous lives demanded a specific set of traits that the sales profession requires but cannot reliably interview for.
Butler breaks this down into five criteria.
Resilience. Athletes and veterans have already proven they can absorb setbacks and keep performing. Entry-level sales is bloody difficult, you deal with a lot of rejection, and a huge number of losses before you get your first win. That tolerance is not something you can screen for in a 45-minute conversation, but it is something a decade of competitive sport or military service builds into a person.
Teamwork. Sales is a team sport, despite what the lone-wolf mythology suggests. Closing complex B2B deals requires working across functions, pulling in technical resources, aligning with marketing, coordinating with leadership. Athletes and veterans understand how to work with different personalities towards a shared outcome because they have been doing it for years.
Access to great leadership. This is the one that rarely gets discussed. Athletes and veterans have spent years under coaches and commanding officers who were held to high standards of leadership. They know what good leadership looks like. They know what it feels like to rally behind someone. That baseline understanding means they respond to strong sales leadership in a way that someone without that exposure might not.
Coachability. Being able to take feedback constructively without losing confidence is one of the hardest things to find in a sales hire. Athletes have spent their entire careers being coached, critiqued, and corrected. It is not personal to them. It is the process.
“Being able to take feedback constructively and use it to get better and not take it personally, maintain your confidence.”
And then there is what Butler calls being “dialled in.” When he uses that phrase with an athlete or a veteran, they know exactly what he means. They have had a purpose. They know what it feels like to be locked into becoming excellent at something. The reps and the practice do not feel like work when you are pursuing something you believe in.
“When I say ‘are you dialled in’ to an athlete or a soldier, they know what I mean. They have a purpose. It’s easy to get passionate about becoming excellent at the things that help them achieve that purpose. These people know what it means to be dialled in, and we help them get dialled in on a new thing, on sales.”
His argument is not that these traits are exclusive to athletes and veterans. Anyone can develop them. But athletes and veterans already have the muscle memory. Shift Group’s job is to point that muscle at a new profession. If they can get a candidate bought into sales as a career worth being excellent at, the work ethic follows automatically. That is a fundamentally different bet to reading a CV and hoping.
Curiosity is the closest thing sales has to a leading indicator
When asked what single trait most predicts sales success, Butler had a straight answer.
“The biggest indicator of a salesperson being successful is their level of curiosity. And that’s hard. That’s really hard to interview for.”
At Turbonomic, Butler was hiring people to sell complex infrastructure technology. Nobody walking in at 24 or 25 years old understood the product. That was not the point. The point was whether they were trying to understand. Were they asking questions in the interview? Had they researched the company? Were they genuinely trying to figure out how the business worked, even if they did not yet have the answers?
“If somebody comes in and they’re asking great questions and it’s clear that they’re trying to understand, it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand. That natural curiosity means they’re gonna go into customer meetings with the same curiosity, really trying to understand what the customer is doing, how is it impacting their world, and where they want to get to.”
That tracks with what we see across the organisations we work with. The reps who adopt new tools, who push into unfamiliar markets, who actually improve quarter over quarter, almost always share that trait. Curiosity is what makes Chris Voss’s calibrated questions work in B2B negotiation. It is what separates the reps in our AI performance gap research who used new technology to genuinely change their approach from those who let it gather dust. It is not a guarantee, but if you forced me to bet on one trait, it would be that one.
The curriculum is a humility filter, not a training programme
Shift Group’s candidates go through a curriculum before they are placed. It is free but demanding, taking 25 to 40 hours to complete. Candidates are recorded doing cold calls, presenting account research, building outreach. Companies can watch them on tape before making a hiring decision.
But the curriculum is not primarily about teaching people to sell. It is a screening mechanism for humility.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re right out of college, a division three backup quarterback, or a ten year NFL player. They all have to go through the same curriculum. And if they’re not willing to do that, that’s pretty much proof point number one that they don’t have the humility.”
“Even though it’s free, you’d be shocked how many people aren’t willing to do that. And if you’re not willing to do that, then we’re not willing to put you in front of one of our customers.”
This is a system designed around the assumption that prediction is unreliable. Rather than trying to guess who will succeed from an interview, it creates conditions where the wrong people opt out and the right people demonstrate their approach under realistic pressure. The filter is not a question in a meeting room. It is observed behaviour over time.
Butler uses an analogy for this that he regularly shares with candidates:
“If LeBron James joined the Navy SEALs, would you bring him out on a mission on day one because he was one of the best basketball players in the world? Of course you wouldn’t. He’d have to start from the beginning and go through the same training you did to get where you are.”
The same applies to any experienced hire entering a new organisation. A rep who crushed quota at their last company still needs to learn your product, your market, your sales motion, and your culture. If they cannot approach that with a beginner’s mindset, their past success becomes a liability. The best hires are not the ones with the most impressive history. They are the ones who treat every new environment as something to learn.
The strongest candidates show this in the interview itself. They do not just claim to be coachable. They give a specific example, then explain why coachability matters in the role they are interviewing for.
“It’s one thing for somebody to say ‘I’m coachable.’ It’s a different level when somebody says they’re coachable and gives you an example and then can explain why coachability is important in the role that they’re interviewing for.”
That three-part answer, trait plus example plus relevance, is Butler’s marker for someone who will do the work.
“No breath is better than bad breath”
At Turbonomic, where Butler stewarded the sales team through a period of rapid scale, attrition was a feature of the system, not a failure.
“No breath is better than bad breath. As soon as we knew somebody wasn’t a fit, we tried to move them out of the business as quickly as possible. You can’t let people stick around that don’t match the values of the organisation.”
It’s the sunk cost fallacy. Rather than throwing good money after bad, it’s better to accept that a mistake has been made, and bite the bullet. The mistake will only get more expensive.
The arithmetic supports this. With a 3.2-month ramp and an 18-month average tenure, every month spent carrying a rep who is not going to work out is a month you are not spending onboarding their replacement. Slow decisions on bad hires are one of the most expensive mistakes a sales leader can make, and one of the least visible on a P&L.
The leadership problem underneath the hiring problem
Butler raised a point towards the end of the conversation that deserves its own article, but the short version matters here.
Many of today’s sales leaders were promoted during a period of historically easy selling. Low interest rates, abundant funding, growth-at-all-costs mandates. They succeeded without needing strong fundamentals because the environment did not demand them.
“You’ve got people who sold in an environment where they didn’t need the fundamentals to be successful. Now they’re leading sales teams who need the fundamentals right now more than ever because of how hard the environment is to sell in.”
“If you don’t have a leader that can do what they’re telling their people to do, you’re going to struggle.”
I lived through those years in the software world, most of them as an IC. I saw some genuinely strange hires into both sales and management roles, in most cases because the input/output maths were strong. More people in seats meant more top-line revenue. When VC money is sloshing around an entire industry, less attention gets paid to efficiency and profitability. Growth at all costs was the mantra, and hiring decisions reflected it.
This connects to Butler’s point in a way that is often invisible. The people making the hiring decisions and doing the post-hire coaching may themselves be products of a system that selected for the wrong things. If your sales leader cannot sit next to a struggling rep and demonstrate how to run a discovery call, it does not matter how good your hiring process is. The development system downstream is broken.
Stop predicting. Start screening.
Sales hiring will never be an exact science. The information you need to predict whether someone will succeed in your environment does not exist until they are in the seat, selling your product, to your customers.
The organisations that consistently build strong sales teams screen for traits instead of credentials. They test candidates under realistic pressure before making an offer. They build systems where the wrong people self-select out. They make fast, honest decisions when a hire is not working. And they invest in leaders who can actually coach, not just interrogate a forecast.
Butler built Shift Group around these principles for athletes and veterans specifically. But the logic applies to any team willing to accept that prediction has limits and discipline has none.
We explored how AI is widening the performance gap across sales teams in our earlier analysis of why technology amplifies existing disparities rather than closing them. For smaller teams, where every hire represents a larger share of total capacity, the stakes are even higher. The hiring problem sits underneath both. If 14% of your reps carry 80% of the revenue, the question is not just how to develop the other 86%. It is whether you hired for the right traits in the first place. And whether your system finds out fast when you did not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How accurate are sales hiring interviews at predicting performance?
Unstructured interviews predict the right hire approximately 57% of the time, according to a landmark meta-analysis by Schmidt and Hunter. Google’s internal analysis of tens of thousands of interviews found no meaningful relationship between interview scores and subsequent job performance. Even structured interviews with trained interviewers achieve only moderate predictive accuracy.
What is the real cost of replacing a sales rep?
Direct replacement costs average around EUR 100,000 per departure, covering recruitment, training, and lost pipeline. With average ramp to productivity at 3.2 months and average tenure at 18 months, most reps leave before reaching peak performance, which typically occurs between years two and three.
What traits best predict B2B sales success?
JR Butler identifies curiosity as the single strongest early indicator, followed by coachability, resilience, and growth mindset. These character traits predict whether a rep will do the hard work of learning, adapting, and improving under coaching. However, even strong traits do not guarantee outcomes, which is why Butler’s model emphasises observed behaviour over interview performance.
Why does previous quota attainment not reliably predict future sales performance?
Quota attainment reflects conditions as much as individual ability. Brand strength, market maturity, product quality, competitive environment, and internal support all influence the number. A rep who consistently hit 120% selling a market leader may struggle at a lesser-known company with fewer resources.
Why does Shift Group focus specifically on athletes and military veterans for sales roles?
Athletes and veterans develop specific intangible traits through years of structured competition and pressure: resilience, teamwork, coachability, comfort with leadership, and what Butler calls being “dialled in” to a purpose. These traits are difficult to screen for in a traditional interview but are directly transferable to B2B sales environments.
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