#286 - Lead Playbook Part 1: Armand and Mark on What to Look for When Hiring Great Sales Talent

Foreign. Everybody. And welcome to our first ever two part leadership playbook on 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host Mark Kosklo. And today folks, if you haven't been part of one of our playbook episodes before, where the heck have you been? Because that means you have not listened to more than nine episodes. But every 10 episodes on either the leadership show or the sales show, we do a playbook episode where we take one topic and we break it down with just the two hosts, end to end. And today we are doing a two part special on how to hire. Part number one is going to cover everything you should look for when you're trying to hire a President's club caliber rep. What are the competencies, the dimensions, the skills you test for all that stuff. Then part number two, next week we'll cover the ways that you test for those things. We will go through my interview process and we will go through Mark's interview process step by step, including example interview questions that you can use to test for those competencies. So Mark, why should people listen to part number one?

Part number one, nothing determines your success as a sales leader more than the talent that you attract, hire and develop. And so in this first one, what we're going to talk about is how to find the people that are most suited to send through a process. You have to start there. Like you have to have a great pre process, if you will, of this is what we're going to do to make sure that we only send people through the entire process the right way. And I think that that starts with some key decisions that you have to make about what kind of people that you want to work with. And once you do that, then I think the rest starts to really fall in place.

And a three, two, one it is. Part one. Let's ride. Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster. When timing matters. The fastest way to move a field forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting and that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later, folks. We put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward with Text Us. Check it out. It's free in the show notes. Alrighty, Mark. So we're going to talk through a couple of parts of the hiring life cycle. The first thing we're going to talk about is what to look for. If you don't know what to interview for, you don't know how to source all these other things. So Mark, let's start with the top. When we think about AE hiring, what to look for, what to screen for. There are really two, two different buckets here. The first is what's the background that you're looking for on the resume. And the second is what are the skills and competencies that you're testing for once you actually meet the person. So if we start with the first piece, you're looking through people's LinkedIn, you're looking at a stack of a hundred resumes. What are some of the things that you are oftentimes looking for as a hiring manager when you're screening reps?

Listen, I don't know if I even care about resumes that much. I'm definitely not going to go through and read your job responsibilities. I'm really looking for two or three key things. Number one is are you a job hopper? If you haven't spent more than two years at a job, my instincts tell me that you've never been through the muck. And what happens when you get through the muck at my place is I know what's going to happen. You're going to jump ship and go to the next place. And if you job hop, I probably am not going to interview you.

Other things that you're looking for from a background standpoint, let's pretend that you are hiring a mid market ae. My guess is you wouldn't be hiring someone who only had SDR experience. Or if you were hiring at Outreach or Catalyst, you wouldn't take someone who is a 50 year rep at SAP and only work those big clunky sales. So can you talk about the pattern matching on sales cycle and maturity of company?

Yeah. So I advise a few early stage startups and this is probably the first mistake I see that they make is they don't hire for like startup experience. So I would say like where you're at as a company and where you're at as a sales team greatly impacts the resume that you're looking for. So at the beginning at Outreach I was looking for tough, scrappy people. Maybe they weren't the best sellers, but they were the best evangelists. All four of those hires stayed with the company for over four years. What if you don't have an enablement person? What if there Isn't like a deck for that. Well, if you don't know what the competitors do, if you're early stage, that's the situation. Those reps got to figure it out, right? If you're more mature and you're looking for mid market reps or something like that, you want to find that kind of applicable experience. A lot of times companies that have a strong marketing presence or a strong brand, I'm not super interested in those type of people where the conversation is like 60% of the way through just because of the brand. You know, if I hire a Microsoft rep for example, that's a lot of brand. But let's say that I hire a Microsoft rep that was selling to governments and schools. Now that's hard, right? And so I'm looking for the context of where they've been. If they're in a big logo, I don't just discredit all of it. If they're a Microsoft person selling into B2B businesses, come on, they're going to buy some sorts of Microsoft things and you can have success in that kind of area just because of the brand and the machine that they built. Then if you're more late stage and you're looking for high enterprise sellers, I do want to know that they have some idea of complex deals. Now all that to say this is there's certain things that I care about that I can only understand by talking to the person. And I am willing to hire somebody that may not have those resume traits or LinkedIn profile traits as long as I can figure out do they have the traits that are required to get to the level that they need to get to. But for me, I'm kind of the person that when the recruiter sends you something, I look at two things on the resume in 10 seconds and I'm like, that's fine. It's probably a pain in the butt for the, the recruiters because they have to do more screenings with me than normal. But I try to keep that part simple because it can be very difficult. But most of the time you don't have that many people that you have.

To deal with 100%. I have a couple of different angles that I'm looking at any given candidate from that are reasonably similar. So the first one is sales cycle. So if I'm hiring for a mid market ae, have they closed mid market deals? If not, that's okay. I actually believe sometimes hiring and giving someone a leg up is okay. But what I would need to see is they've demonstrated that they've knocked the COVID off the ball as an SMB rep and they've demonstrated skills, behaviors or shown that they've been practicing to close those mid market deals. So I'm usually looking for someone who's closed in a parallel sales cycle. The more you go up, up, the more this matters. So the jump from SMB to commercial is not catastrophically different. Commercial to mid market, a little bit bigger. Mid market to enterprise. Big jump.

Right.

Enterprise to like Strategic Fortune 500. Your deals are lost in the wind for 12 months. You have no idea where you stand. That's where you really want to start. For someone, frankly, even has a Rolodex and has closed those massive seven figure deals because they're quarterbacking sales at that point, it's pretty different from the rest of it. The other thing that I find is really helpful to look at is the sales environment which you described as the stage. So when you think about the sales environment, folks, we actually had someone talk about this the other day on the show, which is you need to look at the amount of resources that were around that person. So a mid market rep at a company like Oracle, SAP or even like a Zendesk is going to have way more resources than a mid market rep at Catalyst. Early stage who's running all their own demos. There's no enablement whatsoever. And so this is especially true when I'm advising early stage founders. You have to match early with early. If someone has not at least worked in a growth stage environment, to me, they have not seen the speed and what it takes to operate in the early early stages. I think you can usually make a jump from mature to growth or from growth to early, but you usually cannot make a jump from mature to early. Mark, I want to pin down on something a lot of people will, in my opinion, over rotate into industry expertise. So if you're selling at outreach, they're like, I got to hire someone who sold to sales tech. Or if you're selling at Retool, I have to sell to people who've sold to engineers in the past.

Right.

What's your thought on industry expertise?

Yeah, I think there's three dimensions. One is traits. A trait is something that you're born with. It's who you are. Like, do you work hard? You know, that's a trait. There's a skill. A skill is something that can be taught and it's related to your profession. Right. And then the last is domain expertise, which is, all right, I'm selling to shipping container companies. Do I understand the Logistics industry well enough to talk about that. Honestly, that is the priority in which I care. I care most about your traits. They are what they are. Skills I can teach you because it's related to sales. I have methodologies, frameworks and all that. That's not as hard to teach. But the thing that seems to me to be the easiest thing is the domain experience. Especially now with access to call recordings and all that kind of stuff, you can skill somebody up pretty well on domain experience and that expertise and that little sliver of stuff. You know, I'd never sold software before I came to outreach. I sold school supplies to schools or that's what my reps sold. But you know how long it took me to figure out how to sell to B2B SaaS, revenue leaders at Outreach? Like maybe a week. Then you figure out what they care about. And so domain expertise is a least important to me. Now, having said that, of course I've talked to like very special things. Like I'm advising a company that does AI pricing optimization. That's a big, very deep intellectual field. And for somebody to talk to, the person that's deciding the pricing for Lululemon, you have to be able to get in the weeds. And that takes time. I think unfortunately, most sales leaders, most founders and whatnot, early stage executives, think that everything is unique about what they do and we know that that's not the case. So I would just be really careful on over indexing on subject matter expert. Because if somebody's really, really good at pricing conversations with executives in retail, but they're just okay at sales skills, but they don't have the trait of hard work, then all the other crap doesn't matter.

I completely agree. I was fortunate enough that I was actually a domain expert in my first sales job. So I worked in finance and I sold in fintech and that helped. But they hired a lot of other people who came from finance who did not succeed because they couldn't get someone else talking, they couldn't prospect. Those are far more common reasons to fail. I didn't know anything about compensation before joining pave and that was okay, you can learn that talk, but you can't teach things like eq, which is a traitor, for instance. And so domain and industry expertise largely, largely overrated in my opinion. But to your point, certain spaces, specifically ones like selling into government, where I'm like, God, how do I like prospect? The water department of Chicago, I don't even know where to start for things like that. So know that there are some spaces but Most things that are selling into hr, finance, a lot of engineering, a lot of product marketing, things like that, it all sort of works. So we have the three different dimensions that you talked about and I really like the way you put it. Traits, skills, domain, expertise. Let's zoom into traits really quick. Talk to me about the traits that we're going to want to test for throughout the interview process.

So the traits for me are, I want to know that you work hard, that you're coachable, that you have the ability to connect dots. Like for example, if you hear something and you have this bit of knowledge, can you bring those two together? I want to know that you're naturally curious. Naturally curious people to me are the best people to hire on the planet, depending on your company. Like at outreach, everybody thinks outreach was easy to sell. Outreach was not easy to sell. We had to have grit in our salespeople to work on it. So we worked a lot on grit and then the ability to teach. Some people are just not willing to explain things to other people in an in depth way and when they don't get it, they don't have another way to explain it. They only have their way because they're not really teachers. And sales is a lot about teaching people things. So you need to be able to teach. So those are some of the core competencies that I look for.

It was funny, I made a LinkedIn post right before this episode. Hard work is overrated. And yes, I get it, it's a hot take. I find that hard work early on, especially for junior hires, SDRs, SMBAEs, I'm looking for that all day because that's what you gotta rely on once you get into mid market enterprise. That's more and more for the brain up top, the executive presence. And so a few of the ones that you mentioned to me that stood out, one of which I'm going to steal is called the dot connector or someone who connect the dots. And the reason for that is you'll get these younger reps who come in and they're like Michael Jordan. They're so talented they don't even know why they're talented. And they'll do great as SDRs, they'll do great as SMB reps, but the moment they hit mid market and they start losing deals, the reps who don't know how to self diagnose or be able to test for conscious competence. In other words, do you know why you're not good? I find that that is oftentimes the biggest wall or ceiling that People hit is when you aren't being coached by all these people around you. Do you have the ability to connect the dots on what's going wrong in your own sales cycles and zoom out? So that's number one. And then number two, this one's really challenging. I have yet to see a single rep in my life who I've been able to coach on eq. Is it's really hard to coach someone who cannot read the signals in a room. It's okay if someone's green, but if someone can't read the basic signals of body language. When to stop talking, when to sit back and listen, I find that is really hard to teach because that is usually taught and shaped through experiences over time. In other words, you see the cause and effect of what your words do to someone else, and you change because of how your words impact someone else. And if you haven't done that already, I essentially need to have you learn to shave on the faces of prospects, which is not what I want.

What's interesting is traits are kind of like New Year's resolutions. Hey, I want to go on a diet or I want to go work out more. People always say, well, I just need to kind of decide I'm going to do it, then go do it. And then within the third day of the year, everybody's already cheating. Right. Traits are things that you can change. You can teach someone to work hard, but there needs to be almost like a traumatic event that switches their brain up and makes them think a different way. And the level of effort to change a trait is so much greater than the level of effort to teach a skill or to give somebody domain expertise that it's not worth the squeeze. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. I don't want to sit around and teach someone how to be more emotionally intelligent. Can I? Yes. I remember my one daughter is super smart, and I had to take her aside one day and be like, listen, Mia, here's a deal is you can be the smartest person in the room, but when you make everybody know you're the idiot, and it's like, quit making everybody know you're the smartest person in the room. Just do it and be cool with it. Right? And that took time for her to figure those things out because she, like, mentally dominate people. But that's my kid. That's worth the amount of work and effort to do it. But for reps, there's people that have these traits that you don't have to do that much work on that have the Easier fixes is when you convince yourself, well, you know, they sure do know the legal industry a ton and they've been so successful and they were just at ironclad and they were crushing it and you know what. But you know, they just kind of felt off to us. I think it's okay though. We'll figure that out. That's when the death knell is starting to chime for you and your team is you should always do it backwards. The minute you say it feels a little off, it doesn't matter about the rest of the stuff because it's too hard to change those traits because that's at the core of who a person is. Just like it's so hard to start working out when you're not a workout person 100%.

I think the a controversial saying is if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no. And honestly, I believe that to be true. Anytime I've gone against my gut, I've gotten burned for it. But what I will say is I also believe that you should be hiring for strengths, extreme strengths. Instead of lack of weakness, there might be one or two things they need to work on. So they're not perfectly checking every box, but they're spiking hard in the stuff that matters. I find that those hires, the ones who have extreme strengths in certain areas will oftentimes excel versus the ones who are just sort of mid at everything. They end up being mid at everything.

We'll talk about it coming up. But when you're around the table and you're talking to the five or six people that interviewed a person, my pet peeve is I'm going to give a soft yes. Soft yes to me means nope. First of all, you're not going to get the interview anymore. Like your job is to come up with a an opinion, yes or no, not to hedge your bets by saying soft yes. And then also if you're soft yes, that means no. Like we hire yes here. Soft yes, soft no no. That's all no. Anything that's not a hard yes is a hard no.

All righty, Mark, it is time to recap part one of our two part leadership playbook. What do you have for your two by two part?

One is make sure that you really name and define your competencies. I don't think that there's anything more important than that document that says these are the things that we make sure we have to have in order for a rep to have a chance to succeed. And the second thing, number two is you have to be extremely intentional about how you're going to interview those, figure out if they are a hard worker, is not fair and never effective. And so sitting down with your interview team and saying we have to figure out how we're going to assess for work ethic and getting really creative and agreed on how we're going to do that, I think that's one of the most valuable exercises you can have.

Bingo. Number three is there were three dimensions that Mark articulated. You have the traits, for example, things like iq, their eq, their work ethic, their coachability. You have their skills. Are you good at prospecting, discovery and process? And then you have their industry or domain expertise. Of the three, the third one is the easiest to teach. You can teach someone about your industry unless you're in some crazy convoluted space. And you can usually teach at least one of the sales skills. For example, you can teach someone to get better at process if they're amazing at process and at prospecting and discovery. But it's really hard to teach work ethic and it's really hard to teach things like eq, so test for those things earlier in the process. And then lastly, number four, when I'm looking at the background of any given hire, it's really important that you're matching sales cycle and sales environment. Sales cycle. Don't put an SMB rep into an enterprise role. Sales environment. Don't put an Oracle rep into the first sales hire role at an early stage company where there's no product market fit and no sales engineers. Alrighty folks, so if you like this one, we'll reference this again, but next week we're going to be covering all things related to Mark's interview process and my interview process. And in last week's newsletter I actually wrote out my process end to end. So go to 30mpc.com newsletter if you want to get that or it'll be directly linked in the show notes. Peace, folks.

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