Are Your Sales Hiring Requirements Meaningful?
Just like some sales professionals have cold call reluctance, some hiring managers develop sales hiring reluctance. Hiring managers who have been “burned by salespeople” have the most difficult time recruiting for their sales teams over the long haul. Just as there are solutions for call reluctance, there are effective solutions for sales hiring reluctance. Let’s begin with understanding the signs of sales hiring hesitation.
Signs of sales hiring reluctance generally express themselves right from the beginning of the recruiting process and are typically found within hiring requirements. When we see sales hiring requirements that are overly rigid, we tend to find hiring managers who have recently made poor sales hires.
After a few failed attempts at hiring sales professionals, the natural tendency is to over correct during the next sales hiring spree. What does this look like? The one trait your mishire didn’t possess that bothered you the most will be weighted heavily in the next hire, leaving a large window of opportunity for other poor characteristics to slide by unnoticed. For example, if your last sales mishire wasn’t “aggressive enough,” when hiring your next sales rep, you will be overly attracted to this characteristic and have a tendency to hire an over aggressive salesperson. Although you know overly aggressive behavior can lead to problems with customers, supervisors and internal staff, this time around, you will ignore this knowledge. Or you will hire an adequately “aggressive salesperson,” but they will have other issues that impede their performance. Six months later, you will notice they lack essential characteristics you assumed they had: work ethic, ability to qualify prospects, an understanding of general business issues and more. You missed this during the interview process because once you fell in love with their “aggressive” behavior that was enough for you to feel satisfied with their ability to perform.
The question remains, how many requirements are too many? At what point are you being counterproductive? How many requirements are necessary and how many are serving as a false sense of protection from making another mishire? A good rule of thumb when putting together requirements for sales professionals comes in the threes. Make your list, but narrow your selection down to your top three must haves. More than three or four must haves is an expression of hiring hesitation. Here are a few examples of effective top three requirements:
Example #1: Experience selling a SaaS business solution, comp history over 140K, track record of success. What These Requirements Imply: Industry training will make ramp up time minimal, they know how to sell a business solution, compensation history narrows the pool to high achievers only and a track record of success is a leading indicator of future behavior.
Example #2: Experience selling software, track record of success, large company training. What These Requirements Imply: Less training with industry experience, history as a predictor of future behavior so expect to see more of the same and solid sales process fundamentals because they were ingrained while at a larger company.
Example #3: Experience calling on F500, hunter only, and verifiable history of 150K+ comp for last two years. What These Requirements Imply: Elephant hunter for the most part, will chase and land new business but has little interest in ongoing management of the client, if they have a verifiable W2 history of 150K plus for at least two consecutive years, you will be getting a hunter. Even better performance if the comp is between 165K-200K.
When hiring for your next sales star, figure out your top three requirements and how you expect those requirements to benefit your organization in the long run. Learn from your mishires and become stronger at narrowing down your must have requirements to meaningful traits/experience that will produce long term gains for your organization.
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