When sports teams scout talent, they invite them to a workout. The workout is a prescribed series of mental, physical, and psychological exercises that allow the coaches to observe the athletes performing the exact things required of them if selected for the team. That happens at the NFL Combine, a multi-day event where the best incoming cohort of football players can showcase their elite-level talent to all 32 NFL teams.

It’s a job interview.

The NFL (the interviewer) has crafted and curated events that put the players (candidates) in simulations that allow them to showcase their physical, mental, and psychological talents.

Even though some of the exercises are the same for every position, the scouts meticulously evaluate players for their physical abilities and how those abilities align with their team's unique schemes, culture, and existing talent.

Standardized drills offer baseline metrics for obvious traits like speed, strength, and agility, but scouts also focus on subtle, non-obvious nuances such as how fluidly a player moves in space, their reaction times, body control, and adaptability during position-specific drills.

They also weigh intangibles like work ethic, coachability, and mental acuity, often gauged through interviews and psychological testing. These insights allow scouts to project how well a player will fit into the team’s system. Beyond obvious talent, scouts analyze how a player’s strengths complement or elevate existing roster gaps, ensuring the pick is not just about individual performance but overall team synergy.

An NFL team will never hire a player based solely on his college stats (resume) and physical stature (obvious characteristics). The stakes are too high. Even though NFL teams sometimes make bad hires, the combination mitigates risk and increases their chances of signing the right player for the roles they need to fill to build a championship football team.

It should be the same for a sales leader. You need to know the obvious and non-obvious behaviors, traits, and skills required at each stage of the buying decision.

Understand Your Sales Process

If you don’t know what activity a salesperson requires to advance a lead to a satisfied customer through your sales process, you won’t know what skills to look for in the interview. To effectively recruit and identify (scout) the right sales candidates, you must understand the job for which candidates are sought (sales process).

The key to becoming an indispensable sales leader is using the interview process to verify and validate that a talented salesperson will be elite at executing your sales process. As such, you’ll never build the right interview process until you have mastered your sales process.

Unfortunately, I rarely find that the case in my work with sales leaders.

Few Really Know Their Sales Process

You likely believe you know more about your sales process than you actually do, but ‘Time in’ dilutes ‘Awareness of.’ The longer you’ve been in a situation, the less likely you can see it objectively and clearly.

Many sales leaders I coach have held their positions for some time. Most of what they know about the sales process is old information from when they first started. Buyers' behavior is always changing, and even if the shifts are subtle, they could have big implications for your sales process. A sales process should be evolutionary, adapting to meet the ever-changing behaviors of the market.

The best sales leaders are constantly testing a new tactic that has worked for one salesperson or in a different industry to see if it would be universally workable for the rest of the team. They validate the test with data, and if it supports a change in the sales process, they make the change. But you can only do that if you spend enough time with customers and prospects.

Hypothesize And Validate What Makes Reps Elite

Your job as the sales leader is to build a prototype of “your next best rep” which is a mashup of the best practices used by the existing sales team.

Elite salespeople unconsciously execute the activities in a sales process. It looks like a master class.

Their prospecting emails read as if an expert copywriter wrote them.
Their flawless demos make you want to repurpose the recording for your training program.
They ask the right question at the right time.
Their follow-up content is that of a pro, not an amateur.
They have a solution to overcome every objection.

But you won't learn much if you start your relearning journey by interviewing your top salespeople and asking them, “What makes you successful?”. They will tell you things or traits that they believe are the reason they're good at what they do, which may not be correct. They suffer from the curse of knowledge (see the chapter, Curse of the Sales Superstar), which means you don't ask them how they do the job—you observe them doing it.

Observe The Best In Action

Clear your schedule for a week. Get out of those internal meetings that don’t create sales. Don’t tell anyone, especially your sales team, that you will be studying them as they work. Spend your next 40 working hours watching every salesperson do the job. If you only study the top performers, you will miss the point of the exercise.

You’ll have to tell them something because you've probably neglected this part of your job for some time now, and magically inserting yourself into selling activities without any communication will cause alarm.

Consider this as a communication strategy for your sales team:

"I've realized that, gradually, I've been spending more time than I should on aspects of my leadership role that have taken me away from the market and the front lines. I want to spend more time with you (the sales team) and our customers. So, if you see me join a meeting or sit beside you as you work, it's solely so I can learn. If I'm out of touch with the market, then I can't effectively lead."

Here’s how I would budget my time for the next week.

Over the five days, you will see them operate in unexpected ways. These unexpected behaviors result from unconsciously competent salespeople making shifts in their behavior to adapt to a sales process that has evolved to meet the demands of the market.

This is your actual sales process.

Now Identify Contrasts Between Top Performers and Others

Compare the activities and outcomes of your best reps to those of the rest of the team. Contrasts illuminate the skills or behaviors that make elite reps over-perform their peers. For example, while all reps may complete discovery calls, top performers might ask deeper, more insightful questions that aren’t included in your current playbook or demonstrate greater adaptability during customer objections. The elite’s adaptability, pivoting on the fly, might be underappreciated in your ideal salesperson profile.

Just as important as identifying what you want in your next hire is recognizing what you don’t want. Examine patterns in your team’s weaker performers. What behaviors, attitudes, or gaps have consistently led to underperformance? Use these insights to create a clearer picture of what to avoid.

Differentiate Roles Clearly

Remember that not all sales roles are created equal. Account management requires a different skill set than new business development. You might learn that an underperforming salesperson is not in the right role. Maybe they are struggling because they don’t have the confidence to challenge a prospect or to ask for the business, but if they were in a different role, maybe post-transaction, this struggling salesperson could be elite. Your sales process must reflect these distinctions. For example, account managers may need strong relationship-building skills and a focus on customer retention, while new business developers excel in prospecting and closing deals. Define your process accordingly, ensuring that it aligns with the specific demands of each role.

But Avoid Blindly Replicating Top Performers

While recruiting, interviewing, and hiring clones of your best reps is tempting, remember that their success may reflect unique circumstances or customer segments that differ from what your next hire will face. You can’t compare someone’s beginning to another person’s middle.

Instead of seeking a replica who will blindly and robotically follow your existing sales process, look for candidates who will challenge your elite performers with new approaches and ideas that you and your team have yet to explore or master.

Elite Sales Candidates Adapt and Evolve Your Sales Process

When you interview an elite candidate, expect them to introduce new techniques and perspectives that can strengthen your team, which means you need to keep the sales process fluid and open to evolution. Remember, you're trying to hire your next best salesperson, who might know more than you and your team.

More often than you expect, elite candidates will have already advanced their approach far beyond your best rep’s current capacity. That's why you need to evaluate the process frequently. If you apply this approach to building a sales team, your sales process will continue to improve as you elevate the talent on the team. Encourage new hires to share their insights and incorporate their innovations into your broader strategy. Regularly review and refine your process to ensure it stays relevant to market demands and team dynamics.

Here’s a quick story to reinforce my point.

I had a client who retained me and my recruiting team to expand their sales team. Their offering is a service as a subscription, that they presented in packages. Their sales process was to present the prospect with three different package options—good, better, and best and the monthly price increased accordingly.

While interviewing elite-level sales candidates, we found a salesperson who confidently stated that presenting packages was a flawed approach. Too many prospects will choose the good or better option, leaving money on the table. The candidate said a better way was to eliminate packages and provide bespoke packages tailored to the prospects' needs. We hired this rep, and within 90 days, the new sales process was bespoke pricing, not packaging, and as a result, every single rep closed more business.

Taking Action

To redefine or refine your sales process, you must observe your team in action and find the situations where “what you thought advanced sales” wasn’t really how the elite closed more deals. We will use this information to build an interview process that allows you to see elite sales candidates in action. But before you start designing your interview process, we must address your old and problematic job qualifications, because what you currently require from candidates won’t get you elite-level sales talent.

Defining your Sales Process