How to Hire for Sales
Be more data-driven in hiring to improve sales results
“Hiring the right people takes time, the right questions, and a healthy dose of curiosity.”
– Richard Branson
Looking forward to having you join my talk on the Modern Sales Playbook today (Thursday) at 3 PM EST. If you have not done so yet, sign up now to reserve your spot!
Getting hired at Amazon is notoriously difficult. Any company at the top of its game is a challenging place to join because everyone wants to work there. That creates a real supply and demand imbalance.
It is not only the demand for jobs though, but the high standards Amazon maintains. Jeff Bezos said the following over twenty years ago to shareholders when it comes to hiring:
“Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?”
Hiring is serious business therefore at Amazon. If you get past the initial screen, you are put through a series of interviews called The Loop. Each interviewer is tasked with questioning the candidate on a couple of pre-selected Amazon leader principles. The questions are thorough, details and data always scrutinized, and everything is religiously written down. During debriefs, the candidate’s responses are then vigorously discussed to see if the candidate truly raises the talent bar for the team.
It is about the most rigorous and objective hiring process I have ever experienced, both as a recruit and as an interviewer in a Loop. There may be other places that are more data-driven, but Amazon absolutely adheres to their leadership principles and standards. No one just sneaks through the door.
Sales is often considered the most data driven of corporate functions next to finance. That is because success is so clear to measure; it’s revenue and margin. There are clear timelines. Activity is easy to track, from emails to calls to meetings. Maybe that is why most sales managers become CRM jockeys rather than coaches. It’s easy to get lost in the reports and the numbers.
The one area of sales though that is rarely measured or tracked is sales hiring. There are pipeline numbers of candidates versus hires. Beyond that however, it is anyone’s guess as to what makes for a good hire from a bad hire. This is a huge failure point in the objective of building a highly performant sales team. How can you build a great team if your hiring process amounts to just winging it?
Let me suggest two changes you may wish to make to improve the sales hiring process. Doing so will increase the hit rate on hires that have greater and more consistent impact on sales results and that are more committed long-term to the team and company.
The two ideas I am suggesting are as follows:
Build consistent interview questions and tie questions to company & sales behaviors
Score all responses to questions and apply metrics to hiring decisions
Values can sound very fluffy for sales managers. Why bother when you just want to know if the sales rep you are interviewing can prospect and close deals. Riddle me this though, do you actually know what makes for a successful versus unsuccessful rep? Or maybe a better, do all of your hires hit or exceed quota? Chances are your hit rate on hires is no better than 50-50.
This is why working backwards from values is the best starting place. You define in a clear and consistent way what matters most from a company fit perspective and the types of behaviors that are most likely to results in positive sales results. This is why Amazon emphasizes their leadership principles in the questions they ask, they are a clear indicator of people that will succeed in Amazon, in their role, and in working with their colleagues.
There will also be behaviors and characteristics from a selling perspective that will determine success in your context. The word context is important because someone that is a successful rep in one setting does not necessarily result in success in another setting.
For example, I have never seen a top rep at a big Fortune 100 tech company succeed in an early stage startup. Why? The startup salesperson needs to be scrappy and apply an evangelical approach to sales because the company has no brand. On the other hand, a big tech sales rep has to be good at navigating process and bureaucracy, and had to collaborate across multiple teams and stakeholders. All are useful skills, but only when applied to the right setting.
When you have the company values and selling behaviors outlined, start building questions to test for alignment to values and behaviors. Questions must be open-ended and follow a process that enables you to understand the response in a discrete way. One method is the STAR approach, which stands for situation, task, action, and result as described below:
Situation – the scene and details of the example being given
Task – the responsibilities of person in that situation
Action – the steps involved to achieve desired outcome
Result – the outcome and metrics of the actions taken
There are other methods like PAR, but the point is to use questions to probe for details of how the person being asked was directly involved and responsible for a business outcome.
Once you have the interview questions built, it is time to build a hiring scorecard. Mark Roberge who built out and led sales for HubSpot outlined an excellent method for running a data-driven hiring process in his book The Sales Acceleration Formula. He shares his interview scorecard and characteristics that he found important when he was first hiring.
What was key insight for Mark and why I stress the hiring scorecard approach is that you actually have no idea what makes for a good hire. You start off with a guess as to the values and behaviors that matter, but by using a data-driven approach, you can then back track from sales results back to hiring scorecard results. You can now gain better insight into what truly moves the needle on sales results.
Over time your hiring will become more precise. You know what questions are valuable, which values and behaviors impact sales results, what you may have missed and need to add to the question bank, and the relative weighting of importance of behaviors in your scorecard. Over the course of a year, you should have a well-established rubric for how you measure any sales candidate during the interview process.
The results are not immediate. Over time however, you will see improvements. There will be better consistency in the interview experience. The ideal behaviors become clearer. New hires will onboard and get results faster. The change will be subtle but profound. If you are not using a data-driven approach today, give it a try, this stuff does work and has worked at HubSpot and Amazon and hundreds of other companies.
Back to the topic from the previous week, I shared some thoughts on how you, as a sales professional, can position yourself for getting the job you want. One thing I stressed was the writing of a personal narrative that ties your unique skills and values to the goals and values of the company you are applying to work.
The thing I realized afterwards though is that it can be hard to figure out what to write without an example. So for paid subscribers to this Enterprise Sales Forum newsletter, I will share the exact document that I wrote that helped get me hired at AWS and that has helped numerous other reps get hired over the past year. If you have questions about the paid newsletter, reply to this newsletter and I would be glad to help.
Cheers and may your hiring be awesome!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum