Conventional wisdom says you can’t go wrong hiring the sales veteran with the heftiest Rolodex and a record of gold-plated sales deals. But if you’re a small, growing company, measuring candidates by their contacts, years in the trenches or multimillion-dollar contracts is a ticket to failure. The well will soon run dry, and you may be stuck with an overpriced sales professional who doesn’t sell your company’s solutions consistently.
What to do instead? After suffering from many bad hires, my company has developed a highly successful process for selecting outbound sales team members.
As a first step, define your ideal salesperson. Look at your three most successful sales employees and identify their essential traits. You might have them brainstorm or list key qualities in each other. Or you could upend the process and analyze why some of your salespeople have fallen short. Then build a checklist to pinpoint the winners.
For us, the classic “sales personality” is table stakes, but we put particular emphasis on required attributes that are likely to include intellectual curiosity, diligence, confidence, previous relevant success, wittiness (can overcome objections on the fly) and articulate communication. But you might be surprised at what does and doesn’t predict effectiveness. For example, is mathematical aptitude necessary? Believe it or not, we’ve found it predicts success (presumably as a proxy for strong learning ability and analytical thinking). Can someone recently fired/down on their luck be a diamond in the rough? Our best salespeople have come from all walks of life, and three of the top four were respectively:
- Fired from their last job in pharmaceutical sales because their laptop was stolen
- Unemployed for two years and living as a ski bum
- Listed online poker as the only prior work experience
Once given an opportunity, all three worked harder than anyone else to prove they belonged here. At first it was coincidence; now we actively look for a “chip on their shoulder” quality.
Once you have your ideal candidate in mind, following these five steps will help you pick the right people to keep your sales pipeline growing:
Resume selection– Use your customized criteria to whittle as many as 1,000 resumes to the top four. For instance, a guy who closed rich deals for IBM may not work well in a dynamic environment requiring self-starters and self-learners. Look for any type of sales experience; it could be in retail selling or college fundraising.
Phone interview– Ask yourself: Is the candidate engaging and smart? What motivates the person? Is she hard working? What attracts her to your company, and what value would she add?
Test of technical and company knowledge– Have the candidate answer 10 questions about your company to determine such things as: Is the person serious about the opportunity and committed to go the distance? Has he used all resources to prepare, and can he effectively express his findings?
Group interview– Have three to five senior sales team members interview the candidate to reveal coachability, confidence and ability to think on one’s feet. Is she coachable; can she revise an elevator pitch on the fly based on feedback? Rely on multiple managers’ reactions to enhance hiring.
Job-fit test– Compare the candidate’s personality and thinking style with a profile of your company’s most successful salespeople. For benchmarking, administer a test to your top sales performers to identify shared traits; then use it to test prospective hires.
As this process indicates, hiring an effective sales team requires a focused approach tailored to your company. It takes much more than spotting resume glitter or asking standard interview questions. However, the investment will pay off by helping you identify and attract the best people to generate repeatable, sustainable revenue for your organization.
Henry Schuck is co-founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg, the leading sales and marketing intelligence solution used by the top IT vendors, staffing companies and consultants targeting IT departments of Fortune-ranked, mid-market and SMB companies in North America and the European Union.
