Almost every sales assessment sorts people on one line: hunter on the left, farmer on the right. It's a tidy story. It's also wrong often enough to cost you good hires.
The problem is that "hunter" and "farmer" aren't two ends of one trait. They're two different drives — and a single slider forces a trade-off that doesn't actually exist.
Think of rating every car on a slider from "fast" to "comfortable." Some cars are both. Some are neither. The slider can't represent either case — it only knows the middle. The same thing happens when you squeeze sellers onto a hunter-to-farmer line: the rare rep who can both open cold doors and grow an account for years gets averaged into a meaningless "balanced," and the person wired for neither front-line role looks like a weak farmer instead of a strong analyst.
So we measure two things independently:
Plot those on two axes instead of one, and a map appears. High hunting, low stewardship is the classic closer. High on both is the rare full-cycle rep. High stewardship, lower hunting is the relationship grower. And the corner that a one-line test would call "worst farmer" is often someone whose real strengths point somewhere else entirely.
There's a well-known finding in sales research: the pure relationship-builder — all warmth, no ask — is actually one of the lowest-performing seller types. Warmth without the willingness to ask for the order doesn't grow revenue; it just keeps people comfortable.
A great farmer isn't a soft hunter. It's warmth with a spine.
That's why our farmer profile requires a real (if moderate) hunting drive, not a low one. A candidate who's all relationship and no ask doesn't get mislabeled a farmer — the map routes them toward support, where their strengths genuinely shine.
A one-line score tells you how "salesy" someone seems. A two-axis map tells you which sales role they're built for — and, just as usefully, when the answer is "none of them, but here's what they'd be great at instead." That's the difference between a test that screens people out and one that routes them to fit.