Lucas Price and veteran sales leader Mike Muhlfelder discuss strategies for effectively screening sales candidates. Mike shares his experiences and insights from over 30 years in B2B sales. They dive into critical questions to identify top talent, the importance of accountability, and how salespeople can communicate their value. Learn practical tips for navigating the complexities of hiring in the sales field and ensuring candidate-driven success. Join the conversation to enhance your hiring process and build an elite sales team.
Take Aways
Challenge of Predicting Success: Interviews alone aren't always indicative of a candidate’s future performance in sales roles.
Importance of Personal Accountability: It’s crucial to understand if a candidate takes responsibility for their situation or shifts blame when things go awry.
Effective Screening Questions: Asking questions to determine a candidate's motivation and their ability to simplify complex topics can provide valuable insights.
Role of Context in Job Performance: Changes in comp plans or territories test a salesperson’s resilience and adaptability.
Learning from Experience: Mike shares that valuable hiring lessons often arise from dealing with previous hiring mistakes.
Now you talk to another candidate, maybe not as good, but they still might have what it takes to succeed. Does this ever keep happening to you? One of the topics we're going to be covering today is how to screen for sellers in a way that's both efficient and effective to help you deal with this issue.
I'm excited to discuss that and more with our guest, Mike Mulfelder. A Boston based sales leader with a career in B2B sales of over 30 years. He started off as an individual contributor and grew into a variety of sales leadership roles in companies from startups to some of the largest tech companies in the world.
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[00:01:01] Mike Muhfelder: Thank you, Lucas. It's great to be here.
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[00:01:12] Mike Muhfelder: This is huge, and people talk about this and write about it quite a bit, that a big part of success or failure in an organization, especially sales, because you have higher turnover, is how well you hire people. And in the past, I admit, I have had people say, Oh, Mike's not real good at hiring people.
The reality, and perhaps there was truth to that. I'm not, I don't get to really weigh in on it. The problem with hiring salespeople is that if you're a half decent salesperson, you will interview well. But you may not know as the leader what you have until that person is on board. So and then you get into all kinds of stuff.
a process. It's fairly rigid [:
This is how we qualify blah blah. I like I laid it all out I brought him on board, could not get him to do anything along the lines of the process. He fought it and fought it. Meanwhile, by the way, he's closing deals. He's top of the heap, but the amount of broken glass behind him was excruciating.
And I ended up about four months in having to terminate him. And it was brutal. And in the last conversation I said to him, I don't understand why won't you do any of the things that we're asking you to do? I was so upfront with you in the process that this is how it was going to work. And he said, I didn't think you were serious. Now could I have mitigated that? Could I have figured that out in the interview? Probably not in the interview, but maybe I could have done a better job with reference checking, but you're going to have a failure rate, when you're hiring salespeople is my point. Now, I have learned over time that there are some things.
ay. You don't learn anything [:
None. People want to believe it, but no, even if Taylor Swift is so hot right now, but when you look at her backstory, it's not like she just signed a record deal and became You know, a billionaire. I'm no Taylor Swift for sure. But what, so one of the things that I learned and I, we use this also in qualifying deals is the first question I ask a candidate is what's going on in your current situation?
That you're, that you've taken this interview. Now I may know that they got laid off or something happened and I may know what the reason is that they have said, but what I'm looking for, and I like, I'm like, I'm showing my cards right now. So if anybody watches the podcast, they're going to know how to interview with me.
But what I'm looking for is, are they running from something or running to something, and are they accountable and responsible for the situation that they're in?
on is is to blame is to make [:
They're going to do the same thing.
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And about 30 percent of the time, the answer that I get from sales leaders is the training isn't good enough. The, we didn't have the right tools. The territories weren't organized properly or whatever. What I find with yardstick is people if that 30 percent who say those things typically aren't interested.
that it's a person issue, a [:
And so you're looking for. Does this candidate believe they're in control or are they going to point and blame this to some other issue?
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One is that we don't control anything that's happening around us. We control what we say. We control our actions. That's it. A lot of times we don't even control what we think because we're getting all this stuff thrown at us constantly, either from other, people in our lives or social media or whatever.
in a really great situation [:
[00:06:05] Lucas Price: Sometimes people are victims, right? How do you think someone should handle that in an interview situation?
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There are Absolutely things that happen to people that are horrific where they are the victim In their victimized in terrible ways And I want to separate that. That's not, that's not what I'm talking about. Like when you have a person who's coming to you for a job and they're like, Oh they changed my territory and and now I couldn't make my number.
ation. I know I could, and I [:
Maybe there is no silver lining and that's fine to say to a, to say to a hiring manager, they changed my comp plan. There's no way I can make my OTE, even if I crush my number and I can crush my number. I need to make this much money. I'm not going to make that here. That's just business. So I have to go somewhere where I can make, where I have an opportunity to make that money and more, and I'm not going to change the comp plan.
I've had this exact conversation with people. I'm not going to change the comp plan. I can complain about it. But I'm not going to change it. I either have to live with it or I have to make a move. And that is a completely acceptable answer versus they changed my comp plan. I can't make any money. That's the difference between being victimized and being a victim. And again, two very different things.
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And I'd love you to respond to it to get your thoughts. It's can you explain something complicated that you understand? Can you explain 30 seconds? And part of what I'm looking for there is, Their communication ability, but also underlying is like, is this somebody who has a passion about something who's a passion about something that's complicated, that they have been passionate enough about it, that they really understand the complexity and know how to simplify it.
So it's a two layered question. It's not the most, in deep psychological question, but I think it's a good way to ease people into that and you love to hear your thoughts on,
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What I'll do in the screening interview is I'll ask what do you know about the company? Whatever company it is that I'm so because I do fractional work so it could be different companies What do you know about the company and I want to understand did they just go to the website like?
Oh, mike moelfelders with calm ocean sales. He's a fractional sales leader I got that doesn't tell me anything versus did you take the information synthesize it and can you explain it back to me? And then the second thing I want to know is what do you know about me? It's not an ego question. It's, did you do research? Have you applied some thought to this or did you just show up for the interview? Because again, if I'm, if it's a transactional sale, 1, 200, 1, 500 a year it's, a snack food route for PepsiCo or something like that, different questions.
na that's required for those [:
I really appreciate you sharing that with us in the Hippocratic oath of, first do no harm and appreciate that observation that you shared with us.
