By Frank Cespedes, senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
U.S. firms annually invest three times more in their sales forces than they do in their advertising, 20 times more than on online media, and 100 times more than on social media. For many companies, selling is by far the most expensive part of business—and where the most hiring occurs. Despite this, hiring results in sales are notoriously hit or miss.
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Why is the sales hiring record so dismal? First, many sales managers ignore what good HR people know about effective recruitment and development. Conversely, too many HR professionals lack a working knowledge of the actual sales tasks in their firms.
Drawing on research from Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors That Drive Effective Selling, let’s explore why companies must rethink traditional sales hiring and training to forge better links between these necessary partners.
Letting Sales Tasks Lead Selection
Recruitment and selection in sales is challenging for various reasons. Annual total turnover for this sector averages 25 to 30 percent across industries. This means that at many firms, the equivalent of the entire sales force must be replaced every 4 years or so. And that time frame shrinks when companies increase revenue targets.
Unfortunately, filling these positions is an ad hoc process at many firms. Studies repeatedly show that managers are excessively confident about their abilities to evaluate candidates via one or two interviews, and this is especially true in sales. Furthermore, when filling a job like sales, where individual performance can make a big difference, hiring managers inevitably suffer from a cloning bias, largely because how each manager did the job is what got him or her promoted and in a position to hire.
Hence, many sales managers simply hire in their own images. However, the best results occur when those doing the hiring can observe the candidate performing the relevant sales tasks—the behaviors that ultimately drive selling success in line with strategy.
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Behaviorally-Based Interviews Work at HubSpot
At HubSpot, a firm founded in 2006 to provide inbound marketing services, Sales VP Mark Roberge defined his goal as “scalable, predictable revenue growth.” To achieve this, he worked with HR managers to develop behavior-based interviews. Roberge began with criteria that, based on his knowledge of key sales tasks, correlate with sales success at HubSpot. After 12 months, 500 interviews, and 20 hires, he worked with HR to analyze the prehire interview scores with posthire sales success.
As Roberge puts it, “Many companies use nothing more than ‘gut feel.’ When you have just a handful of salespeople, that seems like an adequate approach; it’s hard to see the variability. But with hundreds of salespeople working thousands of leads … we’ve worked hard at HubSpot to create a culture of rigorous self-analysis and review.”
Roberge’s interviews helped him and his HR team hire more than two hundred successful salespeople, continually placing HubSpot on the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest Growing Companies.
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Although sales managers know (or should know) the key sales tasks, HR managers typically know a lot more about the tools, techniques, and options for assessing behaviors relevant to those tasks and, therefore, the creation of truly relevant hiring criteria. To close this knowledge gap, HR should ask sales partners if they can explain the key sales tasks in the business, and let these insights guide their recruiting and selection processes.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, Cespedes demonstrates the targeted training process for sales, plus we will introduce you to the all-things-HR-in-one-place website, HR.BLR.com.
Frank Cespedes, author of Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling, is a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. As an experienced entrepreneur, board member, teacher, and consultant, Cespedes helps business leaders close the sales/strategy gap and create long-term value.