The Sales Leader’s 5 Step Guide to Better Sales Hiring

Studies have found that the cost of a badsales hire is four to seven times the annual salary of the position. Ouch!

You can’t afford this. Nobody can. Yet, timeand time again, companies all over the world, large and small, hire the wrongpeople for their sales organizations.

How do we know this? Because of industryresearch from companies like CSO Insights that consistently find that only halfof all sales professionals achieve quota each year in B2B sales. There are alot of factors that go into determining whether a sales rep will hit quota.

And, typically, they all start with the persontasked with recruiting and hiring sales reps.

The typical sales leader usually has theirlist of personal qualities a candidate needs to have boiled down to just a fewmythical stereotypes: Hunter, Closer,Extrovert, & Aggressive

That’s it. Those are, by and large, thequalities that too many sales managers will look for in a candidate. Thequestion is, are these qualities that will help your customers make thepurchase decisions to buy from you? Of course they’re not.

A much better set of qualities that enable asalesperson to help their prospects make better purchase decisions are: Curiosity, Empathy, Problem-solving skills,& Responsiveness.

The question is: how do hire people thatembody those necessary characteristics?

In baseball, a coach will often tell hisplayers to never swing at the first pitch. The idea is that you can learnsomething about the tendencies and capabilities of the pitcher if you justwatch the first pitch come across the plate.

The same can be said for hiring salespeople.Don’t swing at the first pitch. Don’t hire the first person you interview. Nomatter how much you like them.

Too often, a CEO or Sales Manager will “swingat the first pitch” by defaulting to one of two failure modes.

The “Love at First Sight” failure mode. Thisis where the hiring sales leader finds the process of hiring a sales person sounpleasant and taxing that they will hire the first warm body who walks throughthe door that can string together two complete sentences. (I’m kidding. Sortof.)

The “Style over Substance” failure mode. Thisis where the hiring manager is swayed by first impressions of the candidatesthat are attractive, well-dressed and have a pleasant personal demeanor. Theseare the slick sales professionals who make the hiring managers feel good aboutthemselves. (To their later eternal regret.)

Hiring the right person for the job takes timeand a commitment to a process that will help protect you from making some ofthe obvious, and avoidable, mistakes. There are NO shortcuts.

How can you help yourself to become better athiring the ideal sales candidate? Here are 5 easy steps you can implementimmediately.

1. Write an accurate, honest and detailed Hiring ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile.)

The temptation for many hiring managers is towrite an overly broad high-level job description. They do this in an efforthedge their risks, figuring that a general job description will entice a higherlevel of talent, or attract a broader pool of applicants. 

It’s a bit ironic that this occurs sofrequently, because as a sales manager you’re probably coaching your newbusiness sales reps to only call on potential prospects that fit a tightlydefined ideal customer profile (ICP.) Otherwise you end up with a pipeline of “prospects” that aren’t a fitfor your product or service and are taking valuable sales time away fromprospects that will buy from you.

You should do the same thing with your hiring.Your chances of hiring success will increase the more narrowly focused you areon the pool of candidates that match your Ideal Candidate Profile.

Your Hiring ICP should have two parts: a jobdescription and a detailed definition of responsibilities. In fact, think ofthe Hiring ICP like a sales proposal that you would write for a prospect. TheJob Description is the Executive Summary. The Definition of Responsibilities islike the detailed Statement of Work that provides a detailed specification ofthe daily responsibilities, expectations and objectives for the position youare trying to fill.

You want to hire candidates with relevant andapplicable expertise, industry knowledge, and successful sales experience. Toattract and hire those candidates you need to have your Hiring ICP in placebefore you begin recruiting for the role.

2. Perform in-depth evaluations of multiple qualified candidates

The reason why you don’t want to swing at thefirst pitch is that you are waiting for the pitcher to throw the ball acrossthe fat part of the plate so you can hit it out of the park. Same with hiring.

You must evaluate more than one qualifiedcandidate for every job opening. No matter how much you like the first personyou interview you have to conduct assessments, in-depth interviews andreference checks of at least two other candidates before you make a hiringdecision.

Third party hiring assessments are great screening tools for candidates. There are many companies that offer these tools. Investigate which assessment tool will help you screen candidates for the specific qualities that you defined in your Hiring ICP.

Once you identify the tool that works best for you, use it on every candidate and track how the candidates you hired using the assessment are performing on the job. This will help you correlate assessment results to sales results in order to improve your hiring in the future.

Use fact-based questioning during interviews to verify the claims on each resume. Instead of asking opinion based questions, ask direct questions that require the candidate to substantiate every factual claim on their resume.

For instance, if they said that they achieved 120% of their quota last year, ask them to break that down for you. What were the deals that they closed, who were the customers, what product and service did they sell, how many people were on the account team for that deal, what was the dollar size of the deals, and who had what responsibilities?

In other words, you want to be able to do the math for yourself to see if it all adds up. If a candidate has lied or stretched the truth, you disqualify them. It’s that simple.

References should be a source of importantdata that are factored into the hiring decision. However, here’s a key point,reference checks are not meant to be a validation of a decision you’ve alreadymade. Too often, hiring managers will interview candidates, decide who theywant to hire, and then check that one person’s references. This is calledbackwards hiring.

You have to conduct reference checks BEFOREyou make the hiring decision. Before you fall in love with a particularcandidate. Yes, I know that your hiring decision is contingent on a successfulreference check. However, hiring managers are all too willing to dismiss badinput from reference checks if they are advocating for a particular candidate.

Hiring is a risky business in the best ofcircumstances. But sales is one of the few professions where past performancecan be an objective and transparent measure of a candidate's ability and futurecapabilities. Take advantage of this built-in advantage and stop hiringbackwards.

Do your reference checks first, and make your decision second.

3. Have your entire management team interview candidates.

Sales interacts with nearly every departmentin an organization, and it must work closely with marketing, customer successand others. Therefore, it’s important for people in those departments to beexposed to and express their opinions about the people you’re hiring. They mayunderstand better than you if the person has the right mindset, aptitude andskills to collaborate with other departments to achieve a common goal.

You also want to take advantage of the “wisdomof crowds” factor. Research shows that more inputs from multiple sources canhelp people make better decisions. Gathering multiple diverse perspectives onan individual candidate you want to hire will help you to better evaluate theirfit for your sales team.

If you’re reluctant to have your peers orsupervisor meet your favorite candidate, you have a problem. (Just like thattime you hesitated to take your tattooed boyfriend or girlfriend home to meetMom.) Selling is a team sport, and hiring should be a team sport as well. Salestouches every part of your organization, and everyone that works with salesshould have input into the hiring of a salesperson.

4. Test skills and verify all résumé information.

As mentioned earlier, hiring the wrong salesperson is very costly. Therefore, it’s essential that you take every steppossible to reduce the risk of making a bad hire. It’s important to separate“reduce the risk” from “eliminate the risk.” It’s not possible to eliminate the risk. After all, we’re dealing withcomplex, unpredictable human beings, not machines.

First, if there are specific skills orcapabilities defined in your Hiring ICP then you must test the candidates tounderstand to what degree they possess them. For instance, if the job requirestechnical knowledge, give them a short technical test. If they must makefrequent customer presentations, then make them give you a presentation as partof the interview.

Second, you need salespeople who are open toreceiving and acting upon coaching.  Besure to set up a coaching opportunity as part of the interview process. Forinstance, have the candidate give a short presentation to you. Provide themcoaching about the presentation they made and offer suggestions about how theycould improve it. Then ask them to give you the presentation again and see ifthey incorporated any of the coaching tips into it.

Testing and verifying skills will reduce theprobability of making a wrong hire. It will save you the cost of interviewinganother set of candidates, and can potentially save you the cost of losingcustomers. Testing your candidates’ knowledge and skills is absolutelyessential.

5. Recruit Internally

The best place to recruit new salespeople isinside your own company.

Who knows your products and processes better than the people already working there? If your company is in a technical field, recruit technically capable salespeople from within your engineering and development departments.

Look for those engineers that have exhibited a special knack for customer support, or that one engineer that every salesperson wants to use as a technical resource on their sales calls. Your future best salespeople already work for you; they just may not be salespeople.

Hiring salespeople doesn’t have to be anecessary evil. It should be a productive process to build a team that willbuild your company’s top and bottom lines, if you go about it the right way. Bytaking a few extra steps and hiring the right people, the right way, you cantake your sales team from average to amazing.