Hiring B2B Sales People

Hiring Sales people to succeed is hard. Unless you are hiring superstars from a direct competitor (and sometimes even then), there is a higher element of risk than in other areas of your business. You can hire a finance professional, an HR professional or a skilled trades person and know the vast majority of their skills will transfer. You can design simple tests before hiring that work too.

But Sales? For whatever reason (and some of that is on us as sales people, not us as hiring managers), it seems to be a lot murkier. A high performing SaaS CRM salesperson doesn’t crack the new SaaS ERP role they were hired for. That top-selling rep from your key vendor that you hired, moves back to the old job after 6 months of struggling with your processes and targets. We have all been there, and we know the impact to the business.

There are some fundamentals that have to be in place for success before we talk about the soft skills and processes of course. An understanding of what your organisation likes in successful employees (from all areas, it’s the culture, people), a clear definition of the role and what success looks like in that role, a well-defined onboarding procedure, as examples. If these aren’t in place, you are increasing the risk of making the right hire exponentially.

Assuming you have all these, things can still go wrong (even the late great Jack Welch allegedly said he only hired successfully eight out of ten times). So, what can we do to help mitigate the risks? Here are some things we at SOAR have implemented before in Sales hiring;

1.      Testing during hiring phase. Look for communications skills, ability to think outside the box and using previous experience to navigate a sales process.
2.      Look for inherent traits. Long term success in B2B sales requires intellectual curiosity, resilience and empathy. This is especially important when hiring for entry level jobs.
3.      Interview for culture. Another late great, Tony Hsieh, made sure a separate interview was conducted for culture fit, and no matter the result of the skills/experience interview, no-one was hired having failed the culture fit interview. We have a great story of Tony Hsieh out late on a vendor trip to back that up!
4.      Stop looking for purple squirrels! The likelihood that you find the absolute perfect candidate, in your budget and timeline, is extremely low. A good and well-suited B performer will do far more for you than that A-game candidate you still haven’t found.

We get it. Hiring Sales people seems tougher, especially as most of them are good communicators and therefore perform well in interview scenarios. And you’ll never get it right every time. But there are systems and programs you can put in place to improve your lot!