First Can Be the Best!

Following a recent conversation with a start-up business close to hiring, Incubate Consulting’s Neil Brown offers some practical advice when planning to hire your first, or best sales person.

‘Never go on trips with anyone you don’t love’ – Ernest Hemingway

Whether you’re planning on hiring your first professional sales person for your growing business or aiming to raise the bar of an established team, hiring sales people can prove tricky at best and frightfully painful at worst. Get it wrong, and it’s expensive. Worse still, it could prove catastrophic for your brand not to mention considering the opportunity cost of hiring a superstar. Get it right however and you might just introduce a growth enabler to your business who provides you with return on investment akin to winning the lottery. You get the idea…

We all ‘sell’ day to day in some capacity or another so you will recognise and identify with many character traits or tactics when encountering salespeople. This means you already have a sense perhaps of what you are looking for, or to avoid. Experienced salespeople can all sell themselves, so they know how to present themselves at interview having likely mounted many a charm offensive before. Navigating your way through the bravado and bluster to get to the core of what makes a salesperson tick therefore is critical.

Now I appreciate there is oodles of stuff available on the web offering hints and tips for interviewing, but having read a chunk recently, I found most of the suggestions on offer to be largely generic and not tailored towards the sales professional. Therefore, to help you save precious time researching, here is some basic yet practical advice I have seen work time and time again, distilled down into a two-minute read to help get you started.

Question: Are you ready to hire?

Before you begin a selection process first consider where your business is at and how you are spending your time. You will know you are ready to hire your first sales person when you can answer yes to the following three questions;

1. Have you developed a strong appreciation of your target buyers needs, wants, constraints and buying processes and know your competitor landscape well?
2. Have you developed/perfected the sales process in your market, so it is clear, measurable, adaptable and structured?
3. Is your forecasting method robust and you can reliably estimate sales cycles and revenue streams?

Answer yes to all three, then chances are you are good to go.

Profiling

Ok, so next it’s important that you think long and hard about what your ideal candidate looks, feels and sounds like. With respect, seeking a mirror image of yourself is not always necessarily the right thing. Small teams need a blend of talent and complimentary skillsets to flourish, so think honestly about your own, or your teams ‘development areas’ and look for talent that can bring something valuable to the mix. Think hard about what your organisation needs, delivery/end-user/sector/sales cycle experience and associated networks that could compliment your own and then create a profile document outlining your ideal candidate. When you start interviewing potential options you may never be able to tick every box off on your profiling document but aim to satisfy as many requirements as possible and set yourself a robust ‘cut-off’, or compromise point in which you revaluate.

The interview

During the interview itself be prepared to be open and transparent about the opportunity on offer and where it could lead for the perspective postholder. Aim to be clear and realistic on earning potential and career development as it will inevitably come back to bite you if you oversell an opportunity. Demand remains high for quality business development talent so be prepared to sell yourself along with your organisation’s USPs and the strategic vision for the development of the business remembering that this is a two-way deal.

You have a relatively short amount of time to try to quickly understand the individuals in front of you, so arm yourself with pre-considered questions and plan to explore the key competencies most meaningful to you. But remember, this is not an interrogation session so how you present and introduce your questions is critical. Some areas you might explore include;

Proactiveness. Don’t believe the hype, sure technology helps sales people today, but you need to be sure they have the basic aptitude, guts and capability to say, cold call and prospect. They must be prepared to invest the required time to both develop existing clients and bring new ones on board for you to grow. Ask them to articulate their approach towards developing business

Resilience. The best sales people have experienced multiple challenges in their careers and should easily demonstrate ‘bouncebackability’. This means when the going gets tough they don’t hide, they refocus, re-plan or recalibrate and then go again. Look for robust examples of this behaviour

Listening. If they don’t listen to you during an interview, they won’t listen to your customers. There are many ways to sense-check a candidate listening capability but asking some competency focused questions consisting of two/three component parts to see what comes back works well. Test this

Writing. The best modern sales people today are sophisticated communicators, highly proficient when engaging across multiple social and sales channels and with a broad variety of end-users. Request evidence of previously utilised creative approaches or even tenders they have created and used to good effect

Performance. The what, when, where and the how is a ‘biggie’ so really delve into past achievements/delivery so to understand how ‘they’ impacted outcomes. Don’t remotely concern yourself with prying as good sales people thrive on recounting their best work. Ask for evidence to substantiate what they articulate

Professional Integrity, Motivation, Teamwork, Out of Work Commitments, Homeworking etc. These areas must also all be explored to ensure you and your candidate are comfortable this can work. Probe and gain insights

Likeability. This one seems simple, yet it can sometimes be difficult to fully appreciate with questioning alone. So, irrespectively of what you believe they bring to the table, ask yourself this; do you like this person, could you go for dinner with them, will your team like them and would you be comfortable with them representing your brand in the marketplace? There is no science to this, take time to consider in full

There are of course also a vast array of psychometric tools and solutions at varying expense readily available which can help mitigate potential risk when assessing talent. And, naturally, I would always encourage seeking the assistance of an experienced recruitment partner who knows your market well before you start. However, if you begin by considering some of above pre-interview preparation suggestions before interviewing you could go some way towards getting it right first time.

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