Domains for Making the Hire: Identifying Good Sales Leadership
We sometimes get asked to help with hiring and more often than not, it is for revenue-generating roles. As such, we thought it would be helpful to share some specific domains of consideration:
- Good sales people know how to lead conversations. They can turn the most mundane topics into something that captures mindshare. Check for that, always.
- Conversational control is a key to success. Potential sales hires need to possess self awareness and be able to describe how they manage conversations. Once you understand and observe their process and skill, you need to know how well that aligns with the way you want your customers to feel about interacting with your business.
- General curiosity on the part of your sales role candidate in many ways should drive everything else. Test for this on both the professional and personal levels. Ask about the books they’re reading and their favorite podcasts. They should be both ‘interested’ and ‘interesting’.
- Beyond that, it’s all about willingness to serve and having grit.
Assess for these things by being curious yourself - dig into the specifics. Ask a lot of questions that force candidates to provide examples of how they’ve closed, what the lifetime value of their captured customers has been and how they’ve developed relationships.
In preparation to hire a sales leader, make sure you really understand what your business needs.
Can you be successful with someone managing complexity or do you need leadership to penetrate new markets? (See our previous article regarding the differences between managing and leadership.) Do you need order takers or people that can piece together complicated deal structures?
If we can help, let’s talk. Pachydermos is founded on the need for conversation and communication to support growing mission-based organizations. Contact us at info@pachydermos.com to chat about how we can support your leadership hiring needs as part of our Pipeline Consulting services.
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