Do Athletes Make Good Salespeople?
Some of them, absolutely. So do plenty of people who never played anything. That’s exactly the problem with the question.
Here’s the short answer: sometimes, but athletic background isn’t what makes them good, and hiring for it will cost you.
I’ve been arguing this for about thirty years, usually to a room that doesn’t want to hear it. Some of the best salespeople I’ve ever worked with were athletes. So were some of the worst. What I’ve never seen, across three decades of watching companies hire on this theory, is the correlation actually hold up.
“Hire the former athlete” is one of the most durable tropes in sales hiring, and it’s one of the worst, because it substitutes a résumé line for the trait you actually want.
Why the theory sounds right
The theory itself, as it’s stated, isn’t stupid.
The case goes like this. Athletes are competitive. They’re used to being coached, and to being corrected in front of other people without falling apart. They’ve experienced losing repeatedly and shown up the next day anyway. They understand practice — the idea that you get better at something by doing it badly for a while on purpose. They know what it’s like to be measured, publicly, against a standard.
Every one of those is a real quality, and every one of them matters enormously in selling. If a candidate genuinely has all five, they’re worth a serious look.
The problem isn’t the traits. It’s that the game those traits were built in isn’t the game you’re hiring for.
Sports are won by overpowering. Selling isn’t.
In an athlete, those traits developed in a primarily physical activity, where a certain physical prowess is a prerequisite. Selling is a primarily mental activity.
Once, a football player challenged me on this during a speech. He said that mentality is a big part of competitive sports. I agreed with him — and then asked him to tell me about a time when he was able to talk the defense out of the way so he could walk the ball into the end zone, rather than powering through them.
It got a laugh, even from him. But that’s the point. In competitive sports, nobody is winning by persuading their opponent. They’re winning by overpowering their opponent, and that’s pretty much the opposite of what we want to do in selling.
If somebody wants to argue the exception — the play-action fake, the deception, the head game — go ahead and make it. A fake is still aimed at defeating the person across from you, not at serving them. Which is exactly my point.
Where it breaks down
Set all of that aside for a moment and assume the traits do transfer. The heuristic still breaks down, in three ways I’ve watched play out.
The natural. Plenty of athletes played because they were gifted, not because they ever had to work for it. The kid who was the best player on every team he was ever on from age eight never had to develop resilience, because he was never up against a wall. He never had to build a process, because raw ability carried him. He arrives in your sales job with a decorated background and no experience of sustained difficulty, and the first six months of a sales career are almost entirely sustained difficulty. That candidate washes out more often than the trope would predict, and the failure surprises everybody.
Your memory is lying to you. Years ago I had a client who was adamant about hiring former athletes. “All my successes have come from hiring athletes,” he told me.
He was right. That’s also all he hired. And all of his failures — which represented about 60% of his hires — had come from hiring athletes too.
I helped him with his next hire, and we brought in a nerdy girl who stuck out like a sore thumb in his sales room full of male jocks. In one year she was at the top of the board, because she was a thinker.
That’s the pattern everywhere this belief lives. Companies remember the athlete who succeeded, and that person becomes the story told at every hiring meeting for a decade. The ones who didn’t work out get filed under bad luck, bad fit, bad timing — anything except a bad hiring theory. Nobody runs the numbers, so the belief never gets tested. That’s how a hiring trope survives for forty years without any evidence behind it.
The people you never meet. This is the expensive one, and it’s the other half of what happened to my client. Every filter has two sides. If athletics is doing some heavy lifting in your screening, you’re systematically passing on people who have the actual traits and not the background — the candidate who worked thirty hours a week through school, the one who ran a student organization into the ground and rebuilt it, the one who started something of her own, watched it fail, and started another one. Every one of those is a documented record of working hard at something difficult. They just don’t come with a varsity letter.
I wasn’t an athlete. I was a competitive debater in high school and college, and I can tell you from experience that few pursuits in life are as cutthroat, on a mental level, as competitive scholastic debate. Under the athlete heuristic, I don’t get the interview.
So what does predict sales performance?
We actually know this, which is what makes the trope so frustrating.
The most-cited meta-analysis on the subject — Vinchur, Schippmann, Switzer and Roth, 1998 — pooled decades of studies on what predicts salesperson performance. Three categories came out ahead of everything else. Cognitive ability and reasoning. Specific, measurable behavioral traits, as opposed to general impressions of personality. And occupational interest — whether the work itself genuinely appeals to the person. Strongest of all was biodata: a structured record of what the candidate has actually done.
Notice what’s on that list. Reasoning ability, particular measurable behaviors, real interest in the work, and a documented track record. Notice what isn’t on it anywhere.
Notice something else too. Every item on that list can be measured. That’s the whole point of this article. A good sales assessment measures those same three categories — thinking style, behavioral traits, and occupational interests — and matches them against a performance model built for the specific job you’re filling. I use and recommend the Profiles Sales Assessment for this. Whatever instrument you choose, the principle holds: when you can measure the thing itself, using a proxy for it is strictly worse.
While we’re here — “drive” is the same mistake
If you’re nodding along about athletes while thinking that your real criterion is hunger, or drive, or fire in the belly, I’d gently suggest that’s the same error.
You can’t measure drive in an interview. What you’re actually measuring is how a candidate makes you feel across a desk for forty minutes. Confident, verbal candidates read as hungry. Quiet, deliberate ones don’t. Neither impression predicts anything about what happens in a customer’s office eight months from now, and both are easy enough to produce on purpose for the length of a conversation. I’ve watched companies hire “the hungry one” and end up with a talker, and pass on the person who would have outworked everybody because he didn’t perform enthusiasm well.
Hire the measurable trait and the documented record. Leave the vibes out of it.
The question to ask instead
This is where I want to be careful, because the point isn’t to throw out the athlete’s background. It’s to stop treating it as a qualification and start treating it as material.
The right move is to ask about it the way you’d ask about anything else on the résumé, and to probe for the trait underneath. Tell me about a season that went badly and what you did. Tell me about a time a coach told you something you didn’t want to hear. Tell me about the part of the sport you weren’t naturally good at and how you handled that. Were you the best player on your team, or did you have to fight for a spot?
That last question is the one that separates two candidates with identical athletic résumés. The walk-on who spent four years clawing for playing time has shown you something real. The natural who was always the best kid on the field hasn’t — not because he’s lesser, but because nothing in that experience tested the trait you’re hiring for.
And then ask the same caliber of question to the candidate who never played anything. That’s the discipline. Same standard, different setting.
One more cost worth naming
There’s another problem with hiring on this heuristic, and it shows up two or three years later.
Sales organizations that hire against a narrow profile — however they define it — tend to end up with teams that all approach customers the same way. That feels good internally. Everybody gets along, everybody thinks alike, meetings are easy. But your customers are not all alike, and a team with one operating style has limited customer-facing range. The accounts that don’t respond to that style don’t get lost dramatically. They just never quite happen, and nobody connects the miss to the hiring pattern that caused it.
The athlete heuristic is one of the most common ways that narrowing happens, partly because it’s socially comfortable. Nobody has to defend it. Everybody nods. And I have often suspected that one reason some managers and owners prefer former athletes is that they were athletes themselves, and the jocks still like to hang around with the jocks.
Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring Athletes in Sales
Should I stop considering athletic background entirely?
No. Consider it the way you’d consider any other experience on a résumé — as a place to look for evidence, not as a qualification in itself. A candidate who fought for a roster spot, took hard coaching, and kept showing up after losses has demonstrated something you care about. Just make sure you’re hiring the demonstration rather than the sport.
Are athletes more coachable than other candidates?
Some are, and the ones who are tend to be very coachable, because they’ve had the experience of being corrected without taking it personally. But that’s a trait you can test directly in an interview — ask about a time somebody gave them feedback they disagreed with, and listen to what they did next. You’ll learn more from that answer than from the fact that they played.
Isn’t competitiveness what I’m really hiring for?
Careful, because “competitive” as an interview impression is just another proxy — and a softer one than athletics, because at least athletics is a fact you can verify. What you can actually assess is whether someone has repeatedly set a standard for themselves and kept working at it when it got hard. That shows up in their record and in a validated assessment. It does not reliably show up in how fired up somebody seems while they’re trying to get hired.
If not athletics, what should I actually screen on?
Evidence of achievement, sustained effort through difficulty, and how someone responds to correction — surfaced through behavioral interviewing and backed by a validated sales assessment. That combination is what the research supports and it’s what I’d put my money on. It’s also harder work than scanning a résumé for a varsity letter, which is precisely why the shortcut survives.
Does this apply to hiring sales managers too?
Even more so, and the “team captain” version of the trope is just as unreliable. Leading a locker room and developing a salesperson through a performance problem are different skills. Ask about the second one directly.
None of this is an argument against athletes. It’s an argument against shortcuts. The reason the heuristic persists is that hiring well is hard, slow work, and any rule that promises to make it fast will always find an audience. But the traits that make a great salesperson are knowable, measurable, and interviewable — and every hour you spend on the proxy is an hour you didn’t spend on the thing itself.
If your hiring keeps producing mixed results and you can’t tell whether it’s the process or the people, that’s worth finding out before you make the next one. The Navigator’s Sales Diagnostic will tell you where the gaps are, and it’s free. Learn more and schedule yours here.
