How to recruit candidates who can sell services.

Your company sells a service to other businesses and you need a strong salesperson. So you turn to the usual source: Job boards. No doubt, you’ll get plenty of candidates. Unfortunately, most of them will be people whose experience is in selling products. In our experience, many highly successful product sellers struggle when selling services.

The nature of product salespeople is that they’re hunters: They may be very good at tracking down potential clients and closing deals. However, product sales can be all about comparing features, benefits and price against a competitor with a similar product.

If you’re selling a service — especially a complex technology service — you’re not selling something the prospect can immediately see and touch. You’re selling a solution to the client’s problem.

TRANSACTIONAL VS CONSULTATIVE SELLING

All salespeople want to get a return on their investment of time, and as their employer, so do you. Product salespeople can be transactional, chasing deals that can give them a quick win. Selling services on the other hand often requires the patience to build relationships, and to see the bigger picture even if it’s 12 to 18 months away.

Service salespeople must be willing to invest time in that longer sales cycle. To sell a complex solution to a client’s problem, the salesperson first has to understand the problem in detail. Some salespeople are very good passive listeners, taking in all of the information the prospect offers. But to extract everything needed to properly scope a solution, you need someone who’s skilled at directed listening — they need the ability to direct their conversations with the prospect to get all of the information they need.

In addition to directed listening, it’s crucial that the salesperson search out everyone on the prospect’s side who will have input on the decision to buy. Especially for software services, people within the prospect’s IT department — who may be two or three levels below the director who initiated the conversation — will get involved. The salesperson must engage with those stakeholders directly to understand their needs and their potential objections in order to close the deal.

DON’T BE BLINDED BY LOGOS

Candidates who come to you with large, well-known corporations on their resumes deserve a look, but don’t be blinded by the notoriety of their former employers. Especially for a start-up or a company pivoting into a new market, someone from a big-company background may not be self-starting and self-managing. They may have been in a series of positions where they were fed qualified leads and in turn passed them on to a sales engineer to work out the details. If you’re expecting them to find their own prospects and work the deal all the way through to implementation, they may not have the experience — or tenacity — you need.

Everyone you interview will tell you they obliterated their quota every year. And those big company people will tell you they can do it all, from soup to nuts. We want to know about the sales process at those big companies, We ask questions of the candidate and can network with that company’s former salespeople and their competitors to find out what their sales process really is. Sometimes we find that the candidate may not have done their own prospecting for years.

CULTURE COUNTS

If you post on a job board, it’s a given that you’ll get resumes from people who match your requirements. Here’s where experienced recruiters prove their value.

Beyond the requirements, it’s critical to find someone who will fit in to your organization and succeed. We spend a lot of time up front understanding our client’s culture and what kinds of people have been successful in their environment.

Especially for small-to-mid-sized European companies looking to break into the North American market we’ve found that cultural fit is essential to success. Companies headquartered in Norway or Denmark for example find the business culture in the U.S. is very different, and that can pose challenges for both the company and the new hire. These companies need someone who’s comfortable working with thin resources and with colleagues who have a very different view of business. When you add in the fact that headquarters is six to nine time zones away, we find that excellent communication skills and a commitment to use them are key.

When we screen candidates, we take culture into account and do an in-depth assessment of their character, their personality, their work style and how they like to be managed to make sure they’re a fit for our client’s needs and their organization.

SUCCESS CHECKLIST

To hire someone who can successfully sell services we start by verifying their skills. We delve into likes and dislikes, into common sales situations and their reactions, into past victories and defeats. We get a firm fix on their personality traits. And we spend the time up front to know our client’s culture. When we present a candidate, we’re confident they can be successful in that company. Remember, even mediocre salespeople still have the skill to sell themselves. Separating the pretenders from the performers takes skill and experience — and that’s where we stake our reputation, hire after hire.

Don’t Make This Common Hiring Mistake

Beware: The Entrepreneurial Spirited Candidate is the Lone Wolf to Look Out For!

You’re looking for a new Vice President of Sales, and think you’re going about it the right way. You’re putting a lot of thought into the kind of candidate your organization needs at this time. Especially if you’re a startup, you may have added “entrepreneurial” at the top of your list of must-have traits. 

Drop ‘entrepreneur’ from your vocabulary if you’re looking for this type of candidate:

“We run into this constantly,” says Ryan Moore, Practice Lead for Executive Search at Peak Sales Recruiting. “Especially among our North American clients, they’ll ask for an entrepreneur, but that’s not actually the skill set they’re looking for. Entrepreneurial can mean two different things depending on whether you’re the employer or the employee. That slight difference is causing the majority of them to make the wrong hire.”

What Clients expect when they say “entrepreneur”:

To clients, “entrepreneur” means someone willing to wear multiple hats, get their hands dirty and make things happen: Chasing payments, helping with operations, writing contracts, spending a lot of time making calls with junior sales staff. Entrepreneurs are people who take ownership of their work. 

“When we talk to job candidates who really are entrepreneurs, we get a completely different take on that word,” Moore says. “The candidate tells us that they started a business but it didn’t go well. Now they’re going back to corporate life, but it’s not their first choice. They really want their own business, so they’re planning to work full time but also chase two other opportunities on the side.”

Companies can certainly appreciate this entrepreneurial spirit, but not when it turns into moonlighting for the employees’ side business. You need to look for this trait in someone who will tackle your business as their own.

“When a client tells me they’re looking for someone who’s entrepreneurial, I immediately ask, ‘What do you mean by that?’ Once we clarify that they aren’t actually looking for an entrepreneur, I encourage them to take that out of the job description and the interview script.” Moore explains. 

Focus on the “entrepreneur’s” tenacity and grit;

• Can they roll up their sleeves?
• Do they have an ‘all hands on deck’ mentality?
• Can they work in a sales organization that’s short on resources?
• Can they avoid moonlighting?
• Do they naturally want to be part of the team and seek growth within the organization?

A fear of commitment:

Using that entrepreneurial criteria will get you some skilled candidates, but they may not be a committed manager who’s going to lock in and stay focused for two to three years. Moore says he finds a lot of entrepreneurial sales consultants who will parachute in, set up a sales process and department infrastructure — and then leave. While that may be helpful, it’s a short term relationship.

“The other thing we see is that some real entrepreneurs want to control everything,” Moore notes. “They’re used to making all of the decisions. Start-ups tend to be very cross-functional, and other leaders may feel steamrolled. In the opposite case, sales becomes very insular and the leader doesn’t care about how sales affects or integrates with the rest of the organization.” 

Verifying the entrepreneur’s track record:

The worst outcome may be getting someone who’s a bad fit who also doesn’t have the sales chops. It’s hard to verify a true entrepreneur’s track record. If an owner/operator says they sold $1 million in a year, who do you call to confirm that? 

“With a sales person who’s been employed by a company, income is highly correlated to sales quota; if your income is high, you’re most likely hitting your quotas,” Moore explains. 

Once the recruiter gets to the verification stage, they go back to former supervisors and confirm the numbers the candidate provided, and they look for any misrepresentation. “As a quick check, I will ask a salesperson to tell me what their number was last year and then have them walk me through how they met it. If their number was $1 million, and they can lay out that they sold five deals over six months, and they have the numbers for each deal, that level of detail gives me confidence that they’re telling the truth.”

Betting On A Lone Wolf

Another drawback is that some entrepreneurs are more about “me” than “we”. They’re the proverbial lone wolf. They are laser-focused on personal achievements for themselves, but your sales leader needs to build — and care about — a team.

There are circumstances where that can work; “The lone wolf has a very distinct character,” Moore says. “They will drive revenue, but they want to be left alone. If the organization has urgent revenue needs — you have investors and there’s a narrow window to haul in some sales for example — they can do that. They’ll keep their heads down, won’t be distracted by any chaos going on around them and just sell. It often works where there’s no sales team. They’re the first sales person and you’re not even thinking about adding a team until 18 months out.”

The mistake companies make is thinking that the lone wolf is going to change its nature and become a shepherd. As soon as you start to grow a team and wrap the process around sales, the lone wolf will begin disconnecting and eventually, they’ll feel constrained and look to leave.

Short term growth with the entrepreneur: 

The entrepreneurial VP of Sales can be useful at some stages of your company’s growth, but in the end, you’re going to need someone who values being part of a team. Moore advises thinking very carefully about making a hire based on short-term needs. It can work, but if your goal is to grow revenues to a high level and build a solid and productive sales team, drop “entrepreneur” from your vocabulary.

The vice-president of sales role is critical to the health and well-being of every organization. The right hire can take you to new heights, while a mis-hire can cripple revenues and growth for years. At Peak Sales Recruiting, we’ve successfully matched hundreds of organizations with new VP of Sales. That experience has shown us the kinds of candidates who are most likely to make a difference for you.

Just because someone already has the VP of Sales title doesn’t mean they’re right for your organization. There are several different versions of  VP of Sales, each coming with a variety of skill sets. This is where sales hiring is very different from other departments within your organization. The skills and responsibilities for a VP of Sales vary wildly depending on the nature of the business, its revenue and organizational structure; if you’re just looking at the title, you could easily mis-hire or overpay. You need to dig below the surface to find out what sort of VP of Sales your organization needs and what the optimal candidate profile looks like to fill that need.

The Builder

For example, the type we call “the builder” comes in when an organization is at $2-$5 million, and they can take it to $20 million. They’re not always good with data, with systems and processes, but they can put revenue on the books. They like the hyper-growth stage in a company’s development and the more process — and red tape — that comes in as the company grows, the more frustrated they become. They’re not going to stay for five to ten years. If you hire a builder and they leave after 18 months — but they hit your revenue targets — you didn’t necessarily mis-hire, it just means you need someone with different skills for your next phase.

The Next Level

If you’ve already been through your hyper-growth and you’re looking to stabilize your sales platform for the long haul, a “Builder” profile is not the right hire. Instead, you need the VP of Sales who’s going to put systems and methodologies around the sales process making the business scalable.

One clue about the identity of the VP of Sales candidate you’re interviewing comes from the organization they currently work for. We have clients who get very excited about the possibility of getting someone from the likes of Oracle or IBM. There is a certain degree of pedigree that comes with those candidates. They know how to manage a team and a book of business. However, if you’re not moving them to another large organization of similar size and scope, they may struggle. Moving candidates like this into smaller organizations often brings misalignment. These candidates are used to ample resources to help support initiatives. While they may be tired of corporate politics, the heavy lifting and limited resources in smaller organizations will have them feeling frustrated. Even if you pay them what they want — which can be substantial — you have a higher risk of turnover in the role in the short term.

The opposite is also true. When you put a start-up specialist into a big-logo company it can be like caging a wild animal. In a smaller company, the VP of Sales probably did things their own way, and as long as they were bringing in revenue, no one complained. Working in a heavy-process-driven organization is going to frustrate them and eventually drive them away.

How To Draw Your Target

You can’t judge candidates for your next VP of Sales solely by their current title, by the company they work for or the salary they command. Instead, focus on the core objectives they need to accomplish for your organization within 18-24 months of them starting. The ideal candidates will have mirrored those objectives in previous jobs, have worked with the same customer profile and similar sales cycle. Hitting $2 million in revenue when you’re selling enterprise software systems at $1 million apiece requires one set of skills; hitting $2 million in revenue when you’re selling software at $10,000-$30,000 per deal is a very different task.

Building For Success

If you’re a mid-sized company, past the hyper-growth stage, you’re probably looking for what we call “the Scaler.” This VP of Sales  comes in when you’re at $20-$50 million and their job is to drive revenue to $75-$100 million. You achieve hyper-growth through grit and effort; to get that to scale up, you need someone who can wrap process around sales and focus on customer retention.

If your organization is already at $100 million and you need someone to reliably produce revenue growth of 2%-5% a year — which is still a big number — you’re looking for a high-level VP of Sales focused on strategy and less on daily tactics. The vetting of that candidate becomes critical, digging into details of what they achieved and how they achieved it.

If there’s a lot of “we” talk around goals and revenue, that could indicate the candidate had a lot of infrastructure supporting them. They may have done the strategy, but the implementation was likely dropped down a level, carried out by sales managers and frontline sales. Ask who reported to them, and who they reported to. This will give you an idea of the structure of their current organization. In a mid-sized company, there may be one or two layers above and one or two below. In a big company, that could be five layers above and dozens of layers below. You can figure out the organization’s structure — and the role the candidate played — from that.

Dig into the candidate’s coaching style. Ask how they handled an underperforming sales rep. That lets you quickly understand whether they did it themselves or if the task was pushed down to a second-level manager. This is a great indicator for a mid-sized company; if the candidate handled it, they’re willing to get their hands dirty and can be good for a mid-sized organization.

Also, dig deeper when a candidate tells you they managed multiple departments. If their primary responsibility was sales, but they also had their hands in marketing, they might want to have more say in your marketing department create friction on your current team.

Ask Questions — A Lot of Questions

Another pitfall is in not asking enough questions or the right questions. If the interviewers aren’t familiar with how sales departments vary between organizations, they may think the only job of a VP of Sales is to sell. And in some organizations, typically smaller ones, that’s true. When a candidate says “we sold it,” the follow up is to find out who was that “we”. Was the candidate selling it, or was their team selling it? What role did the candidate play? Peel it back layer by layer. The more detail they can give you about what they did and how they did it, the better information you have to decide if they’re the right fit.

Also, don’t underestimate the importance of culture, especially in sales.

Culture is difficult to screen for, but it does matter. Integrity comes up a lot as a value that organizations have, so does the future VP of Sales have integrity? Asking a question like, “Tell me about a time you had to walk away from a deal because it wasn’t good for the client or the company.” If they say they’ve never walked away from a deal, I have a lot more questions.

If they give an example, dig into it. Why was the deal wrong? How did they walk away? Were they able to turn that into a positive and work with that client on other deals? You are looking for some emotional intelligence and self -awareness.  Ask, “How did that feel when they walked away?” If they say, “Yes, it hurt but I was able to sleep at night,” that’s a good answer. You’re trying to weed out sales leaders who overpromise and underdeliver, because that can put immense strain on other parts of the organization.

The Square Peg Problem

The examples above are just a few of the VP of Sales personalities we’ve interviewed — and matched with organizations — over the years. Some are suited for smaller organizations because they’re laser focused on revenue and will push every deal until it’s closed. Others are more skilled at working with and through sales reps, building sophisticated data-driven support that can scale revenue from several million into the tens or hundreds of millions.

Before starting your search, know what kind of VP of Sales  you’re looking for. Is your organization ready for a “builder”, or would a “scaler” fit your needs and your culture better? Drawing your target, deciding the essential skills and objectives will benefit you, your company and the candidates you interview.