- When it comes to hiring sales people
there are five things you need to put in place.
First, a well-defined, customer-centric sales process.
There's no such thing as innate sales skills.
When you're looking for new sales people
don't look for talent.
Look for people who can execute your sales process.
- The real thing is sales is a process.
Executing that process
is what a very successful salesperson does.
Believe it or not, you look for creativity in salespeople,
but you also look for people that are process oriented.
We all look for that diamond-in-the-rough salesperson,
the guy that's just naturally a salesperson.
But, really, what happens is I think
you have to find people that are motivated,
they wanna succeed, they wanna build their career,
they're intelligent, that they grasp what it is
that you're selling, or your organization is selling.
And I think that they also have to be
someone that's moldable a bit,
that you can actually teach them,
this is our process.
Sales is nothing but a process.
- Once you've defined your sales process,
the next thing you need to do
before you can hire salespeople
is get a deep understanding of your target persona.
Sales is very different from one industry to the next,
and from one kind of buyer to the next.
Hire salespeople who are going to succeed
when interacting with your target persona.
- As far as recruiting and hiring salespeople is concerned,
you really have to have some way of gauging
what type of, first of all, sale that you're doing
and whether that person matches up to it.
It's a fallacy that a good salesperson can sell everything.
That's just not the way life works.
It's not the way people work.
What you come to understand is that some people
are geared toward having business level conversations
in the C-suite.
Others are geared towards having
more of a process-level type of conversation
where, instead of CXOs,
it's more of, maybe, a VP or Director.
And there are others
that really are just very transactional.
And you can gauge when you're speaking with them
what type of seller that they're going to be.
If they use the pronoun, for example, I,
as in I have, or we, as in my company,
but mainly I have this.
That's all they're talking about
is the widgets that they sell,
then you have a very transactional type of seller.
If the pronoun that they use is more along lines of you,
as in you, Mr. Customer, what is it that you need,
and they're more of a consultative diagnostic
type of conversation,
that's gonna be something that's more in tune
with like a process type of seller.
'Kay?
Or we can go to market style.
It's gonna be a level two type of seller.
A level three type of seller is gonna be somebody
that can handle a conversation in a C-suite.
Topics revolve around much more strategic things,
such as cashflow and asset utilization, growth,
market share, that type of thing.
And so depending upon the level
that the person is comfortable actually having
that type of conversation,
it's kinda where we have to start plugging them in.
But one of the problems that we have in sales today
is that so many of them still work by territory
rather than something trying to match up
the seller with the buyer,
as to how much the buyer wishes to be interacted with.
And so consequently you'll have these sellers
that are put into these awful positions
where they expect them to go into the C-suite,
they arm them with a couple of conversational bits
just to get them past the gatekeepers,
and then once they start talking
about five minutes into the conversation
after they've exhausted the tricks that they actually have,
they start talking about the widgets.
And that's when the CXOs say, ah, I see,
you've lifted your veil now.
Now what you are is you're a technologist.
Let me walk you out of my office
and down to this person's office.
And have a nice day.
You can have the conversation from there,
never to get back into the C-suite again,
because you've labeled yourself as a technologist.
You really have to understand what your strategy is,
as far as how you intend to sell.
You have to understand how it is
that your customers wish you to interact with them,
'cause they don't all want to operate at the C-suite level
of conversation there or in process, however.
And then you have to find the right people
that can actually carry on the type of conversation
that you wish to have.
- Once you've defined your process and target persona
you need to create a profile of the kind of salesperson
who will succeed with that process and persona.
There are lots of fancy tests and evaluations
you can pay a lot of money to use for this,
but the simplest way to figure out
what a successful salesperson looks like
is to look at your current sales team
and figure out what makes them succeed of fail.
- There is no best practice, ideal sales hire
for all of business.
It is personalized to your context,
which partially we've defined with our buyer journey
and who you're selling to, but it's much broader than that.
What stage is your category?
Is this a new product or is it a product
that's been around for 50 years?
How much competition is there?
How complicated your product?
Are you selling $10 million jets?
Or $50 widgets?
There's what stage is your venture at.
Are you a new company or have you been around for 30 years?
These are all important contextual elements
that are going to define the ideal decisions
around demand gen and around your sales hires.
But there is a process to uncover these.
On the sales-hiring front,
one of the things that we underappreciate with sales hiring,
is the function of sales, success or failure,
is highly quantifiable.
Right?
It's really difficult to walk into a room of engineers
and be like, that right there,
that's my best engineer by 7%.
You just can't do it!
I can get pretty close with a room full of salespeople.
That person right there is my best salesperson by 7%.
But we don't take advantage of it in selling.
Right?
The process to do this is to quantify
the characteristics you're observing,
the behaviors, the skills you're observing
during the interview process, for your context,
giving your market maturity, giving your product complexity,
giving your buyer what is gonna be important characteristics
for the people you hire.
Is it that they have lots of experience?
Is it that they have experience selling
to this particular buyer?
Is it that they're really
run a consultative selling process?
Is they're high work ethic?
Is it they're extraordinarily convincing?
Is it that they're super smart?
Like what is it that's gonna make them really successful
in your environment?
Figure out what those attributes are,
define what a score of a one, a three, a five, a seven,
a ten would sound like,
and establish a weight of importance.
And start scoring your people,
even if you're gonna hire two sales reps next year.
You've gotta go through this process to get ready for scale.
And now we've established another
test, learn, iterate, feedback loop.
That, even if I hire three salespeople this year,
I guarantee you all three of them
will not perform the same way.
One or two, hopefully, will crush it.
And one or two, probably, will be mediocre or less.
And we'll be in a position now to say,
okay, why did that happen?
Why is Julie crushing it?
And why is Bob not doing so good?
What is it about them?
Were we assessing on that?
Did we assess on that during the interview process?
How did we miss it?
And, if so, how do we need to iterate the interview process?
So, we have to set up that feedback loop.
- [Instructor] Once you identify the things
that make a salesperson successful in your organization
you need to develop a robust standardized interview process
that will help you determine
whether someone fits that profile.
- As I like to say, the onboarding process actually starts
with the very first interview.
So, in hiring salespeople you wanna make sure
that you have identified, hey, you can't work here
unless you have these baseline competencies,
and then you have a process in your hiring approach
that assesses for those competencies.
- When it comes to assessing a candidate's competency
you have a few different options.
- So there's a personality assessment,
there's a behavioral assessment,
and then there's a skills assessment.
The personality assessment helps you understand
what that individual's makeup is,
the things that motivate them individually.
A behavioral assessment will let you know
how a person would work inside of an organization
or in collaboration with a team.
It kinda gives you a sense of a culture,
a flavor, if you're trying to build out a diverse team
in that respect.
A skills assessment tells you whether or not somebody
is coachable, trainable, and where they are today
as a snapshot on the spectrum of skills necessary
to perform in their function.
I think the most effective one for sales teams
is doing a skills assessment.
Unfortunately, most people either do a behavioral
or a personality assessment and they get somebody on board,
and they don't have any kind of tools by which to manage,
or to effectively coach, or to develop
a professional development program for that individual.
And so they throw them into the queue in a homogeneous way
and hope that they'll kinda get it.
They get the pat on the back.
- To prevent this from happening
you need to design your interview
to focus on what matters most.
- So, being able to create an experiential interview.
That doesn't mean sitting them down
and making them do cold calls,
but ask about things that would be
an indicator as to whether or not
someone would have call reluctance.
Ask about things that they've done in their past
that may align to whether or not
they've been metrics driven.
Don't forget that if you're hiring STRs and salespeople,
it's a research function.
It's not just a function of having conversations
with people on the phone,
but this person has to be diligent in setting aside time
to source, to evaluate, to even do admin tasks.
I know that's not what we hire salespeople to do,
but if you're gonna scale an organization,
you've gotta make sure that you're keeping good data.
- And if you're gonna hire somebody
and they're gonna be doing research five hours a week,
and they're gonna do admin tasks four hours a week,
and the job description, and the interview process
just focuses on, oh you're gonna close deals
and you're gonna be a hero,
there's a disconnect there.
And so, I think it's just about being honest.
What are you actually gonna do
when you show up for work day one?
- That's an important point.
Different sales roles require different skill sets,
and therefore, different interview techniques.
So you have to nail down a clear definition of the role
you're trying to fill.
- So the first thing that I always recommend
is step back and take a look at the roles
in your organization.
Understand what those roles entail,
especially the competencies, but if you can,
and if you have the ability to work with a psychometric firm
that does reliable, validated, psychometric assessments,
you can get a sort of a personality and competency profile
of what your top producers look like
compared to those who aren't top producers,
and start to look for differences and gaps
between those two profiles.
And so if you do that, you can start to use assessments,
or behavioral interviewing,
or competency modeling assessments
to help you select people that are the right fit
for the right role in your organization.
- Once you know the skill you're looking for,
you can start to define the interview experience
that will best identify those skills.
Get creative with the interview process.
Your interview shouldn't be just a series of questions
you fire at the candidate.
In fact, the typical job interview only predicts 14%
of a candidate's post-hire success.
Instead, find ways to evaluate the skills
you're interested in.
For example, coachability is an important trait
in any sales rep,
so try coaching candidates during the interview.
Instead of asking someone how coachable they are,
let them show you.
Have them do a role-play and then give them feedback.
Pay attention to how they respond.
Are they happy to receive feedback?
Or does it make them bristle?
After you give them feedback
have them do the role-play again,
and see if they implement the feedback you gave them.
Here's another example of a creative interview idea.
When your reps get on sales calls
you want them to be able to understand
a prospect's challenges
and consult them toward the right solution,
so treat the interview like a consultation.
Present them with a real problem
your team is currently facing
and ask them for advice on how to fix it.
This will give you a ton of information
about how good they are at asking questions
and uncovering solutions.
And it might give you some good ideas
for how to fix the problem.
That's much better than asking them something ridiculous
like how many golf balls
would fit inside a commercial airplane?
There are so many ways to make an interview
more than just a series of questions.
If you want more ideas HubSpot's Sales Blog
has a whole bunch of posts on interviewing and hiring
to help you get started,
which we've linked to in the additional resources section.
But, the best interview questions will be the ones
that are unique to your own team and process.
One word of caution here.
While it is important to get creative
with your interview process,
it's also important to standardize your interview process.
You need to ask the exact same question to every candidate.
Otherwise, you won't have a solid point of comparison.
You also need to have a standard grading rubric
for the answers to those questions.
Standardizing your questions and the way you assess answers
is a good practice in any hiring situation,
but it's especially important in sales.
- You need to have a hiring methodology
that emulates what someone is going to be doing in the wild
once they're hired.
It doesn't make sense
to have someone sit across a murder board of five people
who are asking questions
that have nothing to do with their role,
and they're simply satisfied
with the answers that they're getting.
I mean, if a person is a good (laughing) salesperson
they're probably gonna give you some good answers.
That doesn't necessarily mean that that's gonna show up
when they actually get to the workforce.
- Think of it this way.
If someone can trick you into hiring them,
they will probably deceive your customers too.
That might give you a short term bump in sales,
but it'll lead to lost trust and broken relationships,
and ultimately, that'll mean less sales for your company
in the long run.
By standardizing your interview process,
you can filter out the people
who don't have your company's best interests at heart.
One important thing to keep in mind here
is that some job candidates might be a good fit
for your company but not a good fit for your sales team.
In some cases, the candidates you get for sales roles
would do much better somewhere else in the company.
- You know, you may interview somebody
that, on the surface, seems to be the perfect person.
You know, he's just very outgoing, sales-type of person.
You know, this is the one you want on your team.
But, in doing that analysis, you may find out
that they are uncomfortable in that role.
The way they're coming across
is what they expect you like in that sorta thing.
They may be much more comfortable in a support role
or much more comfortable in a different administrative role
or something like that.
So, the identifying talent.
So, doing the assessment, doing the one-on-one interviews.
The other thing that we've always found with our teams
is to go ahead and have multiple people interview,
so not just the hiring manager
but also have the support folks: the sales support,
the sales team,
other members of the management team perhaps.
And one of the key ones is, I think,
is have that person interview
with someone that's been hired in the last six months
in your organization.
They will have much more of a one on one
of what's the organization really like,
what are you really looking for?
And if the person kind of makes it past
the first couple of rounds,
we'll actually have them go out on sales calls with our team
and actually go out and sit down with a client,
see how they act in that environment
and see if they enjoy that environment,
what that looks like.
- You don't want to just reject these candidates
and forget about them.
They might turn out to be valuable assets
in other parts of your company.
The last step is to create a recruiting strategy.
As you think about the different roles on your sales team,
keep in mind that they'll change as your company grows.
- When I joined almost three years ago,
we were about 35 people as a company.
So, I came in, just had a couple people on the team.
We've scaled that up, so, as a company,
we're over 300 people overall.
Between sales and customer success
and other other parts of the funnel,
we've got 70 to 80 people on that team right now.
And the key is, like early on was,
you kinda hire people that can do a lot of different things.
And then, as you find particular pockets,
you sorta specialize and scale.
So, we did that.
So, as we got more traction on the enterprise layer,
we segmented out the S&B once we saw
that was more transactional,
and we could cater to that in a specific way.
Once we got post-sale, we said,
all right, now it's time to bring in customer success
once we got to a certain volume.
We specialized inbound versus outbound
from a top-of-the-funnel perspective,
and we're continuing to stratify,
so as we move up funnel to bigger enterprise relationships,
we're moving up to the enterprise
and then the strategic layer
which is more of your traditional elephant hunters.
- Even if you company isn't in its early stages,
the needs of a sales organization change over time.
You need to constantly look ahead
so you aren't forced into a hiring crisis.
- The one thing I've gotten better at
over the last couple of years is thinking about
what's this company gonna look in six months
and how do I prepare now?
Because we know we could lose people,
we need to hire people,
and it takes time to train people and recruit people.
And so trying to really think
what do we need three or six months from now
instead of what do we need right now
is one way that I've been able to keep ahead of that.
- In order for that to work you need to not only plan ahead
but also start recruiting
before you're even looking to hire.
- It's like you've gotta go out there and start to nurture
and find sales talent way before you need it.
And that best sales talent
probably is already happy where they are
so you have to nurture them
and you have to use that kind of,
almost like a lead generation approach to talent.
It's hitting somebody who may not be ready to make a move.
It's identifying, either through tools like LinkedIn
and other social tools,
but it's finding and identifying salespeople
that you may wanna have join your organization
and you start to connect with them proactively.
What you're looking for is, you know, salespeople,
even great salespeople say, hey, I need to make a move,
because they just cut my territory in half,
or they changed the comp plan.
I don't like the comp plan.
When those salespeople are ready to make a change,
you wanna make sure you're first on their list
as those organizations that they reach out to.
- When you start looking for potential hires on LinkedIn,
there are a couple of different strategies
you'll want to use.
Building relationships with established sales talent
is a long-term strategy.
For example, if you want to build a pipeline
of potential account executives,
you need to recognize that it might be a long time
before top performers at other companies
will be looking for a change.
You should still nurture those relationships,
but you can supplement that strategy
with a short-term strategy of nurturing relationships
with high-performing business development reps.
BDRs typically stay in their roles for 10 to 19 months.
Knowing this, identify top reps
who are approaching the 10-month mark in their current role.
You'll likely find high-quality candidates
who are looking for an opportunity
to take on a new challenge.
Nurturing those relationships will bring results faster
than nurturing relationships with established salespeople
who have already landed the dream job.
So if you want to hire an all-star sales team,
start by making sure your sales process and target persona
are well defined.
Then, figure out what roles you need to fill
in order to execute that process
and what skills and competencies someone needs to have
to be successful in those roles.
To do that you need to figure out
what predicts the success of your current team members.
And once you know all that,
you can design a recruiting strategy
and an interview process
that will attract and secure the best possible new editions
to your team.
Following these steps will build a pipeline of sales talent
that will help your company grow better.
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