Avoid Hiring Fails
Avoid the $1M mistake of a bad sales hire
An enterprise sales rep is a $1M hire. If they are good, in 2-3 years they will add $1M of incremental revenue by exceeding quota, gaining market share, and expanding the business. But if they are bad, and you don’t correct the mistake in their first 6 months, they will cost the business $1M in base salary plus missed quota and churning out existing customers.
In a previous post I called out two mistakes that can be avoided with clear filtering criteria when building a pool of candidates. In this post, we will call out distinctions in criteria during the interview process.
In my experience, there are 3 categories of hiring criteria:
Knowledge - deep understanding of the market, industry, product, and competitors is a key indicator of success for top sellers.
Skills - enterprise selling requires a broad set of complex behaviors - managing many stakeholders, developing value propositions, finding budget, implementing competitive strategies, negotiating with many parties. These are all key components of success and capabilities expected of experienced hires.
Traits - the innate talents and personal characteristics that drive productivity, create personality, and support interpersonal relationships. These are often viewed as self-evident in interactions during the hiring process, and may be assumed for senior hires.
Other than for entry-level positions, hiring processes typically focus on Knowledge and Skills. The higher salary given to an experienced rep is based on the expectation that they will bring more knowledge and better skills, so most interviews will focus on gauging the candidate’s level in those key areas identified for the specific role.
However, I would argue that most reps fail — whether in 6 months or 21 — due to misalignment in their core traits.
A few examples:
No Grit - just not willing to do the work and persevere through adversity.
Lack of Resourcefulness - unable to be tenacious, creative, and scrappy.
Struggle with ambiguity - must have everything spelled out precisely, can’t handle vagueness in goals, direction, product definition, target buyers, and territories.
Not persuasive - cannot convince people to do things — Yes! There are many people in selling roles - careers - that are not persuasive.
No competitive mindset - ultimately ok with losing. It does not eat at them or keep them up at night when they lose a deal.
Lack of Growth Mindset (a strong desire to learn - all the time, from anyone) and limited Coachability
Limited drive - will not make themselves and others do whatever is required for success.
Not every selling role requires these. There may even be a few selling jobs that don’t require any of them. But in today’s hyper-competitive world, having the right core traits will make or break sales success.
By identifying the short list of traits (max 5) that are critical to your success, and rigorously interviewing for them, you will significantly increase your hiring success rate.
A few considerations:
Prioritize traits over skills & knowledge. It is easy to spend 100% of the interview time on the best-known topics.
Traits are harder to screen. Interviewers must get comfortable asking questions like:
“Tell me about the hardest you have ever worked, and why.”
“What do you do after you lose a deal?”
“What drives you more - joy of winning or fear of losing?”
“How do you personally measure success?”
“What have you learned recently that you didn’t know you needed to learn?”
“At you near the end of the workday, how do you know you can stop working?”
“What is the worst product you’ve ever sold? How do you sell it to someone?”
Experienced job candidates can fake it. Get as much data as possible by having every interviewer ask 3-4 questions around the critical traits, and as a group compare responses and agree on an overall rating.
Use a psychometric assessment - DISc, Caliper, Predictive Index, etc.
Continue assessing traits through the onboarding process. It is easy to get distracted in the flurry of cramming in company and product knowledge, and miss warning signals re: underlying traits.
You must be courageous. Do not hire candidates who are missing any aspect of your top traits, no matter how many other boxes they tick, or how much they wow you with their experience, knowledge, and skill. They can be trained, and are worth compromising on as the right people will learn and grow. Instead, focus on finding people with the right traits. Even though it makes the hiring process more difficult, it is not worth compromising on.
