Two candidates can list the same six platforms on a CV and be completely different hires. Tooling fluency and selling ability correlate loosely at best, and hiring processes routinely treat them as one thing.
They are different skills
Tooling fluency is operational: knowing how to find the right accounts, work efficiently, keep data clean and reduce admin. It is learnable in weeks and it is genuinely valuable, because a fluent seller spends more time in front of buyers.
Selling ability is judgement: knowing which question to ask next, when to slow a deal down, how to build a case a buyer can defend internally, and when to walk away. It takes years, and interviews frequently fail to detect it.
What happens when you confuse them
Hire for tooling alone and you get busy pipelines with poor conversion, immaculate CRM records and a lot of automated activity that no buyer remembers. Hire for charisma alone and you get a seller who is expensive to support, slower than the market, and whose forecast is a story rather than a plan.
Test them separately
For tooling, ask a process question: "Walk me through how you would build and work a target list for this territory." Listen for prioritisation and judgement, not brand names.
For selling ability, run a live discovery exercise and score it. Then ask for a short written follow-up.
The combination is the point
The seller you want uses modern tooling to earn more human conversations, and then handles those conversations well. That is the whole idea, and it is why we screen for experience, modern GTM fluency and human connection as three separate things before we recommend anyone.