Steve W. Martin, a sales strategy professor and author of books on sales linguistics, recently wrote in his Harvard Business Review blog that successful salespeople share many common characteristics.

In order to come to this conclusion, Martin asked 1,000 top salespeople to take a personality test. He then used the results to see what characteristics these individuals had compared to their peers.

His results indicated that about 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores on their personality tests when it came to modesty and humility. Additionally, about 85 percent of successful salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, or they took their jobs very seriously and felt personally responsible for their businesses' success.

According to Martin, other characteristics that a vast majority of top salespeople showed were achievement orientation, curiosity, lack of discouragement and lack of self-consciousness.

Bob Kreisberg, chief executive officer of Opus Productivity Solutions, told Inc. Magazine that his company uses personality tests for hiring salespeople, as finding successful professionals in this field can be difficult.

"There are more mistakes in sales hiring than any other position," he said. "The difference between a good interview and a good performance is often wider than usual."  

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