12 min read
Purpose
Hiring sales talent is a painful, expensive process that early stage companies (Seed — Series C) are getting horribly wrong. Despite throwing time and money at the problem, companies are unable to build an interview process that properly attracts and vets the right sales talent for their business.
We crafted this guide for early-stage (Seed — Series C) executives building their founding GTM team. We have helped over 1,000 companies hire with Bravado Talent, spanning nearly every segment, industry, location, and sector. What follows is a collection of best practices and insights gleaned from those years of experience.
However, this guide isn’t a recipe meant to be followed down to the last instruction. Businesses are complex and needs are varied, so adapt this advice to your use case based on product and industry.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to refine your process, dive in and let us help you find the perfect fit for your team.
You will learn how to:
Define criteria
In our experience, most early-stage executives struggle to answer the most basic question that precedes sales hiring: What actually makes a good sales rep at your company?
When you set out to hire for a new role, you must start here.
Purpose
Hiring sales talent is a painful, expensive process that early stage companies (Seed — Series C) are getting horribly wrong. Despite throwing time and money at the problem, companies are unable to build an interview process that properly attracts and vets the right sales talent for their business.
We crafted this guide for early-stage (Seed — Series C) executives building their founding GTM team. We have helped over 1,000 companies hire with Bravado Talent, spanning nearly every segment, industry, location, and sector. What follows is a collection of best practices and insights gleaned from those years of experience.
However, this guide isn’t a recipe meant to be followed down to the last instruction. Businesses are complex and needs are varied, so adapt this advice to your use case based on product and industry.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to refine your process, dive in and let us help you find the perfect fit for your team.
You will learn how to:
Define criteria
In our experience, most early-stage executives struggle to answer the most basic question that precedes sales hiring: What actually makes a good sales rep at your company?
When you set out to hire for a new role, you must start here. While founders are adept at giving motivational locker room speeches filled with great platitudes (“hustle, grit, charisma, runs through walls, and passion”) you will need to get more granular. Define exactly what you’re looking for in this next hire, even if you think it might be difficult to measure.
The specific skills needed may vary slightly from company to company based on industry and product, but we have listed some common skills critical to an early-stage sales team’s success. We break out our criteria into three distinct categories: hard skills, soft skills, and compatibility.
Hard skills
Metrics
• Proven track record of hitting and exceeding quota.
• How do they think about the numbers pertaining to the health of a business?
• Understanding and ownership over KPIs that impact an early-stage business.
Prospecting / outbound mastery
Most early-stage companies lack demand for their product, so you will want someone who is adept at building their own pipeline (e.g. experience as an SDR or outbound prospecting). Otherwise, they’re more likely to get “stuck.”
Previous ICP / sales motion
• Have they sold to their buyer persona / department before.
• Have they sold a similar deal size / technically complex product before?
• Have they sold deals that take a similar cycle / timeline as yours?
Experience selling at a previous early-stage startup
Early-stage sales, where the product and value prop shift weekly, requires nimble feet. Hiring a sales rep who has only sold at Google or Stripe is extremely risky if your company doesn’t have the same number of inbound leads or PDE roadmap stability as Google or Stripe.
Evangelism / thought leadership / raw IQ
There is no “script” when selling an early-stage product. You need someone who is quick on their feet, has domain expertise in their field, and can match wits with customers and uncover new paths to closing deals, fast.
Soft skills
Scrappy
Early-stage companies don’t offer the luxury of proper onboarding, sales training, enablement teams, resources, long ramp times, etc. Yet many sales reps require these things to produce. You need someone who can deliver an incredible sales cycle and customer experience without a huge budget, excessive travel, and lavish on-site dinners for clients.
Customer-success obsessive
Closing deals and “throwing them over the fence” doesn’t work for early-stage businesses. Customer retention is one of the single most important metrics at your company, and you need sales reps who have proven track records of building long-term, successful relationships with their clients. A “Sign it and Forget It” mentality won’t cut it in this environment.
Multi-stakeholder management
Stakeholder management involves both external aspects (selling to executives and individual users) and internal (working closely with PDE / Finance / Operations to infuse the business with insights from the market).
High-performance culture / ethic
Early-stage startups are a grind. If your sales rep is looking for a 9-5 job, tell them to keep looking elsewhere. Properly set expectations to ensure there is no future misalignment.
Structuring the interview process and asking the questions that reveal
After helping over 1,100 companies hire sales talent on Bravado, we’ve seen every permutation the sales interview process and most companies get it woefully wrong: they start with an overly cumbersome, ultramarathon endurance contest of a process, then (shockingly) fall behind on hiring goals. The ensuing pressure and panic then lead to hiring managers throwing unqualified bodies at the problem, which lands leaders with low-quality sales teams.
Boiled down, the two main challenges to building an effective interview process are:
- The best sales candidates are off the market in a matter of days.
- Failure to properly vet candidates upfront leads to an expensive failure for the business.
The best companies run intensive, short interview processes. They are intensive in that they deeply test and validate that the candidate is a great fit to scale revenue. They are short in that they get top candidate prospects to sign before they have the chance to get into a bidding war with other offers on the table. Speed is key if you want to hire the best.
This process will look slightly different for different organizations and based on the hire, but use this as a good rule of thumb:
- Number of vetted 1st interviews: 5-8
- Total number of interviews: 20
- First interview to offer: 10 days
Sourcing
Before we begin, a preamble on sourcing...
On average, the top 5% of sales talent is only on the market for 13 days. Yet, most companies run a much longer interview process because they interview far too many low-quality candidates to begin with, requiring the overcomplicated and lengthy process that inadvertently screens out top candidates.
You must run a sourcing process that screens out low-quality applicants from ever entering your interview stage in the first place, keep your interview process short and sweet, and then strike while the iron is hot.
Additionally, many companies are tempted to hire based on previous experience. For example, you might think hiring reps who worked at Uber and Airbnb have seen outlier success and worked in a competitive marketplace that got to scale, so they can apply the same learnings at your startup. Here’s the problem with that logic: even a few years’ difference working at these companies actually does make a massive difference. Reps who worked at Uber in 2012 have a fundamentally different skill set than reps who were successful at Uber in 2018. Billions of dollars in funding attract scalers, not scrappy builders. Your early-stage startup isn’t Uber (yet), so it is probably not the right hire profile to hire at this stage.
A better way to source? Cross-reference public revenue data against your ideal soft skill set. Tools like Bravado, which combine data from Crunchbase, Pitchbook, and LinkedIn, help you understand which stage of the organization these reps worked for in their respective startups. From there, you can glean information about candidates’ grit, hustle, comfort with ambiguity, lack of structure, and willingness to trailblaze.
Interview 1: Earn the right
Assuming you have filtered only top sellers into your interview process via thorough screening (or using a vetted marketplace like Bravado), the first interview should focus primarily on selling the candidate on your company. Top sales talent has choices. If you don’t do an outstanding job convincing them to take a bet on your fledging business, they will very quickly check out.
Put on your sales hat and boost candidates’ excitement through the roof. Spend the first 15-20 minutes painting the BIG vision for your company and product, while levelsetting the required scrappiness and hard work needed to be successful. This vets out the “scalers” who aren’t looking for a grind.
Then, open up the floor for the last 10-15 minutes to allow the candidate to explain why they are the right fit to join a competitive, fast-growing business. This serves as a culture fit and “vibe” test to see if the candidate is someone you’d enjoy building with.
If you are leaning in, end the call by taking control of the process and setting clear expectations: “We run an intensive, short interview process designed not to waste time. There are 3 more interviews that we will schedule over the next 5-7 days. Assuming we are both in after those conversations, we will get an offer to you before the end of next week.”
This will put you in the driver’s seat with top candidates who are accustomed to the general levels of incompetence most companies show in running an expedited process.
Interview 2: Soft skills
It is much more important to assess soft skills in early-stage sales than hard skills. The process itself is undefined and apt to change, so it’s critical to get someone with the DNA to thrive in a scrappy, in-flux environment vs. someone who can sell when everything goes right. As a refresher, here are the key characteristics you are looking for:
- Scrappy
- Customer-success obsessive
- Multi-stakeholder management
- High-performance culture / ethic
Here are some specific questions you can use to dig in:
-
Curiosity
- What is something you recently learned that excited you, and why?
- What is a problem you are passionate about solving, and how would you approach it?
- If you could explore any topic in depth, what would it be and what draws you to it?
-
Self-awareness
- How would you explain a complex concept you understand well to someone unfamiliar with it?
- How do you handle situations where you don’t know the answer to something?
-
Accountability
- Tell me about a situation where you had to take responsibility for a project or task that didn’t go as planned. What did you do to address the issues?
- What steps do you take to learn from your mistakes or failures? Can you give a specific example of how you applied this learning?
- How do you manage situations where you might be held accountable for factors outside of your control?
-
Comfort with the unknown
- Can you describe a time when you had to make a decision without having all the information? How did you approach it, and what was the outcome?
- How do you cope with uncertainty or ambiguity in your job? Can you provide an example?
-
Grit
- Have you ever had to work on something for an extended period without seeing immediate results? How did you stay motivated?
- What is the most difficult obstacle you have overcome in your professional or personal life? How did you manage to do it?
- Can you share an experience where you had to put in an extraordinary amount of effort to achieve a goal? What kept you going?
Interview 3a: RIP mock calls + presentations
After the candidate has passed the soft skills assessment, it’s time to move on to hard skills. While it’s a common industry standard to use mock discovery or mock sales pitches, both have extremely high false positives and are one of the key reasons why companies hire the wrong sales professionals.
Mock assessments simply measure someone’s ability to act. Like a stand-up comic or magician, it’s a performative recitation of lines in which a candidate takes their surface-level understanding of something and either pretends to be an expert on it or uses charisma and charm in place of substance.
After helping over 1,000 companies hire sales talent at Bravado, we can safely say that there’s almost an inverse correlation between how good someone is at mock calls / demos and how good they are at actually closing deals.
The difference between a mediocre and a great salesperson is not their ability to sound charming on a cold call or their ability to give a good demo. Almost all sellers can do both with practice. It’s their ability to step up and deliver in real-time under pressure when you need a deal closed. But there is no way to simulate the pressure of talking to an actual CTO or CMO with a multi-million dollar deal on the line. And even if there was, it takes weeks to build the requisite knowledge and expertise needed to properly objection handle for your specific product. Attempting to do so leads to hiring exactly the wrong seller.
Instead, the most successful sales teams use Deal Reviews to uncover hard skills.
Interview 3b: Deal review
Here are the key hard skills of top-performing AEs:
- Proven track record of hitting and exceeding quota
- Prospecting / outbound mastery
- Previous ICP / sales motion
- Experience selling at an early-stage startup
- Evangelism / thought leadership / raw IQ
Deal reviews are the perfect way to gain an in-depth understanding of a seller’s true sales acumen and skills. They are impossible to game and quickly separate top-performing sellers from the pack. Simply ask the candidate to step-by-step walk you through different types of deals they have closed, omitting no details. Pepper in questions throughout their review to dig into their process and mindset.
Here are the types of deals you will want to hear about:
Tell me about the biggest deal you have ever closed.
Tell me about a deal you closed that nobody believed would close.
Tell me about a deal you closed based on serendipity / random change.
Tell me about a deal you closed in a vertical or space that was new to the company.
Tell me about a deal you would have bet your life on closing, but somehow it just never did.
Tell me about a deal you closed that took forever, and how you finally managed to close it.
Tell me about the hardest product you ever had to sell, and how you managed to sell it.
Here’s what you are looking for:
Prospecting
How did the AE get in touch with their accounts? Were the deals sourced for them, or can they break into enterprise accounts themselves? How did they do it?
Relationships
What sort of trust did they engender with their customers? On what level of detail can they speak about each person involved with the account?
Sales Process
How long did the process take? How many people were involved? What challenges did they run into, and how did they overcome them?
Intelligence
How articulate is the rep when talking about sales? How well do they understand the psychology and the process of selling?
Creativity
How clever is this seller at overcoming challenges or finding out-of-the-box ways to get a deal closed?
If you walk away from the interview thinking, “Wow, this person deeply understands sales and would be a great mind to have on our sales team” — it’s time to make an offer. If you don’t, move on immediately. This assessment will make it clear if you want to hire a seller or not.
Seal the deal: nailing candidate communications
Our final advice to help you run a smooth interview process and close the deal with your top candidates: you must nail your candidate communication. Often overlooked, candidate comms play a critical role in making a successful hire.
Here are our four key pillars for candidate communication during the interview process:
- Multi-channel
- Be timely
- Quarterback the communication
- Get the details right
Multi-channel
Subliminally influencing the candidate’s thoughts about the role comes from timely communication and multi-channeling.
Always send the candidate formal feedback and set up next steps for the process via email. You can also use text messaging to break the formal barrier. This is often where you can elicit raw, unfiltered thoughts from the candidate, allowing you to better understand where they sit with the process and company, and address any reservations they may have.
Be timely
Speed is incredibly important. Top candidates won’t wait to hear back from you before moving on to other great offers. Give candidates feedback via email within 24 hours of your interview. There should be no questions as to the next steps in the process, or when they can expect to hear back from you again.
Quarterback the communication
There should be no surprises during the interview process, in part because there is no such thing as over-communicating during this process. Ensure the candidate is well-prepped on what will be covered and what to expect in each interview stage, and that you are aligned after each stage. Quarterback the communication internally and with the candidate directly when other stakeholders are brought into the process.
Get the details right
Small details count. Make sure all logistical aspects of the process are set up correctly — Zoom links are in the calendar invites, email reminders are sent out, and all stakeholders know which stage of the interview process they are on and what is being measured.
We hope this guide helps you beat the odds and hire the right sales team for your business. If you’re interested in learning more about hiring vetted candidates through Bravado Talent.
