Hiring the right sales talent is one of the most critical decisions you’ll make as a sales leader. But what exactly constitutes “top sales talent,” and how do you find and keep the right sellers for your organization?
The answer is more nuanced than you might think. It’s not just about identifying candidates with impressive resumes or strong interview skills. It requires a strategic framework that considers your company’s unique needs, resources, and timeline for return on investment.
Watch the webinar on demand: Hiring Sales Talent: How to Identify and Select Top Performers
The Real Question: What Does Your Company Need?
Before you even start screening candidates, ask yourself a fundamental question: What do we actually need in a salesperson right now?
The characteristics of your ideal candidate should be driven by several key factors:
Your onboarding capabilities. If you have a structured onboarding program with training resources and mentorship, then you can afford to hire candidates who need more development. But if your onboarding is minimal—essentially throwing new hires into the deep end—then you need someone who can hit the ground running with minimal guidance.
Your timeline for ROI. How long can this employee take to reach productivity before you need to see a return on your investment? This directly influences whether you should hire an experienced seller or invest in developing raw talent.
The complexity of your sales cycle. Longer, more complex B2B sales processes might require different attributes than transactional sales. Consider what your specific selling environment demands.
3 Factors for Hiring Success
When evaluating candidates, think beyond the immediate hire. Consider the entire employee lifecycle.
1. Readiness
What skills and experience does the candidate bring on day one? This gives you insight into your onboarding requirements. Someone with higher readiness needs less handholding, while a candidate with raw potential but less experience requires more structured support.
2. Time to Competence
How quickly can this person become productive in your specific selling environment? This is influenced both by their innate capabilities and your training infrastructure. Candidates with stronger intellectual drive can often self-direct their learning, while those who are more instinctive may need more shadowing and mentorship.
3. Long-Term Superior Performance
What does sustained excellence look like in your organization? This is where benchmarking becomes critical. You’re not just hiring for today—you’re hiring for the future trajectory of your team.
Why Benchmarking Matters (And How to Do It Right)
Benchmarking isn’t about finding a one-size-fits-all profile of the perfect salesperson. It’s about understanding what success looks like specifically in your organization and using that knowledge to make better hiring decisions.
When you benchmark your top performers, you gain clarity on the specific attributes, skills, and behaviors that drive results in your unique sales environment. This becomes your North Star for both hiring and development.
Your benchmark should influence:
- What you look for in the sales hiring process
- How you assess candidates objectively
- What you prioritize in your onboarding plan
- How you coach and develop your team after hire
One powerful approach is to look at your entire team and understand “who’s sitting in what seat on the bus.” Benchmarking tools can help you see not just whether you have the right people, but whether they’re in the right roles. Sometimes your hiring challenge isn’t about bringing in new talent—it’s about repositioning the talent you already have.
Assessment Techniques That Actually Work
Relying solely on interviews and gut feelings is a recipe for inconsistent hiring. Sales assessments provide objective data that can dramatically improve your success.
What to look for in assessments:
- Validated tools that measure attributes correlated with sales success
- Assessments that give you actionable insights, not just scores
- Tools that provide both selection guidance and onboarding roadmaps
Don’t stop using these insights after you make the hire. That data becomes your personalized playbook for coaching and development. If you’ve invested in understanding a candidate’s strengths and growth areas during selection, then leverage that information throughout onboarding and beyond—it helps you personalize your coaching approach and accelerate their path to productivity.
Interview Questions That Reveal True Capabilities
Your interview process should be designed to uncover not just what candidates have done, but how they think and adapt. Here are key areas to probe:
Problem-solving approach: Present real scenarios from your sales environment. How do they break down the challenge? What questions do they ask before proposing solutions?
Self-awareness: Do they understand their own strengths and weaknesses? Can they articulate how they’ve developed new skills or overcome obstacles?
Learning agility: In a constantly evolving sales landscape, the ability to learn and adapt is often more valuable than existing knowledge. How do they respond to new information or changing circumstances?
Cultural fit: Beyond skills, do their values and working style align with your organization? Cultural misalignment is a common reason for turnover, even among talented salespeople.
Streamlining Your Hiring Process
Speed matters in hiring, but not at the expense of quality. Here’s how to move efficiently without compromising your standards:
Be clear about your requirements upfront. Ambiguity in job descriptions attracts the wrong candidates and wastes everyone’s time. Be specific about what success looks like in the role, including the sales cycle, typical deal size, and key competencies required.
Use structured evaluation criteria. When every interviewer asks different questions and evaluates based on their own preferences, you end up with inconsistent data. Create a standardized scorecard that everyone uses.
Make assessment tools work for you. Rather than adding assessments as another step that slows things down, integrate them early in the process to help you focus on the most promising candidates.
Don’t ghost candidates. The way you treat people during the sales hiring process—even those you don’t select—reflects your employer brand. You never know when you might want to recruit that person again in the future.
Building a High-Performing Sales Team
When you get hiring right, everything else in sales leadership becomes easier. You spend less time managing performance issues and more time coaching your team to even higher levels of achievement. You reduce turnover and its associated costs. Most importantly, you build a team capable of driving sustainable revenue growth.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in a better hiring process. The question is whether you can afford not to.
Find out how sales assessment solutions from The Brooks Group can help you hire and retain high-performing salespeople.
