The problem with the quality of your sales hires is you.
Say it with me again: the problem with the quality of your sales hires, is you.
You could be the problem in a number of ways. These are the most common:
You’re hiring the wrong people because you’re not clear on the profile of the salespeople you should be hiring.
You're hiring the wrong people because your hiring process is poor.
You have unreasonable expectations of your salespeople.
You are not providing your salespeople with the ramp time or resources required for them to achieve the expectations you have of them.
You are incentivizing salesperson behavior that is counterproductive.
Your salespeople leave because of any combination of items 1-5 that result in them generally not wanting to work for you.
To be fair, you’re not the only problem. There are a lot of you out there. This is an industry-wide issue fueled by a mass commitment to ever-widening total addressable markets and unrealistic year-over-year growth targets despite an increasingly saturated market and growing buyer skepticism. Case in point: less than half of B2B technology sellers are hitting their numbers, and more than a third of them turnover each year.
Excited yet? It gets worse! Getting good sales people in the door is only half the battle. It takes, on average, three to four months to hire a seller and nine for them to reach full productivity. Their average tenure nowadays is between eighteen and twenty-four months. So, if you’re average, you’re getting six to twelve of full production from your sellers and replacing the entire organization every three to five years. That’s an expensive way to run a business.
You have two choices. You can be average! You can cloak yourself in industry best practices around sales hiring and continue to suffer, while taking solace in the fact that you’re not suffering alone (ugh, salespeople these days, amiright?). Or, you can choose to be different.
What does different look like? It starts with being brutally honest about the kind of environment your salespeople will need to operate in and building a candidate profile from there. It requires recognizing that prior quota attainment is not a skill; it’s an outcome. It is an outcome that requires you to understand the context the seller was operating in when they attained so that you don’t inappropriately extrapolate prior success forward. And remember, no history of prior quota attainment will save you from disappointment if you are unwilling to be data-driven about what an appropriate sales target for your organization really is.
Here are some questions to help build that profile:
Who is my ideal customer? What skills matter most to convey to them during a sales cycle?
What stakeholders need to say ‘yes’ to us? How many of them are there? What kind of person needs to sit across from these stakeholders?
Are we selling something that our customer base has a reference point for or creating a new category?
Will this seller be selling direct to end users or managing channel partners? Both?
Will this seller be working with BDRs, SDRs, AMs or other sales-adjacent functions? Or do they need to own the full sales cycle for now?
Not being average means not building your hiring process around some platonic ideal of a salesperson. Instead, build a hiring process that helps you determine whether a given candidate is likely to be successful selling the product you have, to the people they should be selling to, in the organization you’re asking them to operate in. Make sure that process uses experience-oriented questions, relies on multiple interviewers who have clear guidance on priority skill sets, and keeps those interviewers blind to each other’s feedback until it’s shared with the group. (My suggestions here should surprise nobody, given my background).
No hiring process is perfect. “Better” still means you’re going to get it wrong sometimes. The industry has a best practice for you here, too: hire slowly, fire quickly. The problem with this best practice is not in the fundamental logic behind it (carefully consider who you bring on and don’t belabor the decision once you have clear indicators they’re not a fit). The problem arises when this concept—like much of tech lore—is weaponized by leaders looking to justify a decision they were already going to make. Don’t let reasonable concepts paper over poor processes and steal your chance to get better. That’s average company behavior.
The average SaaS firm has a bunch of unhappy salespeople looking for the exit. You don’t want them all. You want the ones who are looking to leave because they know they can have a bigger impact and make more money in a more effectively run organization. To be different, you need to be that more effectively run organization. You can’t do that unless you know what you’re looking for, know how to look for it and are clear-eyed about what’s achievable given your organization’s current constraints.
Be. Different.
Happy Selling!