Adding the right sales leader to your organization can help accelerate your company’s ability to grow and increase revenue. On the other hand, hiring the wrong sales leader can cost your company a lot of money and lead to a string of negative consequences.
In order to make sure you hire the right person, it’s important for the interviewer to be able to determine whether a candidate is just good in an interview setting, or if the candidate really has the right leadership skills and cultural awareness to be successful at your organization.
Keep reading to discover 6 important factors to consider when hiring a new sales leader to make sure you hire someone with the right skills to be successful.
Leadership Traits
Many companies make the mistake of promoting or hiring top-performing sales reps to fill the position of a sales leader.
While this may seem like a natural progression for a talented sales rep, many sales reps lack the leadership traits to be successful in a management position.
According to research by Gallup, companies are failing to choose candidates with the innate talents necessary to be an effective manager 82% of the time.
They also identified great managers as having these five traits:
- Motivational Ability
- Assertiveness
- Accountability
- Cultivate Relationships
- Decision-Making Skills
It can be difficult to determine during an interview whether a sales leadership candidate has these traits but asking the right questions can help you make a more informed decision. To learn more about which questions you should ask, we have listed 25 questions to ask based on each leadership trait.
Track Record of Experience
Another way to find a sales leader that fits your open role is to learn more about the candidate’s past leadership roles. One of the best predictors of future success is past experiences, and this is especially true when it comes to evaluating leadership candidates.
Make sure to ask the candidate questions about their past successes and failures in leadership roles. Also, ask them specific questions about how they identify success, what lead them to this success, and numbers to back up their statements.
Sense of Culture
While it’s important to get a sense of what sales leaders have accomplished in the past and what numbers their team hit, hiring on sales performance alone is not going to get you a cultural fit. You must first identify your own company’s culture and what it makes it unique.
For example, is your company driven, focused, and would do anything to make a sale? Or are you more process focused and methodical, while still trying to move fast and make a sale.
If the sales leader doesn’t match the existing culture, then there will be a lot of conflicts and friction between management and reps in the future.
The culture you have worked hard to create needs to be a top priority when bringing on new leadership and that person needs to fit your company’s management style and cultural needs.
Input From Team Members
Another way to ensure your sales leadership candidate fits your company culture is to get other team members involved in the interview process.
Most sales hiring processes consist of a phone interview, an in-person interview with the hiring manager, and maybe a final interview with the VP of Sales. While that may work well with entry-level sales rep position, when you’re hiring for a sales leadership position, you need to extend the interview process and get more people involved.
Skype video calls, in-person interviews with multiple people in your company, informal lunches, and even dinner interviews with spouses will help you evaluate what a candidate is like outside a formal interview setting and provide insight into what they will be like to work with.
And since your current employees know and fit into your company culture, they can help determine whether or not a candidate will also fit into the culture.
Interest Level
An interview is a two-way street. Not only do you need to be interested in the sales leadership candidate, but they need to be interested in the opportunity. If they don’t seem passionate about the opportunity and about your company, then this is a red flag. A disengaged sales leader can negatively affect your company’s culture, productivity, and sales team morale.
Instead, you should hire a candidate who seems excited about the opportunity and who is capable of driving the company’s goals. One way to determine a candidate’s interest level is to ask the right questions.
An ideal candidate will ask questions related to leadership, specific questions about the position, future goals and direction of the company, and internal organization questions.
For example, the candidate could ask about the company’s biggest opportunities and threats in the near future, or about how top management views the sales department and leadership roles.
Other questions might be about what the ideal sales lead looks like for the company or about the sales department’s goals for the year. The questions should show that the candidate is interested in the future or the company and also how to be successful in the position.
Long Term Success
Not only is it very expensive to have turnover at the leadership level, but it can also affect productivity, relationships with clients, and team morale.
When considering sales leadership candidates, one way to get an idea of their strategy and future performance is to ask for a 30-60-90 day business plan. When a candidate has to plan strategic initiatives into the future, you can get a very good sense of the strategies they will use and what goals they want to accomplish.
If a sales leadership candidate doesn’t have a clear plan for the team they’re going to manage and specific objectives, then this can be a red flag.
Hiring new employees is a difficult task, but hiring new leadership becomes even more difficult. Make sure you consider these six factors when hiring a new sales leader to make sure they’re successful in the role and are the right cultural fit.
