The One Mistake Behind Every Bad Sales Hire (Ask Jeb)

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0:43How do I identify good sales people to hire them, to bring them on board? Give me the basics. What are the right questions to ask? How do I actually identify from their answers who will be a good fit for my team? I'm going to be transparent here. If I had the exact answer for this, I'd be a billionaire. I would own my own island, right? Like, is this not the question that every leader wants to know? Like, how do I find the right person? And I don't have an answer for it. I make the same mistakes that everybody else makes. I've burned through so many salespeople who I made bad hires on, although I've been insanely successful.

1:17There was a season in my life where I had to take over a 10-state territory and it was completely failing. I had a team of 10 salespeople. I had to fire nine of them and start all over again. And I was able to get nine more people in, get the team ramped up. We went from the last place team out of 53 teams in the country to number one in nine months. And I just got super lucky, hired the right people, applied the right amount of coaching. So there's a couple of things that I would say to you. Number one is what is the role? Like what do they do? So if it's a heavy hunting role, you got to find people that are willing to hunt.

1:49And if it's a heavy account management role, then you've got to find people who are really good with customers and are good with expanding and growing their accounts. And if it's a middle role where they've got to hunt and they've got to account manage, think about splitting it because you're threading a needle trying to find human beings that can do both of those things very well. And a lot of companies make that mistake. We bring people in, they either gravitate to farming all the time or they gravitate to hunting all the time. If they gravitate to hunting, they lose all your customers. If they gravitate to farming, they don't grow the business.

2:17And so either way you lose. First of all, just understand what the role is and what you're looking for. If it's super transactional, then you don't need the smartest people in the world. If it's more complex, then IQ really matters. Like you got to get smart people. That's the place where I typically begin. The second thing I do is once I understand what the role is, I use an assessment. I've been using it for years. Full disclosure, I sell it. I don't make a lot of money at it, but I sell it. But I use this as a sales VP and as a sales leader and it's called Sales Drive. It's a killer assessment in terms of from a hiring standpoint because what it does is tell you, is this person a hunter or a farmer?

2:50And as you dial it into your sales team, it gets super easy to interpret it. Like I can look at a sales drive and I can tell you what someone's resume says. I only use that when I feel in my heart that I wanna hire the person, I don't use it up front. So I only use it at the end. Because what it does is it helps me see the holes in my interview process. Because if you think about salespeople who are interviewing, they're salespeople. And a lot of them are really, really good at interviewing. You wanna have something that helps you see through that. Now, if you're using an assessment remesh, what I always recommend is use a stack.

3:22So an assessment stack would be sales drive is going to tell you, are they going to hunt? A disk assessment, which you can get anywhere for like 20 bucks, that's going to tell you like what their personality type is. So you're typically looking for someone who is like high I, high D. Those people are going to fit better in a sales role than someone who's an S or a C. So look at that. And then you might look at like an IQ test to see how smart they are. Like how good are they at taking patterns, looking at disparate situations and maybe putting that together and building solutions? Are they creative?

3:51of. I want to know those type of things. So I want to start there. Make sure that you're hiring for the right competencies. Have some sort of way of testing your assumptions because we're human and we make really bad decisions, especially when we're dealing with people who are good at interviewing. And then the third thing is thinking about your interviewing processing questions. With a process, if you have the ability to do this, you want multiple people doing interviews. So you want to have the person going through different layers and you need to have an interview process for them. Here's what I want you to do.

4:20And here's the questions. You can do that in conjunction with your HR team. My HR team right now is working really, really hard on developing a set set of interview processes because we have to scale up our whole team. I mean, we're probably adding a million dollars in payroll over the next 18 months to support our growth. And I really can't afford to make too many bad hires. So we need to have processes set. So if you can have an interview process that works really well, then you can compare notes with each other. That allows you to bounce things off. Is this person going to be good? Are they going to be bad?

4:51And I've got a person on my team who is just brilliant at seeing bullshit. Forgive my language, but like she just can see below the surface where I can't. Like I'm like, oh, let's harm. And she's like, nope, you're going to regret it. And every time I go against what she says, we fail. See if you can find someone on your team that you run them through that does that. Going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting.

5:26Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's Recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepin S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. Now, when you think about questions, this is what's most important. If you go to salesgravy.com forward slash resources, there is a sales interview guide.

6:01It's not going to change your life, but it does talk about some of the mistakes that we make in these interviews. If you're moving fast, you got a lot of things on your plate, especially if you're desperate to bring people in, we have a tendency to walk into those interviews and we do all the talking. We talk at them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In doing that, we tell the person exactly what to say back to us. Think about it. You're interviewing salespeople. Good salespeople know how to take information you give them and tell your story back to you and you go, oh my God, they're just like me.

6:27I love them. We have a tendency to do that. We also, if we're good at sales, like we start selling them, get focused on being as quiet as you can at interviews and letting people talk, like letting them roll. Then you want to start thinking about the questions. The biggest mistakes we make in questions in sales interviews is that we ask these general questions about like, how would you do this? And how would you do that? And how do you think about that? These people that you're interviewing know how to answer those questions. Like if they don't quickly, you're going to go, this is the wrong person.

6:56What you really want to start thinking about is situational questions. So tell me a specific situation when you were doing this and what happened. And what you're going to notice is when you ask for a specific situation, they're going to give you general. And what you do is you come back and you say, give me a specific situation. And if you ever want to hear someone do this really, really well, my son is brilliant at it. I didn't realize what a good interviewee was until I set an interview with him. But he'll ask a question. The interviewee will give him something completely different. And he comes right back and asks the question again.

7:26So you want to think as situational as I can get. Give me a situation when this happened. Give me a situation when that happened. So you're listening to their way of handling those situations. And the way that you come up with those questions is think about the role. Think about the job. Think about what people do. Think about the levers that they pull that make them good in those jobs. And then get them in the interview where they're having to walk through the situations they were in before. And then finally, you got to think about what is the personality type that you want? And I've been in enough interviews to go, I like their energy.

7:56Like I'm in this mode where we go, why do we like them? Because they came in and they got energy. Like, I think that's important, but I have to test that energy against other things that could be tells that this is going to be a problem for them in the future. And finally, one more thing that you can do dependent on your ability as a company is have them come in and spend a day on your sales floor, spend a day with one of your sales reps, spend a day watching someone do the job, like high activity cold calling. How many people are like, yeah, I can do that all day long? And they come in, they spend a morning doing that.

8:28And they're like, I don't have anything to do with that. That's not what I want. So you can do that or arrange some tests for them. I've done in the past said, you know, here's a list of 10 people, dial them just to see what they do. I'm not saying that was the best way of doing it. And we don't do that anymore. But that is one way that you can do it. Does that answer your question? You did a great job. Thank you. And I appreciate it. Would it be different for a small company? Was this a big company in the way you're approaching things there? Oh, my God, yes. Because think about it. It's a big company.

8:51When I worked for a big company, I had people who were doing recruiting for me. I had people who were doing all the vetting for me. And one of the things I said recently, Ramesh, I worked for a big company called Aramark. But back when I worked for Aramark, I'm like, you know, I would bring people in. I would hire them. And like, I was good at this. Now I'm in a small business. Like, I'm not as good as this as I used to be. And then I started thinking about the support team that I had. And I'm like, maybe I wasn't really good at recruiting. Maybe they were really good at getting the right people in front of me.

9:17And all I was really doing was just confirming what they had already decided. With a big company, you have a lot more support when you're doing that. The other thing that a big company has the ability to do is make a mistake. And a small company doesn't have that same ability. I made a mistake this year that cost$45 ,000. That's a big hit for a small company. It was a hiring mistake. And I mean, it didn't hurt that bad because we learned a lot when we did it. With a small company, it's essential that you be super careful. It's also essential that you don't have a long cycle because you can lose people very quickly in a long cycle to other companies who are recruiting them as well.

9:49But I go back to what I said earlier. The biggest mistake we make in small companies is that we're desperate to hire someone because we're a small company. You know, as a small company, it's way harder to recruit than if you're in a big company. And you come into the interviews and you're just like, I need somebody so bad that you pass up all the other things that you would normally do. And you're going, OK, they're breathing and they got high energy. Hire them. And then you realize, you know, six weeks down the road that you've got a problem. I think with a small company, it's even more important that you have your processes dialed in because in a big company as a hiring manager, you typically have a group of people around you in HR that are making sure that you're not doing stupid stuff.

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