The other day, I was talking with an old friend about the challenges he was having hiring the right salespeople for his team. He said: “It seems like everyone who applies was the number 1 sales rep at their company!”
He was making a joke but he was frustrated. He knew that many of those applicants weren’t telling the truth.
His frustration gets to a deeper issue: Hiring a great team means avoiding a lot of false quality signals and getting to the folks who are actually great.
And here’s the thing: It’s not just that dishonest reps are trying to fool you.
Many companies fool themselves.
They do that by pursuing the wrong indicators of quality and end up with sales reps that aren’t as good as they think they are.
You’re at risk if you’re a promising early-to-mid stage SaaS startup that’s doing well but isn’t a blazing rocket ship that’s featured in TechCrunch every other week and paying top of market compensation.
Companies like yours often look for obvious stars by building hiring processes that emphasize experience and past performance.
The problem is that the blazing rocket ships who are featured in TechCrunch every other week want those obvious stars too. They get the first pass at reps that look good on paper and they take the ones that are actually good in practice.
Many of the reps that are left are fool’s gold: They look great but they aren’t.
If you use the wrong criteria, you’re at risk of hiring fool's gold reps and only finding out after they’ve burned your leads, time, and money.
You have to pursue a strategy that’s designed to uncover hidden gems. These are the candidates that are amazing that others might miss.
This means that both your hiring criteria and your hiring process will be different from what most companies do. If you embrace the hidden-gem hiring process, you’ll have an edge.
Want to know more? Read on:
The Challenge
Hiring is a matching game: You should target reps (1) who you want to work for your company and (2) who want to work for you.
Most companies only focus on who they want to work for them and that leads them astray.
Imagine the range of candidates along two dimensions: The vertical dimension reflects the actual quality of the applicant. At the top are applicants that are genuinely good.
The horizontal dimension reflects their apparent quality. At the right are applicants that appear to be good at first glance. Some are good; some aren’t.
That gives us four basic types of sales rep:
Obvious Stars Are Hard to Get
Let’s start at the top right: The Obvious Stars.
You think you should be targeting these reps but you shouldn’t be.
These are the folks with gold-plated resumes who are genuinely awesome. I’d love to have a team full of these folks and so would you.
And you know what, so would everyone else.
Here’s the problem: Your company is not their first choice.
Ouch. That stings.
In fact, it stings so much that most founders can’t accept it. If you can, you’ll have a leg up because you’ll respond in a constructive way.
Put yourself in the applicant’s shoes. Your company has a great story and a talented team, but so does every other promising early-mid stage startup. They wouldn’t have gotten funding otherwise.
From the inside, you’re aware of what makes your company exceptional.
From the outside, it’s hard to tell companies apart. The only clear differentiator is that some companies are blazing rocket ships featured in TechCrunch every other week that are paying top of market compensation.
Those are the companies where obvious stars want to work. Those companies have it all: Lots of upside and limited risk. Your company has great upside but it’s higher risk than the blazing rocket ship.
It’s even harder for companies like yours to recruit obvious stars who have lots of experience.
Those reps usually care more about mitigating risk than maximizing upside. They want to guarantee that they’re set up to crush their quota and rake in the accelerators.
Career upside – like rising into a leadership role – is a secondary priority for them.
They've probably had opportunities to move into leadership but decided that they’re happy being a standout frontline seller. They get to do a job they’re great at and make fantastic money doing it.
That means your company is an awkward fit for them. They’re well aware that many early-stage companies look great but turn out to not have enough leads or product-market fit.
For them, the potential upside usually isn’t worth that risk.
Fool’s Gold Reps Are Dangerous
Fool’s gold reps are the ones you need to avoid.
Fool’s gold reps look like obvious stars. They have impressive resumes and lots of apparent accomplishments.
But their actual skills are modest at best.
How do reps become fool’s gold? My buddy was running into the most obvious way: They lie about their qualifications.
But they don’t have to lie; they could just be vague: Imagine a candidate who says they did “technology business development and account management.”
Did that rep sell a software product like yours or were they a post-sale support person for a (high tech!) machine tool manufacturer who helped with a few upsells to existing accounts?
The most dangerous kind of fool’s gold is a rep who genuinely was successful… but only due to luck.
This happens all the time. A rep could get a killer sales territory, trip over a whale deal, or work at a company with incredible product-market fit and tons of leads.
The more senior they are, the more chances they’ve had to get lucky. Reps who’ve had long careers are bound to have had periods where they were in the right place at the right time. They’ll spend their interviews talking about those times.
Here’s the problem: It’s easy to mistakenly hire fool’s gold reps. After all, their resumes look a lot like the obvious stars that everyone wants.
They will apply to your company in droves; they’d LOVE to work for you!
But you need to find a way to avoid them at all costs.
You Want the Hidden Gems
So who should you be trying to hire? The hidden gems.
They’re a mutual match: They will deliver for your company and they want to work for you.
These are reps who are outstanding but whose quality isn’t obvious to everyone.
They have superb talent and motivation, giving them the potential to excel. They can quickly learn and implement your sales process – if you onboard and enable them well.
But their resumes are… OK. They’ve had some success but haven’t yet hit it out of the park because they haven’t quite found the right setting.
That means that the market undervalues them. You aren’t competing against the blazing rocket ship that’s in TechCrunch every other week and is paying top of market compensation.
They love companies like yours: They’re excited by the upside and willing to take on the risk.
Even better: They can prove how good they are, but only to a company that runs the right kind of hiring process.
That can be your company. Just keep reading.
The Solution
So how do we come up with a hiring process that finds hidden gems and screens out fool’s gold?
We have to build a different kind of hiring process. Most companies look for obvious stars by focusing on experience and past accomplishments.
That’s a trap: There won’t be many obvious stars in our hiring pool. If we screen for experience, the fool’s gold reps will meet our selection criteria and the hidden gems won’t.
We could end up with a team full of fool’s gold.
We need to build a hiring process that focuses on simulations that uncover the ability to communicate effectively and think strategically. Hidden-gem reps will ace these simulations and the fool’s gold reps will falter.
Let’s unpack each of the components we could include in a hiring process to see where it fits in and why.
Experience
Companies looking for experience ask: “Has the candidate succeeded in similar roles?” They look closely at a candidate's resume and ask about experience during the interview process.
The hidden-gem hiring process sets the experience bar as low as reasonably possible.
Most companies don’t want to do that. But if you set the experience bar too high, you’ll screen out hidden-gem reps because they’re usually early in their careers.
Hidden-gem reps are talented folks who just haven’t found the right setting yet. Once they get enough at bats, they’re going to hit it out of the park.
You’ve got to get them right before that happens, before everyone is trying to hire them. You want them to hit it out of the park at your company!
At the same time, you don’t want to set the experience bar too low. You want reps who can get up to speed quickly.
How do you set the right minimum level of experience? Here are a few guidelines.
First, there’s lots of value to having someone who has at least a year of on-quota experience closing SaaS deals and has some evidence of success. This could be a rep who was an account executive for a year and hit their ramp quota or who had a couple of good quarters.
Someone who fits those criteria has learned a software sales process. That means they can learn your software sales process (if you enable and onboard them properly).
Second, you should be reasonably strict about what counts as relevant experience.
There will be a TON of people who puff and hedge on their resumes to look like they have the right experience but actually don’t. Examples include the “business development manager” who was really a sales development rep who scheduled meetings for someone else or the “fintech account executive” who really sold mortgages rather than software.
That said, don’t be too strict. If you’re a seed stage company, you have to be extremely flexible on what experience counts.
There are also difficult edge case questions about what experience is relevant. For example, should you consider partnerships experience to be equivalent to sales experience? It’s a judgment call: If your company works on complex deals, then maybe yes. If your company has a high velocity sales process, then I’d say no.
Third, the marginal value of additional experience declines quickly unless you have a very complex sales process.
Three years of sales experience is substantially better than one year. Five years is somewhat better than three years – particularly if you sell complex enterprise deals.
But requiring more than five years of experience is usually a bad idea. Past that point, you’re probably excluding too many talented hidden-gem sales reps to make it worth it.
Behavioral
Companies using behavioral questions ask: “Does the candidate have the right skills and attitudes for the role, as shown by their actions in the past?” To test this, companies ask for examples of times when candidates exhibited the skills and attitudes they’re looking for.
These questions have a great pedigree: Companies like Amazon and Hubspot put a lot of emphasis on them.
But you shouldn't rely heavily on them because they’re tough for small companies to implement well.
The Amazons and Hubspots of the world measure applicants’ traits using clear rubrics, figure out which traits correlate with success by looking at actual employee performance over time, and then select for those traits in their hiring process.
That’s HARD. Amazon and Hubspot can do it because they have resources that you don’t have.
Without those resources, behavioral questions can devolve into a bunch of hocus pocus. Who is to say what traits are important or how you measure them based on the candidate’s answers?
Behavioral questions also don’t do a great job of screening out fool’s gold reps.
They can tell great stories about what they’ve done in the past; after all, they’ve got a lot of experience.
But those stories are all puffery.
They have a great story to tell about coming up with a great strategy (in fact, it was their manager’s idea), closing a killer deal (in fact, the prospect made their decision based on the website), and helping their colleagues (in fact, the other reps actually found their advice to be useless and borderline insufferable).
There are some behavioral questions I think you should ask. But there are just a few and they’re relatively obvious.
The real focus is on our next category.
Simulation
Simulations are the core of the hidden-gem hiring process.
Companies focusing on simulations ask: “Can the candidate exhibit the skills they’ll need in the role during the interview process?” To test this, companies design exercises that let the applicant show off what they can do.
Hidden gem sales reps will crush it on the simulations. They’re actually good.
The fool’s gold reps will struggle. They have experience, maybe they’ve gotten lucky. But when it comes time to show their stuff, they’ll fall short.
The key with simulations is to design them well. I’ll share a bit about that in our next section.
Putting it Into Practice
Here’s what a hidden-gem hiring process would look like for a company selling SaaS to mid-market customers.
Step 1 - Screening Call (30 Minutes)
The goal of the screening call is to weed out reps that don’t fit before you spend too much time on them. You also want to motivate promising candidates to engage in the process.
Good screening calls have four main parts:
First, establish rapport.
They want to work at a company filled with nice people and you want nice people to work at your company.
Second, check to be sure they meet your minimum experience criteria.
Dig deep to screen out fool’s gold reps who have vague resumes. Imagine a rep whose resume says they did “business development.”
You need to find out what they actually did.
Script questions that precisely define what the right experience is and give examples of things that sound right but actually aren’t. This is particularly important if you’re delegating the screening call to a recruiter.
Here’s an example set of questions:
Were they an account executive closing new business software deals? (Yes)
Were they actually an SDR who set appointments for someone else? (No)
Were they a customer success manager renewing existing accounts? (No)
Were they a channel manager who helped third parties sell the product? (No)
Were they selling a hardware product, like laptops or servers? (No)
Were they selling a financial product, like mortgages or insurance? (No)
Third, check any potential blockers. For example, if you have in office requirements or non-standard compensation, get that on the table now.
Fourth, tell them why your company is a great opportunity.
You should lay out your company’s long term vision.
But you should spend most of your time explaining why they’ll have a fair chance to meet and exceed their quota.
It doesn’t matter to a sales rep if your company is poised to take over the world in five years if they get fired after one year because they couldn’t hit an impossible quota.
Smart hidden-gem reps are very focused on this. They know that many companies don’t offer their reps a fair chance to succeed. Those companies make a bunch of hires and crank up the goals without refining their product-market fit, generating enough leads, or setting realistic quotas.
This is also worth scripting out. Start with the performance of your current reps. Are they hitting quota?
If so, how will you keep that going as you expand the team? For example, what are you doing to generate more leads? What makes you think the market size will support a larger team?
If they’re not hitting quota, why not? How are you addressing that?
Step 2 - Manager Initial Interview - (45 Minutes)
Candidates that pass the screening call move to an initial interview with the hiring manager.
There are four main parts:
First, establish rapport.
Show them that you care about their success and that you know what you’re doing. Get a sense of whether they’re friendly and likely to collaborate with the team.
Second, ask a few behavioral questions.
These aren’t the focus of our process, but you want to look into whether they persevere through challenges and support their colleagues.
Good answers respond directly to the question, include details, show their personal role in the situation, and are powerful examples of the trait that you’re looking for.
I won’t share the exact questions here (I don’t want to give applicants a cheat sheet!), but feel free to reach out if you’d like to see them.
Third, administer the simulations!
These are designed to test their communication skills and they’re the focus of the interview.
Sales reps who can communicate with precision and agility can probably learn your sales process, even if they haven’t got the most imposing track record. If they can’t communicate well, that’s a sign that they haven’t got the right skills – even if their resume is otherwise impressive.
You’ll ask them to role play some hypothetical sales scenarios that test their ability to sell a product, handle objections, and react to competition. The scenarios come thick and fast; the sales rep will have to be on their toes to keep up.
Great applicants will be clear and persuasive during these simulations, good applicants will be merely clear or perhaps make a few strong points but not have the best structure, other applicants will give answers that are muddled or simply be unable to keep up with the scenarios.
As above, I won’t share the exact questions here, but feel free to reach out to learn more.
Fourth, pitch your company and answer their questions.
This is the time to address anything that’s come up since the screening call.
Step 3 - Final Round
The final round has three parts.
Manager Final Interview - (30 Minutes)
The first part of the final round is a second 1:1 interview between the manager and the applicant.
The focus of this interview is to ask a set of three deal strategy questions. For each question, the manager presents the candidate with a hypothetical deal situation. The candidate has a chance to ask questions to learn more about the situation.
Then, the candidate shares all of the potential solutions to the strategy question and says what is good and bad about each potential solution.
In other words, the candidate shouldn’t simply state the answer they think is best and stop talking. They need to consider all the options and evaluate each one.
The goal is to see how the candidate thinks through deal strategy problems. Do they gather useful information? Do they generate sensible ideas? Can they think through pros and cons?
As before, I won’t share the exact questions here.
Team Interview - (30 Minutes)
It’s usually a good idea to have a current salesperson on the team lead one of the interviews.
They can catch things the manager might have missed and give the applicant a different perspective on the company.
Don’t try too hard to script this interview. The whole point is to get someone else’s point of view.
But you do need them to dig into whether the applicant would be a good colleague.
This is different from trying to figure out if they’d “fit in.” It's not important for everyone on the team to have the same hobbies.
But it’s critical that everyone who joins the team would pitch in to help a colleague. Small teams can’t afford reps who are solely focused on themselves.
Presentation - (60 Minutes)
This is the main event. The applicant will sell your product to you on a call that requires them to do discovery that uncovers information about the prospective customer and deliver a presentation that pitches the product.
This is the ultimate test of their sales skills. They have to clearly articulate the value of your solution. They’ll have the chance to prepare but also have to adapt on the fly to incorporate what they learn from their discovery.
They also have to learn your product, not just spout a bunch of jargon about the product they already sell.
It’s designed to be a fair test. You’ll give them a pitch deck that summarizes the high points of your product. The deck should be something that you’d present on an opening call and email to a prospect afterwards; i.e. there’s nothing sensitive in the deck. They don’t need to make slides or have subject matter knowledge.
You’ll set them up to do good discovery by giving each member of the audience a role, a set of goals, and information that they can reveal during discovery if they’re asked relevant questions. Have at least two people on the panel so the applicant has to manage multiple buyer personas.
You’ll also tell them exactly what they’re being evaluated on.
There are four criteria:
1. Rapport: Can they create a positive atmosphere where the prospect feels comfortable sharing information?
2. Discovery: Can they uncover information that helps them sell the product?
3. Pitch: Can they clearly articulate the value of the product and incorporate the information they learned in discovery into their presentation?
4. Next Steps: Can they close the call by asking for next steps that advance the sales process?
You are throwing them a fast pitch. But it’s a pitch right down the middle of the plate.
They need to hit it.
If you’re interested in seeing an example, drop us a line!
The Takeaway
Hiring strategy is like any other strategy: You have to define goals, recognize challenges, understand your strengths, and then design a course of action that fits.
Good hiring strategy requires recognizing that even very promising early-mid SaaS stage startups can’t recruit a whole team of sales reps who are obvious stars. Everyone wants obvious stars and those reps prefer blazing rocket ships who are featured in TechCrunch every other week and pay top of market compensation.
Companies that can’t face that fact will design a hiring process around traditional criteria like experience and hire a team of fool’s gold reps that look good on paper but can’t deliver.
Many of those companies won’t recover from that mistake.
Instead, you should build a hiring process that’s designed to find hidden-gem reps who have tons of talent and would love to work at a high-upside company like yours. These folks haven’t yet realized their full potential, so they’re available to companies that look for them in the right way.
To find them, use a simulation-focused hiring process that lets hidden-gem reps show off their talent and screens out the fool’s gold reps who aren’t actually good.
Then, sit back and watch your amazing team crush their goals and power your company to success!
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If you liked this article, have a look at our piece on Guerrilla Sales Enablement to see how to set your new hires up for success. You can also check out the P.S.I. Selling Content Page for more insights on sales communication, strategy, and leadership.
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For more about the author, check out Mike's bio.