In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez guides event leaders through one of the most critical and misunderstood levers in scaling a profitable live event: hiring the right sales rep. Drawing from years of hands-on experience and more than one hundred successful sales hires, Rudy breaks down the hidden costs of bringing on the wrong person and reveals the strategic blueprint his team uses to consistently recruit A-players who drive revenue, elevate attendee experience, and stay aligned with the mission of the event.

Rudy begins by illustrating the importance of building a strategic, high-ROI hiring process from the ground up. He explains how the scorecard—a detailed, mission-driven document—anchors every step of the decision-making process. Instead of relying on intuition or hurried judgments, Rudy shows how event leaders can tie each hiring choice to clear outcomes, core values, and the measurable results that matter most for high-ticket live events. This foundational approach ensures alignment long before the first interview even takes place.

From there, Rudy introduces listeners to his Four-Step “Sourcing–Selecting–Screening–Selling” Framework. Through a conversational and deeply practical exploration, he demonstrates how thinking beyond job boards, tapping into existing networks, and evaluating candidates through structured interviews protects event leaders from costly mistakes. He brings special attention to the power of competency interviews, personality assessments, and rejection-resilience testing—all designed to reveal whether a candidate genuinely has the nature, drive, and emotional stability required in the high-touch world of live event sales. Rudy’s detailed walkthrough dissolves the mystery behind hiring and replaces it with a repeatable process any event leader can follow.

As the episode unfolds, Rudy discusses the crossroads many leaders eventually reach: whether to run the entire hiring process themselves, partner with a recruiter, or bring on a fractional sales team. With honesty and clarity, he lays out the trade-offs of each path. DIY hiring may offer control but demands enormous time and oversight. Recruiters can help, but often without deep contextual alignment. Fractional sales teams, in contrast, offer built-in strategy, tested systems, and performance-based motivation—making them an increasingly attractive option for event leaders committed to high-impact experiences.

Throughout the episode, Rudy’s tone is warm, professional, and encouraging. His insights offer both strategic clarity and the motivation event leaders need to take action. Whether you are planning your next live event, scaling an existing experience, or preparing to expand your team, this episode provides the frameworks and confidence to build a sales force worthy of the transformation you’re creating.

Tune in to learn how to hire with intention, onboard with confidence, and lead events that generate both impact and profit.

Want to connect with Rudy?

Book a Call: https://go.oncehub.com/rodolforodriguez2

Website: https://virtualeventsalesteam.com/

HPES Podcast: https://virtualeventsalesteam.com/hpespodcast/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rudy.rodriguez.963871/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rodolforodriguezjr1/

Are you struggling to find the right sales rep for your business? Do you find yourself constantly looking through resumes and conducting endless interviews only to hire someone who ultimately doesn't end up meeting your expectations? In this video, I'm going to share with you the tried and true methods we use to hire. In fact, the hard truth is that bad hires will waste your time and they will waste your money. According to Dr. Brad Smart, a world-renowned hiring expert, the average cost of a mishire in your business could be as much between 5 and 27 times what you pay them on an annual basis. It's staggering. To add to that, the cost of time could be as much as 300 hours between you and your team and other opportunity costs that may be involved as well. It can add up. Over the last several years, we've hired over 100 sales reps using a sales process that we've learned from top grading, Dr. Brad Smart, as well as Who author Jeff Smart and some insight from other mentors, including Chet Holmes. I'm going to share with you here the exact process and blueprint that we've used to hire consistent performers. First and foremost, you have to create a scorecard. What is a scorecard? It's a detailed job description. But beyond the detailed job description, it goes into very specific, what's the mission of the position? How do you connect to the mission of the company? And what are the specific results or outcomes that that person is accountable for? You can also include compensation and core values and essentially everything in one card that can be used not only as a hiring tool, but also for accountability and reflection on performance.

Being able to quantify all that into a scorecard is the first step, which is oftentimes overlooked. Once you have that scorecard, you can then take that scorecard and you can now start to source, looking for candidates for your position. Oftentimes people use job boards like Indeed, maybe even recruiters. But I recommend that you start thinking outside the box. Start exploring more industry-specific platforms, networking events, even social media groups. We personally focus primarily on referrals from our existing sales professionals, because an A-player knows other A-players, or asking people in our network who they know. I find that is the best way to build that bench and even doing it before you need people, creating that virtual bench, which is another conversation. You want to look for candidates who have a proven track record of success in high-ticket sales and who align with your company values. Now, that being said, I want to say, make an important note here. I believe it's important to hire more based on nature versus nurture. So hiring someone who is in their nature to have sales aptitude, which are things like drive, optimism, trust, and other abilities. I believe that's more important than specialized knowledge about your business or even your industry. I think that can be taught, but the aptitude is what needs to be screened for. Our primary method that we do for that is we use a complex personality assessment, but the primary driver from that is the disk assessment. We look for candidates who are primary I, which is hyper interactive, or the secondary D we found, tried and true, that is the most consistent personality profile that demonstrates aptitude for a sales position.

Next, once you've sourced your candidates, it's time to select or interview those candidates. You want to use a structured interview process, and it can ensure that you're asking the right fit questions and getting information you need to make an informed decision. No voodoo interview hiring process. They talk about that in the book, with this idea, you have a candidate and you don't have any structural process. So they're just going from person to person and nobody's really asking them any quality questions that's being able to paint a full picture. It's more based on hiring someone that you like. And at the end of the day, that tends to not be the best hire. What we use is a process that we've combined from Who and Top Grading. The first step is doing a career snapshot. So having them submit some information and a piece of software that we use that shows us their career over time. Then we help them do that personality assessment and those things line up. Then we'll do a phone screening interview. On that phone screen interview, it's important to focus on a couple of key things. One, talk about their recent work history. You go into the you, go further back later on, but also talk about their goals. What are their goals? What are their plans for the future? You want to know that early on because it's important that what you're doing is in alignment with where they want to be in three or five years. Otherwise, you're churning and burning and just not getting proper alignment. No matter what they say in that initial interview, which is normally about 20 or 30 minutes, no matter what they say towards the end of the interview, what we learn from Chet Holmes is to say, I'm not quite sure I'm hearing A-player material. Obviously do it with a straight face and a very tactful kind way. What's going to happen is when they hear that question, they're going to respond. Either they're going to defend their position and be like, Hey, what are you talking about?

Look at all this experience or look at all the skills. Absolutely. Of course I am. What's missing? Let's talk about it. Or they're going to duck out and say, you're probably right. Maybe it's not for me. They're going to excuse themselves. What that is, is the first introduction to rejection and seeing how they interact with rejection, which is a key indicator of success when it comes to a sales position. Assuming you have a great phone screen interview, then moving them into, we call competency interviews and competency interviews is when you get to really dive into what are the competencies of your business that are most important to you in a candidate. This is a separate interview. Again, normally about 20 or 30 minutes each. We recommend that if you have a team to have an interview with different members of the team and each member asks a different competency, we recommend at least three competencies, maybe five. You can do more. There's actually up to 52 that you can select from. We just go with a core three, which is integrity, teamwork, and intelligence. Then the other benefit of that is that other team members will then get to contribute to the interview process itself. You'll have a better whole picture. And there's clear questions that go along with those competencies that you can ask. So there's no voodoo hiring question guesses. Last but not least, if they move through the competency interview process, which by the way, is the whole thing being managed by the hiring manager from phone screening to competencies up until the final interview, we call it the tandem two-on-one interview. In that interview it is normally the hiring manager and you as a CEO or whoever the CEO might be and going through extensive questions that go from all the way from high school up to you wanting to be able to tell the whole picture of the person. So you get a good sense of where they're going.

At this point, the candidate is probably a very sharp candidate and you're probably really enrolled in the idea of working with this candidate because he put in so much time and effort and you can't jump forward right away. You have to do the next step, which are reference checks. Reference checks are so critical. I've tried this. I skipped them in the past and it bit me in the butt or I didn't listen to them in the past and it caught up with me. I can't stress this enough. I recommend doing at least three to five reference checks that you select as the interviewer, not the candidates putting up their friends and family as references. But based on the career history, you're able to figure out who are the best references for that candidate. Then having the candidate themselves arrange those references on your calendar, which will also be a great indicator of their ability to follow through and follow up and also set appointments and also get a sense for the trust that they have with their recent employers or people they've worked with. It's a huge indicator of teacher performance. Then the fourth S in this process is sell. Yes, you have to sell a great A-player candidate on why they should work for you. Likely they're probably already in another opportunity or another position and they have to have reasons that come with you or for you. In addition to compensation and incentives, which are really important, you have to have more motivation than just a base salary. You want to look for someone who's driven by performance-based incentives, such as commissions and bonuses, tight targets. I really encourage you to look for someone who's motivated beyond economics. You have to have economic motivation, but someone who's really willing to put the mission of your company, your business above the commission. So the process, the benefit to doing this process is not only do you get a great sales rep and that will produce consistent results and will stick around, but it also ensures that you have a smooth onboarding process and great retention.

You put in all this effort to get a sales rep. You want to make sure they stick around. I'll give a quick, simple example. When we really dialed in this process, there was one situation where we had a client where we ended up sourcing a hundred applicants. We're going to hire one person from a hundred applicants. We took them through this process and we ended up with two finalists. And we went with both of the finalists because we were just so impressed by both of them. Within 30 days, their first month on deck, because we followed this process to a T, both of those candidates did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales for the business each. That's what's possible if you're willing to take the time to do this thorough process. Higher, slow, fire fast. That's the motto. Who am I? My name is Rudy Rodriguez. I'm the co-founder of Wingman Coaching, and we help small businesses to grow their companies by using sales teams. There's actually a great case study on Topgrading’s website that you can reference here in the article or here in the video nearby. And that shows an example that Topgrading did on us because we've been working with the Topgrading company for several years now. So you can read more about us there, but let's get back to you. Here's the main struggle with hiring. One, you're likely right now doing all the calls yourself. And one, if you have a lot of sales calls, it's eating up your capacity to do other things in your business like marketing and strategy and working on your business, which can be a huge opportunity cost to you. The other component is here, because you're wearing so many hats, you might not have time to follow up with everybody. You just know that opportunity is slipping through the cracks with your clients and customers.

And maybe you're struggling to convert because you don't feel like, hey, I'm a salesperson and this is not my thing. I wish I had somebody here that was better at this. At the same time, you don't want to babysit. You don't want to have to hire people and sit over the shoulders and babysit. Then you want someone who's going to be responsible and is going to be forward-looking and accountable. All of this can be pretty darn time-consuming. Between sourcing, interviewing, hiring, training, managing sales reps, it can be a lot. So there is a solution. So I'm going to share a few options here. One, you can do it yourself. I believe in you. Yes, it'll be an investment of time and money. As I mentioned, all these things that can be done. There's great books out there that you can learn or workshops you can take. But at the end of the day, it's going to be an investment of time and money. When you account for sourcing, interview, hiring, onboarding, training, not even accounting for sales CRMs, data entry and dashboard creation, along with strategy. Oftentimes that's a six-figure plus price tag. Pretty normal, pretty typical for that type of function. So you can do that yourself. You can also hire a recruiter. There's plenty of recruiting companies out there that will place someone in your business. The normal recruiting model is that you normally will pay the recruiter somewhere between 20% to 33%, by an average of about 25% of their annual salary that you're going to pay them or the projected annual income. You'll negotiate that with the recruiter, which a salesperson tends to make, especially their senior salesperson, it's a six-figure to multiple six-figure oftentimes income that's being paid and you're paying 25% of that just to recruit them. Yeah, that's an option and you can do that.

Now there's a third solution, which is partnering with a fractional sales team. Partnering with a company who's a specialist in the self-function of a business. They have a wide range of experience working with several businesses in related industries. They can take all the experience to create a strategy and work with you to grow your business and mostly be compensated on the upside of that, which is the sales that are being produced by the fractional sales team. If you found this video to be valuable and insightful, I highly recommend sharing it with someone who would benefit from it as well. Also, if you're curious to learn more on how you could potentially outsource your sales team to a fractional sales team, I invite you to come to our website, click the link here by the video, and schedule a consultation with myself and a member of our team. We'll be more than happy to walk you through the step-by-step blueprint we use to consistently help our clients to grow and scale their businesses using a sales team. So, have a wonderful day and we'll see you on the other side.