Building a Sales Hiring Process That Actually Works

Start With the Sales Job, Not the Job Description

Let's say you're a $3.5 million ARR founder-led SaaS company. You're still closing a meaningful percentage of the deals yourself, and one of the reasons you're hiring is because you want to stop being the primary closer. Your average contract is around $18,000, the typical sales cycle is 45 days, most of your opportunities are currently inbound, and there is no SDR feeding meetings to the new AE. You expect that person to eventually generate about 30% of their own pipeline and carry a $750,000 annual quota.

That's a much better starting point than saying you need an AE with five years of SaaS experience.

Now compare that with an $8 million ARR SaaS company selling $90,000 contracts through a four-to-six-month sales cycle. The AE has SDR support, deals involve multiple stakeholders, and security and procurement are normal parts of the process. The company already has a defined sales methodology and isn't asking the new AE to invent one.

Both companies could post a job called Account Executive. They shouldn't necessarily hire the same kind of salesperson.

Before you start looking at candidates, define the job in terms of what the salesperson will actually have to do. How much pipeline will they need to create themselves? Where do their opportunities come from? What's the average contract value? How long does a deal take to close? Who is involved in the buying decision? Are they inheriting a working sales process or helping you build one? Will the founder still be involved in deals? What does quota look like, and what percentage of the existing team is actually hitting it?

Those answers start telling you what experience matters. If the person will need to create half of their own pipeline, hiring someone who has spent the last five years receiving qualified meetings from a large SDR team creates an obvious risk. They may be a fantastic salesperson. They just haven't shown you that they can do one of the most important parts of this particular job.

The same thing happens in the opposite direction. A rep who has been great at selling $15,000 deals in 30 days isn't automatically prepared to manage a $150,000 deal involving a CFO, IT, legal, procurement, and a six-month sales cycle.

The goal isn't to find the salesperson with the most impressive resume. It's to understand what your salesperson will actually have to do well enough that you know what you're looking for.

Decide What You Need to Learn Before You Start Interviewing

Once you understand the job, decide what you need to learn about every serious candidate. For most sales roles, I'm going to want to understand their actual performance history, how they create pipeline, how they run a sales process, why they win, why they lose, how they respond when things aren't going well, and how much of their success they understand well enough to repeat.

But I don't want broad answers.

If a candidate tells me they finished last year at 113% of quota, that's a starting point. I want to know what the quota was, where they ranked on the team, how many other reps hit quota, how much of their pipeline they generated themselves, what their average deal looked like, and what they're doing this year.

Maybe they tell me they're currently at 97% to plan. That doesn't automatically concern me. Salespeople miss numbers for plenty of legitimate reasons. I want to understand what happened and then see whether they can separate the things that happened around them from the things they could have controlled.

If marketing produced fewer leads, their SDR left halfway through the year, a major customer cut its budget, and a large deal slipped into the next quarter, all of that may be true. But I still want to know what they would have done differently. Could they have generated more pipeline themselves? Identified the risk in the large deal earlier? Built more coverage going into the quarter? Changed how they were prioritizing their accounts?

I'm not looking for a candidate to take responsibility for things they couldn't control. I'm trying to understand whether they can accurately diagnose their own performance.

This is why you need to know what you're testing before the interview begins. Otherwise, interviews turn into interesting conversations that may or may not tell you anything useful about whether the person can succeed in the job.

Give Every Interview a Job

One of the most common problems I see is multiple people conducting essentially the same interview. The founder talks to the candidate about their background, why they're looking, their numbers, and how they sell. Then the sales leader asks about their background, why they're looking, their numbers, and how they sell. Another executive joins the process and covers much of it again.

The company has now spent three hours interviewing someone without necessarily learning three hours' worth of information.

Before the process starts, decide what each interviewer owns. The sales leader might go deepest on performance history, pipeline generation, sales process, deal execution, and coaching. The founder might focus more on career decisions, motivation, expectations, and whether the opportunity actually matches what the candidate wants next. Another member of the team might spend more time understanding how the person operates with peers, handles internal conflict, uses resources, and responds when something goes wrong.

There can and should be some overlap. In fact, asking two people about the same important fact can sometimes expose something worth investigating. If a candidate tells one interviewer they generated most of their own pipeline and gives another interviewer a very different description of where their opportunities came from, that inconsistency is useful information.

The point isn't to turn every interview into a rigid script. Good interviewers should follow interesting answers and dig when something doesn't make sense. The point is to make sure that by the end of the process, every important part of the hiring decision has actually been tested and somebody was responsible for testing it.

That also helps you put the difficult questions earlier in the process. If self-generated pipeline is absolutely essential for the role, don't wait until the fourth interview to discover the candidate has never had to prospect. If a certain compensation structure won't work for them, you shouldn't discover that after five people have spent time interviewing them.

The earlier you can resolve the things that could legitimately eliminate a candidate, the more time everyone can spend with the people who actually have a chance of being hired.

Make the Decision Before the Debrief Changes It

One of the easiest ways to undermine a good interview process happens after the interviews are over. Everyone gets together to discuss the candidate, and the first person says, "I loved him." That opinion immediately becomes an anchor. Someone who had concerns starts reconsidering them, another interviewer remembers the things they liked, and the conversation gradually shifts from comparing independent observations to building a group opinion.

The same thing happens in the opposite direction. If an influential person starts the meeting by saying they weren't impressed, everyone else begins looking at their notes through that lens. This is why I want interviewers to evaluate candidates before the debrief begins. If we've agreed that pipeline creation, performance history, sales execution, and self-awareness matter for the role, each interviewer should document what they actually learned while their assessment is still independent.

The interesting part of a debrief isn't when everyone agrees. It's when they don't. If one interviewer thinks a candidate demonstrated tremendous self-awareness and another doesn't, averaging those opinions into a score doesn't tell us much. I want to understand what created the disagreement. Maybe one interviewer uncovered something the other didn't. Maybe the candidate gave inconsistent answers. Maybe our interviewers aren't using the same definition of what we're evaluating. Or maybe we simply don't have enough evidence yet.

In that situation, another conversation with the candidate can make sense, but it should have a specific purpose. We're not adding another interview because nobody feels certain enough. We're going back to resolve an unanswered question. There's a big difference between an additional interview designed to collect missing evidence and an additional interview because the company doesn't know how to make a decision.

You'll never eliminate judgment from hiring, and you shouldn't try. I've interviewed enough salespeople to know there are things you notice that don't fit neatly into a box on a scorecard. But judgment should sit on top of evidence, not replace it.

Know What Happens When the Answer Is Yes

I've seen companies spend weeks deciding whether someone is good enough to hire and almost no time deciding what they'll do when the answer is yes.

That work should already be done.

Before the search starts, you should know the compensation range you're prepared to offer, who has authority to approve it, who will make the final hiring decision, whether references are required, and exactly what remains between a final yes and a written offer. If the CEO needs to approve the package, that shouldn't be discovered after the team decides to hire someone.

The same scrutiny should be applied to the number of interviews in the process. Every interview should have a reason to exist. If the candidate has already been evaluated against everything you agreed mattered, adding another executive because "they should probably meet them too" isn't necessarily making the decision better. Sometimes you're just creating another opportunity for the process to stall.

This is especially important because your process isn't happening in isolation. Strong salespeople are often talking to more than one company, and they're making decisions throughout the process just like you are. You don't need to rush into a bad hire because you're afraid of losing someone, but you also shouldn't confuse slowness with rigor.

A rigorous process can move quickly because the decision criteria were established before the candidate entered it.

If the interview team has collected the evidence, the candidate clears the bar you established, the important disagreements have been resolved, and the economics work, you shouldn't need another week to figure out whether you're ready to act.

A good hiring process should get faster as your conviction increases.

One More Thing

The goal of a sales hiring process isn't to create more interviews, more scorecards, or more steps. It's to make a difficult decision easier because you've collected the right information in the right order.

If you're sitting in a debrief arguing about whether someone "felt senior enough," you probably didn't define what senior enough meant before you started interviewing. If three interviewers asked essentially the same questions, you wasted opportunities to learn different things. If you get to the final interview and realize nobody knows whether the candidate can generate their own pipeline, you tested the wrong things in the wrong order. And if you finally decide you want someone but still need several days to figure out compensation and approvals, the process wasn't ready for a yes.

A good process doesn't guarantee you'll never make a bad hire. I've been doing this too long to pretend any hiring system can do that. Hiring people will always involve judgment, and sometimes someone who looked great throughout the process won't work out.

What a good process gives you is a much better way to make the decision. Know the job you're actually hiring for. Decide what you need to learn. Give each interviewer a purpose. Form opinions independently before the debrief. Resolve disagreements instead of averaging them away. Know what a yes requires before you get one.

When those pieces are in place, you stop interviewing people until somebody finally feels good enough.

You start hiring against a standard you actually understand.

Building Your Sales Hiring Process?

If you're preparing to hire an AE, sales leader, or your first salesperson, we can help you pressure-test the role, compensation, candidate profile, and interview process before you start the search. And if you need help finding the right person, that's what we do too. Talk with us: Recruiting Discussion

‍