25+ years
1–10 reps
Top 3%
Stop guessing in sales hiring. Most companies evaluate salespeople the way they’d evaluate any other employee — personality, resume, gut feel. That’s why they keep losing.
This guide walks you through a step-by-step system to define incentives, source candidates, screen effectively, and run structured interviews that reveal actual top performers — before you make an offer.
You don't evaluate fit by instinct — you evaluate it by running candidates through a structured process that mirrors your actual sales motion. That means a role-play, a written exercise, and a scored interview against a defined rubric. If three evaluators score a candidate independently and agree, you've de-risked the decision dramatically.
Hiring based on likability. Great salespeople are often polished interviewees — that's literally their job. Companies fall in love with a candidate in round one and spend rounds two and three confirming their bias instead of testing for actual ability to close under pressure.
In most SMB contexts, you'll have real signal by day 60 and a high-confidence answer by day 90. If a rep hasn't moved pipeline, logged consistent activity, or closed anything by the 90-day mark, the pattern rarely reverses. The cost of waiting longer is almost always higher than the cost of a clean, early exit.
Industry experience matters less than most founders think — selling skill and coachability matter more. A proven closer from an adjacent industry will almost always outperform a mediocre rep with a decade of domain experience. Train for domain, hire for skill.
You should be screening 40–80 applicants, first-round interviewing 8–12, final-round interviewing 3–5, and hiring one. If your funnel looks thinner than that, you're likely compromising — and compromise hires are the ones that fail at month four.
For SMBs hiring their first reps, a 50/50 base-to-variable split with aggressive accelerators above quota is a solid default. Your top performers should be able to earn 2–3x on-target earnings, and your bottom performers should find the comp plan uncomfortable. If everyone's happy with the plan, it's wrong.
Good interviewers answer questions fluently. Good salespeople ask questions that change the conversation. If a candidate never turns the interview around to understand your business, your customers, or your pipeline — they probably won't do it with prospects either.
Replace instinct with process. Define the role on paper before you post it, use structured scoring, run a practical exercise every candidate completes, and reference-check with specific performance questions. The companies that stop getting burned are the ones who stop treating each hire as a one-off decision and start treating hiring as a system.
