How Much Do You Know About Sales Hiring? Three Steps to Hiring A-Players for Your Business

This is a Guest blog post from sales expert Chris Tully.

If you’re looking to add a top sales performer to your team that has the skills, knowledge, leadership, drive, values, and forward-thinking to help take your business to the next level, there are measures you can take to make sure you avoid common hiring pitfalls. Believe it or not, interviewing and hiring, especially at this level, is one of the biggest risks your company can take.
I have broken down preparations to hire into three foundational steps to ensure you effectively define, seek-out, screen and secure top sales performers.

These measures will be essential at any time, but especially going into 2021 when there are many unknowns possibly instore for market conditions. Be careful not to shortcut these best practices or you risk paying for it 10-fold in the form of costly sales turn-over and just as importantly, loss of precious time. This is a time for honest reflection on your previous sales hiring track record.

Step 1: Refine the Position Description & Develop an Ideal Candidate ProfileStep-back and review how well your current position description reflects the new selling environment that has revealed itself since the pandemic hit. What are you anticipating will happen in 2021, in 2022, and beyond? For example, there may have been positions that previously required 80% travel but converted into roles that were just as effective with limited outside activity and increased inside phone or video conferencing, or perhaps a more equal balance of outside and inside sales activity. Which model seems to be the most sustainable it the long run? Will your next hire be open to additional travel if needed down the line? 

Another area to carefully evaluate are duties that involve team interaction. Be sure there are clear lines of accountability on expected outcomes. This crucial step in the process is to bring complete clarity to what you’re truly looking for in your candidate and what role they will play in your business. Next, build out an Ideal Candidate Profile, which differs from the position description you just refined. The position description identifies the role’s purpose, essential duties and responsibilities, and a laundry list of qualification requirements including education and experience.

The ideal candidate profile is laser focused on key accountabilities and non-negotiable requirements necessary to ensure the candidate is qualified. Done properly, this is a thought-provoking exercise concentrated on defining ideal mind-set, prior experience, and skill set.

Step 2: Develop a Recruiting Plan

The next step is to create a plan to bring candidates through a diligent Sales Recruiting Process. To effectively navigate each stage, factors to consider are expertise, budget and time. Recruiting top sales talent requires the expertise to identify the best players. Using a professional recruiter or inside resources will drive the budget. A time commitment from all those involved is a requirement that cannot be avoided.

Attracting Top Talent

A-Players are typically already successful in their current roles, with 90% currently employed. They are likely only willing to make a career move for the right opportunity. Hiring those who are already delivering results means a high probability of success throughout your sales team. A big pitfall is posting ads with an expectation that top-tier talent will respond. A variety of tactics need to be deployed to draw out leading talent including direct sourcing (recruiters), social networking, creative advertising, and professional networking. 

Screening Interview

Think of this stage as an opportunity for candidates to “audition” for a face-to-face meeting or furthering along in the recruiting funnel. The objective of this first interaction is to weed out those that do not fit your ideal candidate profile and non-negotiable requirements before moving on. 

Behavioral Interviews

This series of interviews should take place with the hiring manager and then separately with other team members – either individually or as a group. Here, the objective is to move past the resume and focus on demonstrated skills and abilities. The hiring manager can focus on specific sales skills while each of the team members can be assigned specific behavioral traits to probe. The result should be a 360-degree view of the candidate. 

Objective Assessment

There are a wide range of assessment tools available that can provide an objective analysis of the candidate. Depending on need, this analysis can measure skill, culture and personality against both position requirements and external benchmarks. Adding this element to the process provides insurance that what was heard in the other interviews is real.

Final Interview

Once the finalist has been identified, the last interview ties up any remaining issues and allows an opportunity for a discussion of the terms of employment. This last phase is often helpful in confirming the candidate’s motivations and desire to move forward. 

Step 3: Be Prepared to “Sell” the Opportunity

It is important to understand that A-level Players will be screening you as much as you are screening them. That is just how their mindset works. To keep them engaged, be sure to keep a balance of assessing them while also selling them on your company, your product’s value proposition, career path potential, etc. Once you get a few steps into the recruiting process, you should know what makes the candidate tick, what they are looking for next in their career, and what it will take for them to make a move.

A-Players want to be amongst winners so it is entirely possible that you may need to showcase the company’s vision and leadership team to help them visualize where the company going, its readiness to do so, and the critical role they’d fill to help make it happen. Recruiting and hiring an A-Player is the right move for any business, but in order to get the right person into the right seat, there are several steps you need to take to ensure proper alignment. Our next blog will focus on defining your company’s onboarding process to make sure your A-Players thrive and flourish within your organization. 

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Chris Tully is Founder of SALES GROWTH ADVISORS. He can be reached at (571) 329-4343 and ctully@salesxceleration.com“For more than 25 years, I’ve led sales organizations in public and private technology companies, with teams as large as 400 people, and significant revenue responsibility.I founded Sales Growth Advisors to help mid-market CEOs execute proven strategies to accelerate their top line revenue. I have a great appreciation for how hard it is to start and grow a business, and it is gratifying to me to do what I am ‘best at’ to help companies grow faster and more effectively.Let’s get acquainted. I am certain I can offer you an experienced perspective to help you with your growth strategy.”

Scaling a Hypergrowth Enterprise – Part 1 (People)

Each January for the past 5 years, I have had the privilege of presenting on “Scaling a Fast Growth Enterprise” to a group of MBA students who attend a 3-day “Start Up Bootcamp” run by John May of New Vantage Group and Tim Meyers of Capital Trust Ventures.  Students come from all over the country including UVA Darden, UMD Smith, U Michigan, Duke Fuqua, and others.

This Post is the first of a series of posts on the topic of scaling a hypergrowth company.  At CyberRep, we were able to grow our top line revenue from $550,000 to $22.5 million in 5 years. We then grew from $22.5 million to over $80 million in the subsequent 4 years. In retrospect, there were FIVE KEY ELEMENTS that contributed to our ability to grow so rapidly while maintaining high degrees of both client satisfaction and retention, as well as employee morale and retention.

These 5 elements are:  People, Culture, Scalable Customers, Process, and Capital.  In these next few posts, I will explain in more detail my thoughts on each of these key elements to scaling a hypergrowth enterprise.

PEOPLE

Everything starts with people, no matter what kind of business you are in. Success begins and ends with getting the right people on Jim Collins’ proverbial bus.

Hiring – We look for 4 key characteristics in our people:  Integrity, Passion, Energy, and Execution capability.  In short, we want players who have high integrity, love their work (because passion is authentic and infectious), have huge reserves of energy (because all hypergrowth organizations require personal and group energy), and folks who can get the job done (critical for thrilling clients).

2 more important traits – flexibilty and resourcefulness.  We need staff who are flexible because plans change in a highly dynamic environment.  Further, since capital and human resources tend to be scarce in organizations which are stretched thin to support rapid growth, we need people who are resourceful and can do more with less.

Staff for the present but keep the future in mind – Every small and growing organization wants to hire the big guns, the heavy hitters whom you may not need right now, but whom you will surely need down the road.  However, you need to focus on the present tasks at hand, so it’s more important to get the best people for the job NOW, than it is to hire for that “future” position prematurely.  Predicting growth is very difficult, so staffing plans are seldom at an “optimal” level.  You will always be overstaffed or understaffed, depending on where your company is in its growth curve.  The key is to make sure you take care of today’s business while keeping in mind the future potential for personal growth of your new hires.  Not everyone will keep growing as the company grows, but that does not mean these folks can’t make important contributions.

Can your people adapt as the company grows?  Every team consists of diverse groups of generalists as well as specialists.  In early stage companies, there is a greater need for utility players, a.k.a. Generalists.  As companies grow, they start to need Specialists to fill specific roles.  The faster they grow, the greater the need for specialty positions.  Can your generalists make the transition?  Do they have the personality, ego sublimation, people skills, and technical expertise to transition, if necessary?  These are key questions which leaders face when hiring and developing their talent in hypergrowth companies.  In my experience, most generalists can’t make this difficult transition and are often left behind as a company grows.  I think it’s important for top leaders of hypergrowth companies to be cognizant of this transition risk and try to mitigate it by providing training and development opportunities to their A Players.

In the coming days, I will talk about the other 4 elements in scaling a hypergrowth enterprise:  Culture, Scalable Customers, Process and Capital.