#289 - Lead Playbook Part 2: Mark and Armand on How to Structure Your Interviews to Hire Great Sales Talent

Foreign. Everybody. And welcome to this part two episode of our first ever two part leadership playbook on how to hire presidents club caliber AES. My name is Armand Farouk and I'm here with my co host Mark Kosklo. Last week, if you missed it, we covered all the things that you should look for in an amazing rep. The traits that they should have, the competencies that you have to test for, even the domain expertise that you might find helpful. And now we need to talk about how you actually test for those things, AKA the interview process. Mark, why should people listen?

Lots of companies are starting to hire again and this is your chance to get high quality people in there. When you have a limited amount of ability to hire, getting the right people in there becomes way more difficult and way more important. And so this part where we talk about, all right, we now have somebody that we think has the characteristics. Now we need to really drill in and confirm that. And what are we going to do to make sure we make a hiring decision? That's what we'll cover here. That is a critical thing to do right now in a market where you might not have a lot of hires coming up.

And three, two, one. Let's hire somebody. 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 feel 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 request 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, we probably talked the audience to death on traits, skills, domain expertise. And just so the audience knows what's coming, there are going to be a series of competencies that Mark is testing for. The three skills that I'm testing for processing, prospecting, discovery, and process. But let's actually jump right to the interview process now that we've talked about the traits that we're looking for. Mark, I'd love to start with your AE hiring process. Talk about the competencies that you're screening for and then the different steps in your interview process.

First step of the process starts with, I think the most important friend that you can have. If you're a sales leader, which is a great recruiter first tip on the interview process is make sure you have a great recruiter. Don't just think because they're willing to bring you candidates, they're good. What makes them good is, oh, my gosh, we only have time to interview three or four of these people, and we got 10 people I'd like to talk to. That's when you know you got a good recruiter. The second thing is the screen. You need to set up a screen. And for me, the screen can either be with the recruiter or it can be with the hiring manager. And I typically did most of the screens until we got up to a point where there were just too many hires and I didn't have enough time to do it anymore. And all I'm looking for in the screen is, would I be cool sitting down with this person and having dinner? I don't need to know their skills. I don't need to grill them. I just want to know, can they carry a conversation with me for half an hour? It's just, is there a connection? After that, the hiring manager does an interview. The purpose of that interview is to save the rest of the process if the person's bad. So they need to find the deal killers and they need to be really sharp with what they're interviewing. Because letting people through to the next round with a loop, we're now wasting half a dozen people's times three or four hours of productivity. And if we're flying them in, we're wasting a lot of money on somebody that the screener just was like, yes, good enough. You have to really define what that screener is supposed to do. After the screener, I would have a loop of four to five people. We had six or seven ish core competencies at outreach, depending on the stage of company. Each interviewer in the loop was responsible for mastering two of those core competencies. And that's what they always interviewed on. And if I heard you ask the stupid question, like, why are you leaving your job? You don't get to interview anymore. I need real strong questions where you've been thoughtful to think about. My core competency is work ethic. How do I assess work ethic in a half hour conversation? When a person is trying to say things that make me want to think that they have work ethic, how do I actually get to the truth? And I think we've talked about that exercise a few times. But, like, that's a very, very valuable exercise. And it makes that loop really good. And what happens is you end up people that can spot coachability a mile away because that's all they ever interview on this. Coachability and grit. And they just get so good at it that you can really trust their opinion. And typically what I'll do is try to make sure that every competency is covered but have a couple overlaps so there's a couple people that touch for coachability. So we get a little bit of extra dimension there. The next thing that we do is we have the final kind of on site or video interview with the hiring manager where any other hesitations or concerns are addressed in there. I do those sometimes and really that is about honesty. At that point you should know whether you want to hire them or not. And if there's a couple of things that you got to get ironed out, that's just where you're like, listen, here's the deal. I don't know if this is true or not, but in general, what we found out was it doesn't feel like you really want to be in sales. We're concerned about that as a company. It feels like sales is on a path to you, whereas we're looking for sales professionals that want to be the dopest salesperson that there is. Can you help me understand what you think about sales? And don't forget, if you take this job and you don't really want it, you'll hate it. But if we need to just clear up a couple things and we found out that you really do want to do this, then we think you could be a great fit once we iron these things out. And so that interview is almost a precursor to a difficult conversation about coaching or managing that rep. Can you have that difficult conversation and how do they respond? Do they blossom in it, in which case is an easy hire or do they shrink from it, in which case you've now probably figured out that the things that you're nervous about are bad. Then after that final thing, then we have a little roundtable where everybody that's interviewed the candidate gets around the table. Everybody real succinctly. So we don't turn it into a two hour long meeting yet. Three or four minutes, you talk about it and then you give your opinion, yes or no.

All right, so I've got a ton of questions to unpack this. Just to recap the process of the audience has the step by step version. You have the screen which is oftentimes run by a recruiter. Then you have the hiring manager interview and that's really where you're getting the big chunky items out of the way, like, do you even know how to sell? Do you know how to run a discovery call, do you know how to do process, et cetera. Then from there they go into the loop. And that loop is four or five people each testing for two core competencies. This is the equivalent of what many people would call a super day, for example. And then the final step is a final video or on site hiring manager. One on one. Whatever is left at this point you should know and this should just be a final de risking. And also you're bringing people a little bit closer to you. I want to zoom in on step two, which is the recruiter's already screened your candidate, you're the hiring manager and now you need to de risk the big stuff because if you say yes, this person is about to go meet four other people on your team. What do you test for in this? I imagine a 60 minute interview. Whether it's discovery, sales skills and how do you run that interview?

I'm a hiring manager. This person is going to report to me and I need to make a good decision. And part of a manager's job is identifying, recruiting, interviewing and developing really great talent. I never told someone to hire someone or to not hire someone because if a frontline manager whose job it is to do those things with talent can't do it on their own, then they can't be a manager. That's a core competency of being a manager. Don't let that hiring manager think that they have an out. They have to be so certain of what they want to do and so good at it. They don't have costaglo as a backstop to be like, whoa, what are we doing here? Right? If you're going to make the mistake, you're going to make the mistake and you're going to be accountable for it and figure it out. If you make too many mistakes, then we have to figure out what we're going to do about it. But that hiring manager interview is one where I think that manager has to be super sharp and they have to understand, okay, more than are they a hard worker or not, I need to know the absolute best deal breakers. What are the things that we know don't work? It's funny, a lot of times what this would turn into was almost a I'd have to apologize. I'm going to ask some rapid fire machine gun questions. One is, what's your average deal size? What's your cycle time? What was your win rate? Who's the people that you actually sold to? And I would just have a list. I think I had like 10 or 11 questions that I would ask. And these are just things like is this person in my universe of people that I should be considering or not?

So what are some of the example grill or interview questions you would ask in this stage?

So literally I would say, I'm going to apologize. After a little bit of rapport building, can I machine gun ask you a bunch of questions and you just give me the shortest, tightest answer. If I ask for a number, just give me the number. And people will be like, okay, all right, what is your average deal size? What was your win rate? What was your average cycle time? What kind of buyer did you buy into? So those are like examples. That's the idea, man, is you want to get as much information as you can in that interview and you just want to put it in the frame or context of hey, I'm about to do this to you. And is that okay?

So after the machine gun, are you doing any skill building or competency testing for the rest of the interview or is that really just to do almost like the lay of the land? Like is this person the right profile for the organization? And then you leave those more sales oriented questions, do you know how to multi thread type of questions? You leave those ones to the loop, Is that right?

Yeah, usually what I'll do is at the back half of this one, that's when I'll say, okay, what kind of questions do you have for me? And I'm starting to see, do they actually ask the right kind of questions? So a great question is, is like how many people hit quota last quarter? That is a question of a rep that knows what they're doing. How many open opportunities does somebody have at a single time here? How much of my pipeline am I supposed to source? And how reliable is the part that I don't have to source? Those are questions of somebody that's really trying to figure out, like, I know what I got, I can win at doing whatever, but you got what I need. And that's what I'm looking for in those questions. At some point, when are they going to interview me to find out what they need to know if they're going to make money here or not.

So they go to the next step, the loop. Four to five people, two core competencies a pop. Could you give an example of what an interview loop would look like? In other words, who would be on it and what would be the competencies that you're testing for with each of.

Those People, typically two peers we sometimes would do together and take them out to eat. Because when you're in that kind of breaking bread environment, things really get real. We'd find out a lot in those. And then the two people together, it's a little bit of a different dynamic. Sometimes it's a separate stop on the train. And so those two would be peers. Then we would have somebody ahead of them in the funnel, so like an SDR or maybe a demand gen person. And then somebody behind them in the funnel like an SC or a csm. And then we usually would have a cultural person. Their only job is to figure out is this person going to vibe with us or not. And the cultural person is risky from this standpoint is most people think about culture. They're like, this is our culture. And does this person have the same kind of a culture that we have? I think that's wrong. That's how you build homogeneity and same thinking. What I'm looking for is here's our culture. How is this going to person going to enrich our culture? How are they going to add something? What's a little bit of a different slant that they think about or how they react to things that creates an overall richer culture for our sales teams.

There it is. Amazing. I want to ask you about one more thing. You have this thing at the end, which is the everything wrong with our company interview.

Talk me through that to talk them out of it. First of all, there's the skill, the trait and the domain expertise assessment, right? Then there's the, hey, we got to sell them on why they would be a good fit for us. But then there's the they have to sell you on whether a good fit for you. But when all that's done, it's a love fest. And we know every relationship isn't just built on a love fest. There's a little bit of friction in there. There's a little bit contention. So I introduced that into the sales process and I will, a lot of times, especially with leader and executive hires, I will talk them out of the job. At Catalyst, everybody that followed me from outreach to Catalyst, I had a specific call where I told them why they should not take the job. And so, you know, listen, you know, this is wrong, this is wrong. This sounds good, but it's actually not good. Here's something that we really like about you, but, like is going to be a challenge for us. And I just completely try to talk people out of the job. Honestly, I think it does the exact opposite the transparency and honesty causes people to like, suck right up into you and just be like, all right, this is what I want to do. It's like magnets and iron filings. It's a call where you don't want to talk about things that are sensitive, right? But you want to talk about the reality of what makes the job hard, what makes it challenging, why you might not like it, and why you're going to have to power through that. And then if they still agree, it's really interesting is when they start to struggle, you can always point back to that conversation and be like, remember we talked about this. The worst thing to do is to hire a salesperson that's best at selling themselves and not best at selling a product. I want to see the selling of the product more than the selling of the self.

After you're hired, here's what my process looked like. I have a lot of things that are very parallel and common to your interview process, Mark. The four steps are as follows. There are three, like golden principles up front that I believe to be true around hiring Number one, I believe that the best reps need to be sold into interviewing. Like most reps, you can't just take the first call and immediately start grilling them. They will not opt into the process. You can't throw a mock disco at em right away. They're gonna be like, too much work, not worth it. Sure, maybe if you're a big brand name you can do that stuff, but I was selling early stage and most people didn't even know what the heck paid it. Principle number two is the best reps usually aren't looking at all, so you gotta go and find them. And then principle number three is the best reps work for people who they think they can learn from. And that usually means there's someone who can get them to think about something that they don't know or they can get them to think on their feet. And so a lot of hiring managers make the mistake of trying to bring people through a bunch of these early stage screens, technical tests, all this BS, 17 recruiter screens. And the hiring manager will jump in way too late in the process. And the best reps are oftentimes making their decision by the second or third interview already. And so I prefer to invert the funnel and spend more time as a hiring manager with the top tier candidates so that at the end I have the decision. And so step number one is the first interview is a hiring manager sell valuation. What I mean by that is I'm going To spend this call mostly selling the candidate in their eyes, but in my eyes I'm still evaluating them. So I'll set my agenda, I'll introduce myself and I'll usually give a 90 second spiel on on who pave is, why the company's awesome, what we're doing on this team and why specifically reached out to that rep, especially if it was outbound. From there I'll ask them why they took the call in the first place. If you recognize this is really similar to how we also started Discovery Call is if it's an outbound candidate or if you're an early stage, you have to fill your own funnel. You have to understand why this person took the call in the first place. Because they will not take a million random screens. A top rep always has the ability to get an interview, so there's a reason they're sitting in front of you. From there I'll usually do discovery on their career goals, what they're trying to accomplish. And then I begin the sell valuation questions. And those are high level big picture questions, similar to your machine gun questions but really big picture that allow me to understand the type of sale they're in, understand what their sales acumen is and let me allow them to brag about their sales process when in reality I'm using that to see if they know how to structure information. So I'll ask them really big questions like it seems like you've had a lot of success, everyone has a different style of selling, how do you sell? And I'll just see what they do with these really big open ended questions. Another good one is walk me through your sales process and then walk me through each step and you'll get people who just ramble on about these steps and their sales processes if it's going nowhere. And you'll get a sense of who actually understands what they're doing in their sales cycle versus who doesn't. And then at the end I'll usually have some sort of turnaround pitch where if they've knocked the COVID off the ball, I'll gas em up. I'll tell them this is why I think they'd be an awesome fit for the team. And I'll ask for permission to grill the living daylights out of them in the next interview. Once we get into interview number two, I pick one topic, usually sales process and I'm going super, super deep. And the key thing is I want them to map out every single step in their sales process and then I'm going to throw curve balls at them between each step. So if they say, my goal is to get to a problem in the first interview, I'll start throwing questions at them. Like, what do you do when someone's giving you no answers or one word answers? What do you do when someone starts multitasking? What do you do when someone pulls in three different competitors? What do you do when someone blocks your access to power? If the next step is getting access to power. So constantly throwing these curveballs at them to see what do you do when things go wrong? And this will go one of two ways. It's either going to get really uncomfortable and the rep is going to feel like, shoot, I'm getting pinned into a corner. Or it's going to feel like the best 30 minutes to President's Club interview you've ever heard. Because they're juiced up. They're like, this person gets that. Selling is not easy, but I've got an answer for everything. And there's a really fun back and forth exchange of awesome sales advice. Step three is the mock discovery call. We run them through a mock discovery with an AE and the hiring manager both together. And then if they pass that and there are a lot of keys, that's frankly the biggest place of drop off at that point. They've now met me two times and they've also met one to two peers on the team. And at this point, we should know if we want to hire this person. And that's why we structure the on site where we have a CEO involved usually, or some sort of executive to help sell the company. We'll have some other peer on the team and then we'll usually do one final hiring manager test, which is really that final missing piece of the equation. Four rounds, hiring manager, sell, hiring manager, grill, the mock discovery, and then the on site with three interviews in the super day.

Love it. How do you do that first. First call where you're selling them. Like, how do you balance out selling them and also evaluating them at the same time.

So there are a couple different places where people tend to screw this thing up. Number one, I'm coming into a call with the assumption that the person knows very little about our team other than what's on our website and what's on our HR team's LinkedIn page or whatever, which is garbage. So I'll start with a mini pitch up front. And I had it down to a science. It was why you should work for this company, why you should work for this team, and why I reached out to you. That's step one. From there, I want to understand their career goals and get them talking. This is still part of the sales process, but it's also part of me understanding what's important to them as a candidate and testing for culture in that first piece. Are you just looking for money? Are you looking for a team where you can contribute? Are you looking for a late stage thing where you're just going to come in and carry a bag and the moment quota goes up, you're going to leave, etc. Once I get that that's the most selling that really is happening in the early part of the interview. And then I transition to the sell valuate questions where I'm using the success that they've already shared with me.

Right.

They've probably told me that they've made club. They're the number one, number two, number three rep, whatever it is. And I'm using that success to evaluate them.

Right.

I'm testing for that conscious competence that we talked about earlier. Do you know how you sell? Do you know your sales style? Do you know how to run a sales process? And that is evaluation that is disguised as me giving you the opportunity to talk about why you're the best seller in the world.

Why do you start with the selling them? I'm curious. That's where you start, why?

So the reason for this is especially true in early stage and with outbound candidates. You'll get a lot of people who jump on these calls and they'll just sit back and they'll be like, all right, not looking, Tell me what you got. And they're not even in the mode to be evaluated yet. Now, if I've got someone who's been screened by a recruiter, they're prime. They're actively looking, yada, yada, yada, Great, I'll go and grill them. But I find that usually with the top reps, you have to constantly stay on top of these folks. You need to constantly pull them out of role. Because usually top reps get treated like gold and you usually have to sell them upfront to get them to even be open to being evaluated in the first place.

Yeah, well, I think the key there is context of an inbound person that's already kind of sold. Maybe you don't go as heavy an outbound person that you're trying to sell on. Just, hey, you should go through my process. That's a very different conversation. My best hires have been ones that probably didn't come through.

Recruiter, totally. Let's talk about and let's Round this thing out. Can you give me the quick one, two punch on? When you're sourcing candidates, when you're filling your recruiting funnel, how do you go about doing that effectively and getting a constant lead flow of candidates?

Mondo, I answer this question with a question. How do you find leads on LinkedIn? You figure out your ICP, you find the traits of that lead, you go do a search, you create a list and then you go outbound on em, right?

That's right.

As a leader, you're still in sales. You're always selling your team on something, a new methodology. You're selling them on the fact that you're not the best product, but you're not so bad that people won't buy you. You're trying to sell them on something on the new comp plan. And so that goes all the way back to the recruiting and hiring process. I hate to simplify it down to this, but what you tell your reps to do on prospecting days, that's what you do on your day. You need to hire some people.

I was literally going to say the exact same take on that one. Take what you're telling your SDRs to do and go do it on candidates. There are three sources of candidate flow for you as a hiring manager. Number one is outbound, number two is inbound and number three is referrals. The number one that you can control is your outbound and so 25 a week you figure out the companies that have similar sales cycles to you. You pull every mid market AE or SMBAE or enterprise AE you into a spreadsheet or there are tools like GEM that basically allow you to just sequence candidates. I've honestly run it out of outreach before in the past too. So you can do whatever you want to sequence people. And it's just a three step LinkedIn drip where it's like you connect with them. On the first step, use a three by three email where it's noticed you've had success at this company. I'm not assuming you're looking to look, here's what we're all about. It will help you calibrate and every once in a while you'll find one there. But then the last, most underestimated channel you is every single quarter. At the beginning of the quarter I'd be like, awesome. End of the quarter. And the gift of growth is we get to bring your friends onto the team. And so here's a spreadsheet with every single rep's name 10 times. You do not get to Leave this room until 10 friends are on this list and DM'd. And we hired literally half of our candidates from outbound and half of them from referral. And that's what you got to do, especially if you want to hire the best in the game, folks. All righty, Mark, it is the final two by two recap in our first ever two part hiring playbook.

What are your two two by two? Number one is make sure that in your loop you designate specific people to do a specific thing so they can get really good at it. Most people don't think about interviewing. They show up, they ask generic questions. But when you assign someone, say two core competencies to address and then have them prove to you how they're going to address and assess for those, you get really people that are really good at interviewing. And then number two is when you got them hooked, when they really want to do it, talk them out of it. And the people that you can talk out of, even though you're excited about it, they wouldn't have worked out anyway because they weren't up for the challenges and the rigor and the things that you have in your sales org. So talk them out of it before you send them the offer letter. I guarantee you your best candidates will love it and they will be more excited to work for you after you do that.

Number three, sell early grill after. The first way you get someone to opt into the process is you understand their goals. You sell them on the company you're building, the team you're building. But then the second way you get them to opt in is you gain their respect by grilling the heck out of them. And if it goes well, it's going to feel like the best 30 MPC interview you've ever heard. And then lastly, number four, I didn't touch on this a ton in my interview process, but it's similar to Mark's takeaway where each step in the process should test for a different dimension of sales. So the grill interview is testing for process, the mock discovery is testing for discovery, and then the on site, usually the peer will be testing for prospecting. And so don't have people ask the same 10 damn questions. Tell me about a time when you did the blah blah, blah blah. Or tell me about why you're leaving your job and have each person do something different so you have a fully rounded assessment of the candidate. So folks, if you like this two part playbook right here, you might want to play some of this stuff back. And I wrote all this stuff up in our last most recent newsletter, I actually wrote out the entire hiring process. And you can get that in the show notes or go to 30mpc.com newsletter. I think it's two weeks ago as of the date of this recording. All righty, folks, we will see you on the next one. Sam.