Every sales manager knows that hiring the right team can make or break a company’s sales performance. They also know it’s one of the biggest challenges they face, often having to fill large teams in a competitive market.
On a recent episode of The Sales Transformation Podcast Dr Phil Squire spoke to Harvard Business School Professor Frank Cespedes about his top advice for sales hiring. Here are a few of his top tips for hiring the right sales team.
1. Understand what “experience” is important to you
“Sales is by far the most context dependent part of business. It depends on what product you're selling. It depends where and to whom you're selling. Selling in North America is different than selling in Europe or in Asia or the Middle East, etc. And yet it's an area where people feel, for some reason, confident to make these huge generalizations, usually unsupported by any evidence”
The first thing many hiring managers do when creating a job listing is ask for experience. But what kind of experience is really important for the role you’re hiring for? Is it experience selling a similar product to you? Or experience selling to the same industry you sell to? Maybe it’s neither and what you really need is people with experience selling to a specific job function.
Think very carefully about what experience would be most valuable in the role, and then learn to articulate that in the hiring process.
2. Make sure your interviews have a point
“Managers across functions, but especially busy sales managers, tend to vastly overestimate their ability to judge somebody's work skills and their fit with the company based on a few unstructured interviews. This is a repeated finding from over 60 years of research.
“In fact, there are studies[…] that actually indicated negative correlation between interviews and actual subsequent on-the-job performance. In other words, the company would have been better simply picking up resumes at random while blindfolded.”
Many sales managers think they can “get a good feel for” someone during an interview, and do a lot of hiring based on a few conversations with a candidate. This “I’m not sure what I want but I’ll know it when I see it” approach has been proved not to work in many academic studies!
Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother with interviews at all. Instead you should make sure you know what you’re looking for before heading into the interview room and make sure your time with the candidate is focussed on finding out if they meet those criteria.
3. Don’t aim for a renaissance man
“When I ask people running sales forces, ‘what are you looking for to hire?’ What I most often get is a list of attributes that only Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo could qualify for.
“And you know, I always say the same thing. When, whenever you can hire Michelangelo, do it. I'm sure he'll do a great job on the ceiling. He's a genius. But there are very, very few Renaissance men and women out there.”
We all want to hire the best people in the world, but the fact is that you’re unlikely to find many golden candidates who are incredible at everything they do right off the bat.
Sales managers who are hoping for the perfect candidate to fall into their laps and improve sales performance by themselves are really just shirking their own responsibilities. What they need to do is define the role and learn to allocate the resources they have in such a way that they don’t need a Michelangelo to do the job!
4. Hire for the task, not the title
“Most sales managers have had the experience of hiring someone who was clearly a star at another company. And somehow when she gets to our company, she's no longer a star. Now step back and think about that. It's not as though that person suddenly got stupid or lost their individual capabilities. There is no such thing as sales performance in the abstract.”
You might think that hiring someone who already has the job title you’re looking for is a no-brainer. After all, they’re already doing the job, right? Well, the responsibilities of a “Business Development Manager” at your company might be surprisingly different to those elsewhere.
Focus on the specific tasks that the salesperson will need to perform rather than being overly concerned with titles. This approach ensures that you are looking for the right skills and abilities, and also helps in setting realistic expectations and aligning the hiring process with the actual demands of the role.
5. Understand the importance of ramp-up time
“Socialisation, that's what we call ramp-up time in sales. And you know, too many sales managers take a passive attitude toward that.
“No, part of your job as a leader is to accelerate that process.”
Don’t think that your new hire is a failure if they take a while to settle in! Recognise that new hires will need time to become fully productive. This ramp-up period can vary widely depending on the complexity of your sales processes and the learning curve needed to get to grips with your products or services.
Providing robust onboarding and continuous training can accelerate this process and improve retention rates. You might find it wasn’t your hiring strategy that was the problem in the first place!
6. Align compensation with company goals
“The nature of the compensation system will also affect not only who you hire, but who is, and is not interested in being hired, right? There are people that welcome high commission plans, others who don't. And it works the other way: The people you hire determine what does and doesn't work in the reward system.”
The nature of your compensation system will affect not only who applies for the job but also how they perform once hired. Ensure that your compensation plans are aligned with your overall business strategy and that they incentivise the behaviours you want to see.
For example, if your goal is to drive long-term customer relationships, your compensation plan should reward activities that contribute to this goal, not scoring short-term transactional deals.
The Consalia View
If we were to pull out one key theme from Phil’s talk with Frank, it would be this: make sure you understand exactly what you need from the role before you even start looking for candidates. We would add that you should also think about the core values and mindsets a person in the role should have.
During interviews, it's crucial to ask probing questions that tease out a candidate's intrinsic values, such as Authenticity, Client-Centricity, Proactive Creativity, and Tactful Audacity. By delving into how candidates have demonstrated these mindsets in real-world scenarios, hiring managers can identify those who are not just capable of performing but who are committed to selling in a way that builds trust and creates sustainable value for clients and the business alike.
You can listen to Frank Cespedes’ full discussion with Phil on The Sales Transformation Podcast here.
You can find more information about Frank Cespedes, including where to buy his latest book, Sales Management That Works, on his website.