When hiring sales reps for an early-stage startup, it's important to look beyond outward presentation and impressive resumes. The guest emphasizes the need to read between the lines and spot warning signs during the interview process. They highlight several red flags to watch out for, including lack of preparation, inability to discuss past performance, excessive focus on compensation, and a lack of team player mentality. The guest also emphasizes the importance of hiring candidates who can handle rejection and demonstrate resilience. They stress the need for a systematic and standardized hiring process to ensure better outcomes.
Take Aways:
Look for candidates who demonstrate intellectual curiosity and have prepared for the interview.
Pay attention to how candidates discuss their past performance and their ability to take ownership of both successes and failures.
Beware of candidates who are solely motivated by compensation and don't prioritize mission and vision alignment.
Hire team players who demonstrate coachability and good listening skills.
Assess candidates' ability to handle rejection and their level of resilience.
There are a number of red flags that you need to steer away from in those early stages of being a B2B startup.
If you fail to avoid these red flags that can spell some pretty costly mistakes and a bleak future for your organization. So what are the red flags that you should be keeping an eye out for and how can you avoid them in the interview process when you're looking to bring on and build out your sales team?
One of the first things that [:
If you have a candidate who shows up knowing nothing about your company, your product, your competitors, the industry, that's a big red flag. One of the things that I commonly look at when I've built sales teams is the level of intellectual curiosity that each rep has. And that will show up in an interview.
ieve it or not, the level of [:
So if they're coming to you looking for a job unprepared, what are they going to do when you put them in a client facing situation?
another red flag to watch out for is to pay attention to candidates who can't. Or won't talk about their past performance
and positive or negative what you're looking for in this is not only the ability to discuss what those results were, but ownership, it's easy to talk about where you did well, but. It's a lot more challenging, especially in an interview to talk about what you did poorly. And I would almost make the argument that you really want to tap into the failure, failures that particular rep had and really dig into.
re they owning what they did [:
But another thing that you're looking for is the ability to own the results, good or bad, because that's going to be indicative of how they engage or interact in your environment when something goes wrong or something isn't to your expectations. Do they own their job? Do they own their desk?
Now, we all know, and at this point, it's almost a cliche that there's an expectation that sales reps have an appropriate level of.
t really spend a lot of time [:
Is to talk through the previous job history, why did they join sales? Why did they move from company X to company Y? And if the answers start becoming consistent, then you should give you some pause. A good candidate is not only going to be money motivated, but when they're making career decisions on company a or company B, there should be a push pull factor that they talk about.
And this ties into the ownership component as well. And if they're only mentioning, move for the money, move for the money throughout the process, that'll give you an indication of what the shelf life is for that candidate.
th organization, you have to [:
That's all great. That isn't mutually exclusive from being a team player. What you're really looking for are those. Candidates who do their own thing and don't demonstrate coach ability, don't demonstrate good listing skills. Those are the types of candidates that you want to avoid because they're going to wreck your internal dynamics and they're also going to wreck your customer reputation.
So be careful with hiring. Candidates who are in it purely for themselves and and aren't really wired. To be in a highly collaborative environment where there's a lot of different responsibilities that they have to bring to the table. This isn't a comprehensive list, but it gives you a framework for operating within and some of the big red flags that you should be paying attention to.
Obviously, [:
And this is another area where you want to get really tactical and really granular about how. They dealt with rejection in the job, and you might want to throw out something as innocuous as a client wants a demo. Your sales engineer isn't available on that day. How do you handle the situation?
Even more tricky because you [:
It's a discipline that you're going to need to build, and it's a discipline that you're going to need to be systematized around. You can't just wing this. 1 of the most common ways that sales leaders flame out in their roles at early stage or accelerating growth startups is by making the wrong hire or not seeing the warning signs or red flags.
of a potential bad hire. These are just a handful of ways that you can avoid those red flags and make better hiring decisions. And ultimately, the more standardized you are in your process, the better your hiring outcomes will be.
