Hiring is a real challenge for most founders and sales leaders, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

I’ve hired over 100 salespeople in my career, and I’ve interviewed at least 1,000.

The thing is, hiring is really hard. 

That’s true for everyone.

The success rates for B2B sales hires are not good: 25% sales rep attrition rate within the first 12 months. 50% of new hires fail to hit their revenue targets within the first year.

Rep turnover is a killer, it’s so expensive to replace a sales rep.

Bad sales hires can cost millions.

But you still have to build your team. You have to hire the right reps, the ones that will ramp quickly and be a positive addition to team culture. 

So how do you do it?

Here’s the simple process that we used to scale our revenue team to 50 reps and $25MM ARR:

Start with a Great Job Description

If you aren’t scaring off candidates with your job description, it’s too bland.

Getting the best sales talent starts with knowing what you are hiring for. Write it down, put it in the job description.

Companies that write bland job descriptions that speak to no-one. They fail to attract interesting talent because the job description is uninspiring.

Don’t do the boring thing. Instead, be inspiring.

This is possibly the first interaction your candidate has with the company and the role.

You want a job description that screams “THIS IS AN AMAZING OPPORTUNITY AND YOU SHOULD COME WORK WITH US!”.

It should be obvious to the candidate that this job is the right job for them.

Don’t let ChatGPT write your job description. YOU need to write it.

Let your personality come through in the job description. 

Talk about your expectations and your team culture.

Be brutally honest about the work that needs to be done.

This kind of direct approach to hiring turns most people off. 

But the best candidates will lean in. Those are the ones you want to hire.

Build your Ideal Candidate Profile

Every company’s culture is unique. The personality traits that lead to success on my sales team are different from what leads to success on your team.

But they aren’t that different. 

If you don’t have your hiring profile written down, you can steal my template to get started.

I’ve written before about what makes a good hire in sales. 

When evaluating hires, I like to look across two dimensions:‍

1. Sales experience‍

Look for candidates who have experience selling a product with a similar sales cycle and similar price-point. Pay close attention to the sales process that the sales rep used in their previous successful roles.

Sales is a muscle like most other skills and sales reps have muscle memory. An enterprise sales rep is not going to be successful selling a transactional, SMB product.

Similarly, a rep who has been very successful with inbound leads is going to struggle with an outbound sales motion. You want candidates who have tons of experience with a similar selling motion to yours.

2. Personality Characteristics

Each candidate should be scored and measured against a set of personality traits that align with success in the role. These are the five that I use to evaluate front-line sales reps:

1. Enthusiasm - A little energy and enthusiasm goes a long way in sales
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2. Grit - Can they withstand pain and suffering? Are they a victim or do they take ownership of their outcomes?
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3. Ambition - Be honest. None of these reps are going to retire at your company. You will have them for 2-5 years if it goes well. You want the candidates that are using your company as a platform to go achieve great things. Get them onboard and be grateful that you have them for however long you can keep them. You can’t want people to be more successful than they want it themselves.
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4. Curiosity - Do they read? Are they inquisitive? Do they pursue their interests outside of work? It’s hard to teach curiosity. The most curious reps will ramp faster because they naturally want to learn.
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5. Agency - Can they figure it out? Resourcefulness is a strong indicator that an individual will be successful in sales.

Caution:

If you are an early-stage company, watch out for candidates that come from big established sales organizations. Many of these reps operate with loads of support and resources that don’t exist at your company. You want to find the ones who have had experience at a company with a similar size and scale to your business.

Fill your Candidate Funnel

Now that you have a killer job description and an ideal profile for your candidates, it’s time to get some people interested in the job.

The folks applying through ZipRecruiter or Indeed are not likely to be the best pool of candidates for your next sales hire.

The best candidates come from your network, so start there.

There’s no real “hack” here. You just need to promote the hell out of your open position:

• Promote on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or wherever your network hangs out.
• Tell your friends and family
• Ask your team to reach out to their friends and family
• Go on LinkedIN and reach out to 10 candidates a day, asking if they are open to a conversation

You have to hustle to build your candidate funnel, so get out there and promote it.

Fool-Proof Interview Process

This is the exact interview process that we used for every front-line sales position. 

Each step is designed to weed out candidates who are not the right fit.

Candidates should self-select out of the process at each stage.
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1. Screening the Candidate - 20 min phone call
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   1. Align on on-target-earnings expectations
   2. Confirm background, make sure they are who they say they are. Their experience should match their LinkedIN profile.
   3. Communicate the expectations for the interview process.
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2. Focus Interview - 45 min zoom or in-person
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   1. Conducted by a hiring manager, this interview is focused on sales experience (see above)
   2. Ask specific questions about the candidate’s sales process, stages of their sales process, how they overcome objections, describe the biggest deal that they closed, etc.
   3. Listen for red flags related to lack of process, poor performance, inconsistent application of the sales playbook
   4. Score rep 1-5 on the following characteristics: Enthusiasm, Grit, Ambition, Curiosity, Agency
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3. Culture Interview - 45 min zoom or in-person
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   1. Conducted by a separate hiring manager, this interview is focused on alignment with team values and culture fit
   2. Ask specific questions about the candidate’s contribution to team culture, career plan, what skills they are looking to build in their next role, etc.
   3. Listen for any red-flags related to lack of motivation, lack of discipline, conflict with manager or peers
   4. Score rep 1-5 on the following characteristics: Enthusiasm, Grit, Ambition, Curiosity, Agency
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4. Mock Demo - 45 min
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   1. Provide candidate with mock demo 1-pager and mock demo sales deck prior to the call
   2. Contents of 1-pagersome text
      1. Overview of the “customer” that the candidate will be pitching. Company background, size, etc. This should perfectly match your ICP
      2. Current status quo of an ICP and  the challenges facing their business
      3. Desired outcomes for the ICP
      4. The exact ways that your company’s product addresses challenges and delivers the desired outcome
      5. Overview of pricing and economics
      6. Key questions to ask during the interview
      7. Coaching on how to approach the sale, position the product. Remind the candidate to be brief, the demo should only take 30 min
   3. Sales deck should be slimmed down to as few slides as possible, include the following:some text
      1. Problem statement
      2. Desired outcome for ICP
      3. Sample customer story
      4. Overview of platform value
      5. Pricing slide
   4. Provide feedback during the demo and ask the candidate to re-do part of the demo. See if they are adaptable and can take the coaching.
   5. Disqualify if the rep hasn’t done their homework and read the materials provided. If they show up to an interview and wing it, that’s how they are going to act when they are on your team
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5. Executive Interview - 30 min zoom or in-person
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   1. Final interview with the founder to executive sales leader
   2. This is where we confirm the candidate. Do they want the job? Are they going to accept it if you give them an offer? Do they want the job?

That’s the process. It’s time-consuming, but it gives you enough time with the candidate to determine if they can be successful on your sales team.

To help you with your interview process, here’s a bank of some of my favorite interview questions:

Question Bank

• What are your career goals?
• What are you really good at professionally?
• What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?
• Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them? 
• What were you hired to do? 
• What accomplishments are you most proud of? 
• What were some low points during that job? 
• Who were the people you worked with? Specifically: What was your boss's name, and how do you spell that? What was it like working with him/her? What will he/she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
• Why did you leave that job? 
• What are your biggest accomplishments in this area during your career?
• What are your insights into your biggest mistakes and lessons learned in this area? 
• What was the last book you read and why? What did you learn?
• What was the last piece of software that you bought and why?

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