The questionnaire is based on a hierarchical theory of personality, which focuses on the effectiveness of different behaviors. The PASAT 2000 model defines personality as being essentially how an individual copes with, or adjusts to, life but it is concerned not so much with personality in general, but with the "sales personality" in particular.

Development of PASAT 2000 involved extensive job analyzis work, which covered a wide range of sales and sales-related roles. This detailed initial work encompassed many different selling environments and identified a range of effective and ineffective behaviors that differentiated between successful and unsuccessful sales personnel. The research included personnel selling a variety of products, within different industries and in different corporate cultures.

PASAT 2000 has eight main scales

Social Adjustment - the tendency to establish and maintain effective relationships with others.
Motivational Adjustment - is concerned with goal-directed behavior and with seeking challenges.
Emotional Adjustment - is concerned with coping effectively with emotionally challenging events and in showing resilience in the face of adversity.
Adaptability - is concerned with the capacity to embrace change, adapt to it and generally react in a positive way towards it.
Conscientiousness - is concerned with doing things conscientiously, planning, paying attention to detail and following rules.
Social Control - is concerned with influencing others by a variety of means, including deception.
Emotional Stability - is concerned with mood control.
Self-Assurance - is essentially concerned with having a positive view of oneself.

In addition, PASAT 2000 has three further scales designed to detect attempts to present false impressions:

Attentive Distortion - attention to the social cues given by others as a guide to one's own behavior.

Adaptive Distortion - adapting one's own behavior to match or compliment that of others.

Social Distortion - this scale is composed of items which are inclined to be distorted when a person is giving inaccurate responses. This may include not only the intention to give a false impression, but also the possibility that the respondent actually believes this is how they would behave (self-delusion) and, overall, is about them trying to look good.

More and more jobs, which historically would not have been classified as sales roles, now involve an element of sales. PASAT 2000 can be used to select staff in all such areas, which, whilst not exclusively "sales", have or will have, a significant sales perspective. PASAT 2000 can also be used in training and development, either as a diagnostic tool or as an evaluation method, as the behaviors tested are directly related to sales environments.