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Three Common Sense Secrets to Hiring Outstanding Sales People

By Bryan Johanson, July 2, 2008

Over the years, we've helped many companies apply the principles of Performance-based Hiring^sm to find talented and productive sales people. When we first engage with these companies their conversations often begin with similar words… "Help me find sales people who are aggressive, multitaskers, closers who don't take ‘No' for an answer. It would be great if they came from our competitors and brought with them a few clients, contacts, or knowledge that will help them hit the ground running. And oh, by the way, I need them NOW." At this point in the conversation we have to intervene and help our clients think differently about the process of consistently hiring outstanding sales professionals. Below are three common sense secrets for doing just that:

Read more articles by this author.

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Secret #1: Don't hire a stereotype!
They don't exist! Not only that, but a careful evaluation of what you want your new sales hire to do may reveal that the "ideal" sales person in your mind might be exactly the wrong person for your job. The typical sales job description isn't a job description at all, it's a people description. It describes the attributes of a certain type of person, NOT what success looks like on the job.

Are all sales jobs the same? Absolutely not! I was interviewing a salesperson for a technical services company who had been selling IT solutions for over 15 years. I asked him about his quota success over the past five years. His quota was 10.5 million dollars, and he had achieved or exceeded this quota each year with his current company (his last year he was 130% of quota). He had only one customer, though – it was Wal-Mart. He had a team of eight people dedicated solely to the Wal-Mart account. He knew all the players, but his primary job was coordinating the resources of his company and of his client to bring the right people together, and he would quarterback the sales process. The average sales price of each solution was 5 million dollars, and he would close 2-3 contracts per year. By all measures he was a great sales person. However, the position we needed to fill was for a sales person to open a whole new territory. The territory consisted of a few medium-size clients and a large number of leads. Most of his job would entail heavy prospecting and business development work. On average he would have to close 20-25 accounts annually to meet his quota of 4.5 million dollars. Are you starting to see the disconnect here? It had been years since this person had done any prospecting. He was the quintessential farmer, not a hunter, and although he was a great sales person, he was not the right sales person for this job.

Here's a little exercise to help you better define what success looks like on your sales job. Whatever your personal biases are about sales people, take a look at your existing organization. Are all your top performers tall, or athletic (I once worked for someone who thought that all good sales people had to have some athletic ability or they couldn't sell), or extroverted, or whatever other descriptor you choose? If they aren't, then you've got to ask yourself the following question: If they don't share those traits in common that you really believe are essential for success, what do they do in the job that separates their performance from your average performers? Once you completely understand the answer to that question, you are then in a position to conduct a great interview to see if you've got a winner. When profiling a sales job, here are a few questions to ask:

What does success look like in this position?
What is the quota?
What is the average selling price of the products to be sold?
What percent of the job is farming and what percent is prospecting?
Who is the intended customer?
What level will my new sales person need to influence and sell to?
What is the average sales cycle?
What activities and metrics lead to sales success (number of calls per day, number of presentations per week)?
How would you measure the pipeline after 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months?
What support does our organization offer a new sales person?

Asking these types of questions allows you to create a performance profile that is specific to your job. Even different territories within the same company often require slightly different skill sets to be successful. It's one thing to open up a completely new territory; it's quite another to mine an already well established territory. Defining what success looks like is the first critical step to consistently hiring top performers.

Secret #2: Interview for performance and process
What's the best interview question to ask a professional sales person? How about, "What was your quota and what did you actually achieve? Walk me through your quota achievements for the past five years." This is a great starting point because it quickly gives you the scope of their achievements over a period of time in terms of their results. However, understanding what they did is not enough; you must also understand how they did it. Deep probing questions are the key to understanding what type of sales approach your candidate employs to drive success. Below are a few questions you might want to explore with a sales candidate:

Where did your leads come from?
Did you have to find your own leads? How did you find them?
How long was your typical sales cycle?
What type of interaction did you have with the client throughout the sales process?
Who did you meet with and how often?
What did you do to prepare for each meeting?
What were the typical obstacles to a sale and how did you address them?
What did you do to understand your competition?
How much of your quota was existing business and how much was new business?
What do you enjoy more – farming or hunting for new business? Why?
What did your support team look like?
How did you interact with the resources that supported you?
What was your biggest frustration?
Did you sell primarily over the phone or face to face?
Is your approach more transactional or more solution selling?

These types of probing questions allow you to understand the process of success, not just the results. Process matters and you have to decide if your candidate's approach to selling is compatible with your environment and culture.

Bringing a Book of Business
Now before we move on from specific interview questions, what about the expectation that a new sales person will bring a whole book of business with them? If this is in reality an expectation of the job, then you should test that premise during the interview. Get specific examples of where they successfully transferred business from one company to the next. Explore their approach. How does this person work? Was it systematic or just lucky? Have they successfully done it multiple times? If they have transitioned from one company to another without bringing over significant business, why not? What made the difference? Do they have any non-compete agreements? Are they loyal to their former staff? The key here is fact finding – there are a lot of issues that need to be explored. If moving business over is a key performance objective, you will need to probe and discover if they have successfully moved business before.

Secret #3: Don't be fooled by first impressions
This is the biggest mistake that sales managers and directors make. Of course we want sales people who make a good impression on our clients. However, let me ask you this: have you ever met someone who made a great first impression but couldn't sell? How about the opposite: have you ever met someone who at first pass wasn't that impressive, but once you saw them in action, you were very impressed with what they accomplished? We teach every sales manager we train to ignore that first impression for at least 30 minutes. Never, ever, ever make a hiring decision in the first 30 minutes of the interview! It simply can't be done effectively. This is true if you really like the person as well as if you dislike the person. The goal of the interview is to understand what the candidate has accomplished. Once you understand what they have done, you will be in a much better position to measure how your first impression of them will affect performance. Don't be fooled by the well-dressed $3000 suit who is highly articulate, born with the gift of gab, and has a great gold game. Many managers are ready to hire that person based primarily on what they see. Don't do it. Find out what they've accomplished and then measure your first impression later in the interview – after you have some knowledge of their successes.

Hiring sales people isn't rocket science. Some basic common sense will go a long way. Follow these simple rules and you'll be well on your way to hiring top-notch sales people every time.

Happy Hiring,
Bryan Johanson