#015: How to Find, Interview And Hire Killer Sales People

Read time - 4.5 min

Today I’m going to discuss how to find, vet and bring on top tier sales talent.

The goal of a Founder as they grow into the role of the CEO is to become excellent capital allocators. There are two parts to this. Human and Financial capital.

Human capital is about finding the best people, and putting the right asses in the right seats. Financial capital is about allocating money to those people to grow the company.

The best Entrepreneurs I’ve ever worked with are incredible capital allocators.

The challenge is finding those people and getting them onboard. I’ve managed hundred of salespeople, and hired and fired a couple hundred more. Today I’m going to share a couple of ways to find the right talent.

In Sales, Hire P.H.D.s: Poor, Hungry, and Determined.

IMO there is nothing more important that finding quality sales talent.

Why?

Because as you develop the product and work towards achieving product-market fit, it is important to have people who can actively generate revenue. Revenue that can then be used to fund further iterations of the product.

I’ve seen terrible products that sold like hot cakes early on because they had killer salespeople, strong lead gen and a dialed in sales process. I’ve also seen amazing products that sold nothing because they had no leads to pitch and no sales process.

Those are the 2 primary reasons early stage startups fail IMO. Lack of leads and lack of sales processes.

If you can crack these two, you don’t need to worry about building the perfect product, because you will close and get the feedback you need to build what the market wants.

When we were building main street hub, churn early on was high, very high. But we kept closing deals, because our focus was on lead gen and building a sales floor of killers. The revenue that we brought in was used to improve the product. If we didn’t have lead gen and our sales process fleshed out I don’t think we would have made it.

It began as understanding how to find, vet and hire the right people. Let’s take a look!

Finding

Finding quality sales people comes in 3 different ways.

1. Poaching: IMO this is the best way to get quality talent. When a founder / CEO sends the right message to a candidate it goes a long way. The message you send has to be complimentary, give a one sentence compelling pitch into what you’re building and a risk free CTA. Below is a screenshot of one that works well.

2. Recruiters: I’m not big on recruiters because they’re compensated regardless of who they place, so oftentimes they sell early founders on how great someone is just to fill the role. However, they are important as you scale and need to fill numerous roles. I haven’t used a recruiter in a long time, but if you need one tap on your internal network for intro’s.
   

3. Leaning on top performers network: A players hang out with and know other A players. If you have salespeople who are happy, well compensated and crushing it, ask them if they know of other killers who would be interested in roles. Offer some type of incentive that if they refer a candidate and they close you will give them a referral fee. This incentivizes them to sell your company harder. The best people I hired have always come from other killer sales people.

Vetting

You want the interview process to have 3 parts.

1. Phone call. The call should be 30 minutes to figure out if they’re a good fit. You’re looking to see if they can hold a conversation; do they sound confident and overall do you vibe with them. If you’ve poached a candidate, or they come highly recommended, you would obviously skip this part and go right into the next steps of the interviewing process.
   

2. In Person / Video Meet. This part of the process should be around 1 - 1.5 hours. You want the candidate to meet the team. Which would be the founders, director of sales, sales manager and a few top sales reps. The idea here is to vet for 4 things. (1) Are they coachable? (2) Can they do the job? Does their resume suggest they can deliver? (3) Will they do the job? You want vet for grit and their ability to overcome. If they have little experience that’s ok as long as they are enthusiastic, gritty and their why is big enough. (3) Culturally are they going to vibe with the company’s values and colleagues. And (4) are they resilient? Sales is hard. Can they overcome and keep moving forward?
   

3. Mock Presentation. This is where as we say, the rubber meets the road. The whole process is designed to vet out the “pretenders. After interviewing hundreds of people I realized that many are great interviewers, but poor executors. And the opposite is true as well. Candidates that didn’t crush the interview but there was something there that conveyed to me that they can own the role, I typically extended them the offer, and was rarely disappointed. We set up a process later on that was able to vet out the real ones from the pretenders. We called the real ones: PHD’s. Poor, hungry and determined. I was one of those. I was not a great interviewer, but a strong operator. Look for the PHD’s!

You can check out our framework for Interviewing and Hiring right here.

Hiring:

The last piece is hiring. Salespeople move forward with an offer for 5 reasons.

1. The product is sound and easy to sell. An easy sale equals more money.

2. They believe the founders are competent and can produce.

3. The people they’ll be working with are quality.

4. They have a clear path to advance.

5. They can make a lot of money.

The biggest motivator for “most” salespeople is money. Your offer has to be generous in order to bring in top talent. The idea is during the interview process you should have conveyed how you can execute on steps 1-5 mentioned above. Now it’s time to show them how motivated you are to bring them on, and this comes through in the offer.

There should be a base salary (guarantee) and the variable (commission). There’s a lot of ways you can split it. I’d recommend to give a little more upfront in the form of salary during the ramp up period, and then reverse it and make the comp plan more weighted on the back end (commission). You need to offer accelerators when they exceed their goal. An example would be anything over 100% of goal gets paid out 1.5x or 2x. Again there are many ways you can do it. And a lot of it is contingent on the market you’re selling into, ACV, sales cycle and the complexity of the product.

Here is an example of a solid comp plan you can incorporate.

Key Takeaways

• Run candidates through a rigorous interview process to find diamonds.

• A fleshed out sales process will help reps close predictably.

• Check out our framework for interviewing and hiring here.

• Focus heavily on lead gen to feed leads to your talent.

• Here’s a good example of a sales comp plan.

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re ready to level up you can book a call with me here.