The 4 Laws of Hiring Elite Salespeople
Coaching & training, forecasting, go-to-market strategy, territory design & planning,…
They’re all important in contributing to a sales leader’s success. I said as much in my first book, Revenue Harvest.
That’s why what I’m about to say next may come as a surprise.
Because while those elements impact the scorecard, they don’t really determine success or failure.
Only one thing matters:
Hiring.
And as a sales leader, winning or losing is dictated by your ability to build a talent pipeline.
That’s why double coverage was invented
There are examples in every sport of a player who was so talented, that the opponents would need to adopt a special plan to minimize his or her impact on the game.
Normally, despite the coach's best efforts to contain these superstar players, they couldn’t be stopped. The outcome ultimately came down to a few great plays from these superstars that swung the outcome in their favor.
Michael Jordan, Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark, and Patrick Mahomes are known for dragging their team to victory.
They’re dangerous. The opposition is scared and for good reason.
Time and again, those players have shown the world that their talent will overcome your plan to stop them.
That’s why talent trumps tactics
Of all the required skills to be a great sales leader, hiring is the one that matters above all else.
A good sales plan, supported by a good marketing team, will fail if the salespeople executing the plan aren’t talented.
How exactly do you identify top talent?
Well, first you need to understand the rules of hiring salespeople. There are four of them.
But first, I need to warn you…
You won’t like these rules
I don’t like them either.
I don’t like rules, period. But what’s true about rules is that if you break them, there will be consequences.
Sometimes the reward of breaking them outweighs the cost. Sometimes it doesn’t.
In the case of these rules, the cost of breaking them is high. This isn’t a metaphor. It will cost you and your company cash, and a lot of it.
A Depaul University study showed that the average cost to replace a bad sales hire was $115,000. That’s an average. For many companies the figure is at least $300,000, and in some cases closer to $1M.
If it sounds ridiculous, then consider the:
Cost to your HR department to onboard a salesperson.
Cost to train a new employee.
Salary you paid the poorly performing salesperson being replaced.
Lost revenue (that you may never recover) from a salesperson who was unable to hit their sales targets.
So pay attention, these rules will save you money and maybe your career.
RULE #1: THEY DON’T CURRENTLY WORK FOR YOU
Stop hiring employees from other departments.
It doesn’t matter how much they care about the company, how long you’ve known them, how well they know the product, want to take on more responsibility or are looking for a better opportunity—these colleagues might be very successful in their current roles, articulate, knowledgeable, etc., but the chances aren’t great that they will succeed in your open sales role.
Why? Because they haven’t been professionally trained in sales. Elite salespeople have been professionally trained and are currently in a sales role.
The best sales talent is found, then trained.
They don’t need basic sales training. Yes, you will have to train them, and yes they will want (and expect) a solid, complete sales training and onboarding experience, but they already know how to sell.
You train them on how to sell your offering(s), not how to sell.
When you have open positions on your team you’ll be tempted to repurpose an existing employee as a new member on your sales team. You might be the source of that temptation, likely because you’ve had good exchanges with them. Or, maybe the internal candidate expresses interest and applies to the job. Maybe they even send you an email pleading their case. Sometimes the temptation comes from other department leaders, even the C-suite.
This is why you need a rigid hiring process
It protects you from making all the mistakes above and saves you from making decisions based on biases.
Later in this series, you’ll build a step-by-step interview process specific to hiring salespeople at your company. The process will help you select the right salesperson based on objectivity, not hope or “gut”.
If at the end of the interview process the internal candidate is the best candidate, great, hire them. They’re an outlier, and all rules have exceptions, but the exceptions need to be validated through the process.
RULE #2: THEY DON’T APPLY TO JOBS
This rule might be the hardest to accept for most sales leaders and every single human resources professional.
A good hiring process is fundamental in building an elite-level sales team, but it isn’t very helpful if you’re sourcing candidates from the wrong talent pools.
Most sales leaders take the conventional human resources approach to hiring–the ‘if you build it’ (create a job posting), ‘they will come’ (apply). This approach might work for other important roles in your company, but it doesn’t work in sales.
Every single employee in the workforce wants more money.
For most workers, the easiest way to earn more money is get another job at another company. That's because for most workers their compensation structure is mostly fixed–salary and maybe a nominal bonus opportunity, coupled with an annual merit or cost of living increase. It’s widely accepted that these annual increases are a joke and barely keep up with inflation, so they apply for the same job with a different company and can enjoy a 10-25% pay increase to go do the exact same thing for a company willing to pay them more money. Makes good sense to me.
What does this have to do with salespeople not applying to jobs?
Couldn’t they bounce from job to job and get a 10-25% pay increase like the rest of the workforce?
Sure they could, and the bad salespeople adopt this practice. For them, it's easier to get a new job than it is to be good at their current sales job and earn more money from commissions on their sales.
So when you post a job for sales, expect an overwhelming influx of applicants that either haven’t ever sold and want their first job in sales or can’t sell and are applying to jobs because they are eventually going to get fired for underperformance. They know it's easier to get a job when you have a job.
Rock bottom for a salesperson is getting fired or RIF’d (reduction in force) without the next thing lined up. This is the game most sales reps play and sales leaders are always the losers when the sales rep gets in front of the inevitable performance improvement plan and bounces to a new sales job for a bigger salary within a year or two. This is a far better outcome for them than sticking around and struggling so much that you have to fire them.
Seems harsh, doesn’t it? It’s a harsh reality, one that I endured before I accepted this rule.
The salespeople you want to hire, the superstar who can transform your sales team, will not apply to your job. Why?
They’re too busy being successful in their current role. These elite sellers earn so much money in commissions from their sales that a new job is the last thing on their minds.
If you want this type of talent on your team, you have to find it. They won’t knock on your door.
In future articles, I’ll show you how to find them, but for now, you just need to understand and accept this really important rule.
RULE #3: WITHOUT THEM THERE IS NO BAND
George Strait, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce aren’t looking for a new band–they are the band.
I’ll concede that they might “humbly” claim they wouldn’t be successful with the rest of the band, but let’s face it–no one can name a single member of any of these bands. So what’s my point?
What do these musical superstars have to do with your sales team?
Peter Drucker famously said “The sole purpose of any business is to create a customer. The rest is just an expense.”
If your business uses a sales team to create sales, then that’s the most important department in the company. Your sales team and each of its members are the lead singer of the band (the company), with every other department acting in support. The salesperson is why the customer buys–the customer will even say as much.
“If Sally (salesperson) leaves, we’re (important customer) going with her.”
In these situations, Sally is more important than marketing, more important than finance, more important than the offering.
She often has to overcome the shortcomings of the offering to keep the business, she has to handle backorders, incorrect shipments or deliveries, sudden price increases, etc.
Now, this isn’t always the case.
For some companies, marketing is the band. They create all the demand and sales’ job is to close qualified leads, consistently served to them on a silver platter. The high life.
No matter your situation, creating customers is the only thing that matters. The people (sales and marketing) who do that well for your company know this reality, and it's time you and your leadership team embrace it too.
Everyone in accounting & finance, IT, operations, product, and human resources is replaceable. Sure, they’re valuable; but, at the end of the day, they exist to support the function of creating customers.
They support sales.
They’re all drummers, guitarists, and roadies. Very talented and necessary, but without sales–they’re looking for a new band. Searching for a new gig.
Taylor Swift isn’t going to tolerate a drummer who doesn’t know that Taylor is the show. Top sales talent knows they are the most important role in their organization, and like it or not, they know they’re irreplaceable.
If you don’t have a company culture that celebrates sales, you won’t attract and retain top talent.
But, obey this rule with caution.
There’s a sweet spot in practicing this rule.
No sales team can succeed without a good support team. Without brilliant innovators and creators, they’d have nothing to sell. Without an operations team, they wouldn’t get paid, wouldn’t have the technology that makes their job easier, etc.
Striking this balance is the sole responsibility of the sales leader.
So how do you attract superstars without building a team of entitled primadonnas? Simple, but not easy.
Your allegiance as a sales leader is to the leadership team first, the sales team second. You represent the company’s best interest of long-term success. Speak up for sales with the leadership when it makes sense, but don’t tolerate salespeople who act as if they are more important than the rest of the team, even though they might be.
This speaks to character and chemistry.
Taylor Swift knows she has it, but she doesn’t treat everyone in the band like second-class citizens. In fact, she does the opposite. She gives them all really great bonuses.
RULE #4: THEY DEMAND AND DESERVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU
This rule is a great way to separate your company from the rest and create a sales team that the best sellers want to join, bringing their rockstar colleagues with them.
In 2020, Patrick Mahomes (player) signed a 10 year with the Chiefs worth $45m per year. In 2024, Andy Reid (his coach) agreed to a deal that would make him the highest-paid coach in U.S. sports at $20m per year.
Reid will gladly support the Chiefs paying Patrick $45 million per year because with Patrick on the team, Andy and the Chiefs have a much better chance of winning games and appearing in a Super Bowl…again.
Without Patrick, Andy’s job gets much harder, and his job becomes less secure.
When you move from a sales position to a sales leadership position, it's common to view this as a promotion. Conventional business practice would agree that the change in title from rep to manager, director, or VP is a promotion.
Yes and no.
If that person wasn’t a sales superstar, the title might come with a small increase in salary. But what’s guaranteed is that the move from individual contributor to leader always comes with more responsibility, and many times the additional problems you solve aren’t rewarded with additional dollars.
Your best salespeople should be the highest-paid people on the sales team and in the company. In some companies, the best salesperson earns more cash in a year than everyone in the C-suite, including the CEO.
If you read this and don’t like the rule, let me remind you that you can always stay in sales and balance the risks and rewards.
There’s a tricky balance with all of this
I know, figuring out what top talent looks like, finding them, attracting them to your firm, and then integrating them into your team without upsetting the apple cart.
It’s a difficult juggling act.
But, if you want to become an elite-level sales leader (and enjoy all the fruits that come with it), hiring talent is unquestionably required.
We’ll go further down this hiring rabbit hole in the next article.
In the meantime, do you agree? Is hiring the only thing that matters in sales leadership?
Let me know what you think.
