Speaker recounts scaling a commercial sales team from a handful to 25 reps and explains hiring and retention practices that worked. Core points: prioritize character and coachability over strict resume credentials; hire complementary strengths (technical acumen or sales instinct) and train the rest; ensure strong onboarding, culture, and growth paths to prevent churn.
When I started with Comfort Systems, we had a very small team. When I left, there was 25 high performing sales reps that I led. Four of them were there originally when I showed up. All of the rest of them were people I hired over that period of time. What most people do is they hire off the resume. Oh, this person has worked in the commercial world. Right. And what I found is one, it's very hard to find people out there. I mean there is a talent war as everybody knows and it's both on the field admin side as well as sales side. But nobody goes to work unless there is a salesperson selling something profitable. So it starts with that. And so I would look at what kind of attributes we are looking for. And so for me the number one thing was character. All of these people are going to have some strengths and they're going to have some blind spots that we're going to need to address taking the rest away. So for instance, let's say I found somebody that had some good technical acumen in the commercial world but they didn't have any sales experience. But I knew based on doing some assessments with them and interviews that they had the right DNA that I could teach them the rest of it. So if they're coachable and they have that right internal DNA, then we can take them the rest away. So whatever people you get, you have to already think about that. Most likely you're going to need to take them the rest of the way and it could be, maybe it's on the other side. So like with agreement sales they don't have to have all the technical acumen. So maybe they've got some real superpowers on the sales or business development side. But we're going to have to help them learn enough so that they can go in and competently sell maintenance agreements. So those were the things that, that I did. And that of course leads into if you're going to hire a players, you better have a culture that is going to help these people continue to grow. And that's where I think most people fall apart is they hire good people but they don't onboard them for success and there's no growth path for them. So these people get bored and then they go work for your competition and start crushing it for them instead of you.
