Repeatable Processes for Hiring the Best Sales Reps

Hiring the best sales reps for your SaaS company starts with a repeatable process. Here’s a quick overview of how to get started.

Transcript: Hi! I’m Anna Talerico. If you plan on building a sales team, you need a repeatable sales hiring process from day one. Without it you are going to waste a lot of time and make more than your fair share of bad-fit hires.

To start, your repeatable sales process doesn’t have to be insanely detailed and rigorous. Over time you will refine and improve it to make your sales hiring become more predictable. Even if you are just about to go recruit your first real salesperson, you can start with a theoretical “best practices” process that you then tweak and build upon as you get your feet under you with some actual new hires. Here’s how to start.

Identify the characteristics, experience and skills your “perfect” sales rep will have. Include “must have” versus “nice to have”.  Consider what type of experience will be a good fit for your company. What values and skills will be important to succeed in your company, and succeed with your buyers?

Then, create a candidate scoring worksheet to objectively measure these things. Rate each candidate. Hiring is emotional and fraught with bias. That candidate you love might just score poorly. Use a scoring matrix and you will be surprised at how helpful it is to compare and contrast the candidates.

Next, create a list of interview questions that you use at each stage of the interview process, and ask every single candidate those questions. Of course, you can go off script, but make sure you are using the same base set of questions for each potential hire. This gives you a more accurate baseline when comparing afterward, particularly for your scoring criteria.

Then, decide on your interview process. A typical process includes a phone screen, then an in-person interview, then a second interview, then the offer. But for sales recruiting, particularly if you are new to it, you will want some additional steps, like a role play conversation, a mock demo call or even a presentation. You can also interview the way your buyers buy.

There are no guarantees in sales recruiting. Some sales hires will knock it out of the park, some will fall on their face. You will make some hiring mistakes. But building and maintaining a repeatable sales hiring process will help improve your chances of success. 

The cost of a bad-fit sales hire is deadly to a small, growing company. Check out the link at the end of this video to see lots of ugly stats about just how costly it is. Putting the effort and time into getting it right can save you time, money, lost momentum, credibility and more. So…that’s it. I hope this inspired you to think about how you recruit and hire your sales team and I hope it was helpful. Thanks so much for watching!