How to Prevent Hiring Horrific SaaS Sellers This Halloween?

Who hasn’t hired a terrible salesperson whose CV looked the part, referenced well and came across as being the ideal candidate at their interview?

We’ve probably all been there, haven’t we?

The price we paid constituted the costs of the wrong hire (recruitment fees, sifting through CV’s, interviews, managing the offer and notice period, HR putting together the contract, advertising costs, training, the list goes on and on!)

After all, the one thing salespeople can sell is themselves, isn’t it?

NO. It’s not!

If you’ve accepted this negative outcome as unavoidable, you are a shooting yourselves in the foot. Getting sales hires wrong are the single highest hidden cost in almost any business and yet managers and HR professionals keep repeating the same mistakes in their hiring process. Worse still, some “professionals” (recruiters), keep encouraging the same bad hiring practices by not challenging employers to recruit more effectively. Is their failure down to ignorance or just selfish self-interest? Sadly, it’s likely to be down to ignorance rather than malice. At least if they were being malicious it might suggest that they have a clue. Sadly, most do not.

The average salesperson is pretty terrible, and sales managers are not any better. Here are some stats that you won’t want to see…

• The average tenure of a salesperson from the time they begin a sales role to the time they leave is less than 2 years (Sales Readiness Group)
• The average tenure of a sales manager is 19 months (Eyes on Sales)
• 47% of companies say that it takes 10 months, or more, for new salespeople to become fully productive (67% are 7 or more months), (CSO Insights)
• 58% of sales reps make their quota (CSO Insights)

If you own a business (i.e. it’s your money that you’re throwing away every time you hire a terrible salesperson and the net one of them go out on the road ruining your accounts and business’s reputation) then these stats should have raised your blood pressure a little. If you have managers who you trust to hire on your behalf and they are hiring ‘salespeople’ who conform to these stats, consider firing whoever hired the sales manager? Oh, wait… it was you!

Stop hiring in your own image… only weaker

If you hired someone who seemed perfect but turned out to be far from it as soon as they’re on your payroll, its probably because you hired someone you liked. There’s a high chance you liked them because they were a lot like you… only, they presented no threat to your position.

Hire salespeople because they’ve consistently hit their targets, have the right habits (prospecting, asking insightful questions, bouncing the question back to the prospect, well-organised, don’t fear “no” as an answer, dig deep to uncover your motive), learn and adapt quickly to the current conditions and personalities of the audience they have in front of them. Hire salespeople because they respond calmly when put under pressure.

A sales interview shouldn’t be a pleasant experience for the candidate

Put your candidates under pressure from the start. Keep them under pressure because the person they become under pressure is the person they will be when they’re on the phone or out in the field representing you to prospects and customers. This is the person they will become when a CFO is grilling them on every aspect of their proposal or when a CEO is telling them they’re perfectly happy with their current provider.

You don’t have to be rude, but make sure to pile the pressure on during the interview process in order to see if the cracks appear. If they do, push a little harder.  You’re not trying to hire a new friend. You’re hiring someone who is going to be successful in making sales for your business.

Keep HR out of the recruitment process until they have a place

I accept that HR do have a place in the recruitment process. Great HR people are worth more than their weight in gold. But great HR people are about as a common as A-Player salespeople!

Issuing contracts and offer letters is what they do best. Don’t go putting them in front of A-player salespeople to ask housekeeping questions of which they couldn’t tell a good or bad answer anyway. Questioning gaps in the CV or critiquing their spelling doesn’t help either. Anecdotally, about 35% of salespeople are dyslexic. Over 30% are partially deaf, and the best ones pretend they are as a way of getting people to repeat themselves!

Design your ideal candidate before you even start the recruitment cycle

It’s a lot easier to spot what want if you know already what you’re looking for. Design your ideal candidate. Then carve up the requirements into ‘must have’ and ‘nice to have’ and identify any automatic disqualifies, of course. Design the selection process to cover off all the must haves. Use the nice to haves as a way of differentiating between 2 candidates who tick all the must have qualities you need. And be ruthless with ‘red flags’ as you don’t want to end up with a bad hire.

Use a scorecard for each step of the selection process.

1 = No

2 = Borderline / Needs further investigation

3 = Fit

Start disqualifying from the start, from the very first contact. Be patient as you will have a 1 in 200 chance of finding an A-player. This highlights that recruitment should be a full-time activity for managers, constantly looking out for serious talent, rather than it being a ‘chore’ that gets in the way of their actual job.

Always be recruiting; build a people bank

Recruitment is every sales managers’ equivalent to prospecting for salespeople. It never stops being important. The top sales managers are those who know turnover is inevitable in any team, and too low a turnover rate is likely to be unhealthy anyway. They also know that if you have 5 suitable, qualified candidates waiting in the wings for every position they have on payroll in the sales team, they’ll gain a big competitive advantage as they can be more than 4 weeks from filling any vacancy while their competition is likely to take 12-16 weeks and has to settle for a terrible salesperson.

Help your weakest (it was probably you who hired them after all) but make it totally clear what they need to do, and then see if they actually do it. If they don’t want to be helped, put them on performance management, but don’t ty to save the sick puppy who isn’t making any effort to help themselves.

Have a well thought through on-boarding process

The recruitment process isn’t finished when you’ve made an offer which the candidate has accepted. This is just the beginning.

• What are you going to do to manage their notice period and get them to hit the ground running?
• How are you going to manage their first 120 days when they’re putting you and your company on probation?
• Do they know what they need to know?
• How will you manage their training into your culture, your systems, your sales methodology?
• Will you make sure they’re introduced to everyone?
• Are you going to give them up to 25% of your time to make sure they receive the healthy start they need to succeed or are you going to set them up for failure?

10 months to become fully productive is not productive, nor is 7 months!

Managers must be prepared to commit enough time to on-boarding of new hires

25% of manager’s time is not unreasonable to commit to helping on-board new sales hires. You’re about to invest the price of a mortgage in recruitment costs, training, marketing, provisioning, and the opportunity costs of getting this hire wrong or failing your company by not setting aside the time to on-board them well. You left them to pick up bad beliefs and be exposed to the negative propaganda from the current B- and C-players on the sales team carry around with them. Shame on you for not taking your job seriously and then passing buck when it all goes wrong…

Realise, now, that the problem might be you.

Sales is the engine that drives any business. Ultimately, all jobs depend on sales performing. Eventually, a poor sales team will kill your business even if you’re depending on repeat orders for now. Remember, no client is forever.

So, the take home message is that getting it right the first time, hiring the right salespeople through the right processes will save you a hell of a lot in the long run.