Making the decision to grow the sales team for our startup, UrbanBound, was an easy one. The tough part was finding the right people that fit our company culture and had thepassion to sell a technology that is new to the industry. As a B2B company (SaaS), we knew from the beginning that we would need a strong sales force to share our software, drive revenue and grow our company. Since our sales cycle is a lengthy process - many times lasting more than 18 months - we knew we needed to grow a team that would cultivate and nurture relationships with potential clients.
From the beginning, we were aiming to implement a sales process that addressed the prospects pain points by asking the right questions. As we are growing, we have an ongoing need for business development managers, account executives and account managers - all of these individuals need to work closely together for us to succeed. As a Co-Founder of the company and VP of Sales, it is important to me that I stay involved with my sales team, which is why I sit with them in the sales pit, prospect with them, and attend many of their in-person meetings.
One lesson I’ve learned in hiring great salespeople is not to let the candidate sell
[ibimage==41483==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]you. This is the number one reason why a sales position is the most difficult job function to fill: they’re good at selling themselves. Being that the main predictor of future success is past performance, I’ll always ask three questions:
What was your manager’s name at your last company?
How do you spell his or her name?
When I call and ask how they would rank your performance on a scale of 1-10, what are they going to say?
These questions are like truth serum. You can really read someone’s body language - if they start getting nervous, that’s a big red flag. You want someone who gives not only a strong answer, but gives context to their answer. If they say they ranked 2nd in the company, they need to follow that up with explaining how many people they were actually competing against. It’s critical to ask follow-up questions, because a little bit of digging can completely change the meaning of their answer.
Another lesson I’ve learned is making sure to look beyond on-target earnings (OTE). Too many hiring managers base a candidate’s offer around their OTE, and this is a big mistake, a salesperson will almost always overestimate as they tend to be optimists about their sales pipeline closing.
Instead, I like to ask someone to share their W2 with me. This serves as a scorecard because you can see the true commissionable activities they had. If they are not willing to share that, then that tells you what kind of successes they had (or didn’t have).
Something I have seen to be really valuable is allowing your prospect to come shadow someone at your company. Invite him or her to spend a half day in your sales pit. There is nothing worse than going through the whole interview process just to have a person walk into your office two weeks later explaining that “this just isn’t what I signed up for.” Give your candidate a taste of what it feels like to work at your company and what kind of behaviors it takes to be successful.
Also, use assessment tests, and use them as early on in the process as possible. I love to test for things that I cannot teach. Drive. Optimism. Skill. Ability. How someone scores on a test, beyond just academic, is one of the best tools you can use in hiring successful salespeople.
Lastly, it is extremely important to utilize role playing. Great salespeople need to be extraordinary at engaging you in conversation, and role playing allows you to see how quickly they can respond in a conversation. How do they handle rejection? Do they give good rebuttals? Are they asking the right questions? Can they dive deeper into conversations? Do they know how to find a pain-point? Do they drill into those pain-points to show that there is a solution to the problem?
While this usually makes people uncomfortable in an interview, I would rather have them be uncomfortable with me than live on the playing field with our clients. I also make it a point to interview people over different mediums. I’ll interview them in person, over the phone, and through email. So much of selling these days is done through more than just the phone, and too many companies do a poor job assessing each and every platform of communication.
Hiring salespeople isn’t easy, but they are critical for growth. You can have a great product or service but without a great salesforce no one will know about it as they are the ones propelling your business forward. They are the last piece to the well-oiled machine any company runs: The engineers build, the marketers promote, the customer success teams retain, the operations team plan, but someone needs to complete the loop and actually sell the product.
There are a lot of steps that need to be taken in order to find strong members for your sales team. But, once you find them, they are invaluable.
Want to join the team? We are hiring now!
