Sales Hiring

Step 1: Establish a theory of the ideal sales characteristics

First, I listed the characteristics I thought would correlate with sales success. For each characteristic, I documented a clear definition. What did I mean by “intelligence?” What did it mean to be “aggressive?” My intention was to score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10 for each characteristic. Therefore I needed to define what a score of “1” versus a score of “5” versus a score of “10” represented for each characteristic. For each candidate, I summarized the results on an Interview Scorecard.

Step 2: Define an evaluation strategy for each characteristic

Once I defined the characteristics I was looking for, I needed a plan to evaluate candidates on each characteristic. What behavioral questions could I ask? Would I use role plays? Should there be an exercise for the candidate prior to the interview? How could I leverage reference checks?

Step 3: Score candidates against the ideal sales characteristics

Back in the early days of HubSpot, I simply filled out the Interview Scorecard after each interview. The process was not overly sophisticated. I used Microsoft Excel. (We were a startup—I needed to be “hacky.”) The key to the process was discipline, not sophisticated technology. I documented my findings and learnings as I went, and used them to constantly tweak my approach.

Step 4: Learn and iterate on the model while engineering the Sales Hiring Formula

A few months in, I had a handful of salespeople on board. Many were doing great. A few were progressing more slowly than others. By remaining disciplined in the process described in Step 3, I was in an optimal position to learn from these first hires and begin to understand our ideal hiring criteria. I was ready to engineer my company’s sales hiring formula. I simply went back to the Interview Scorecards for the top performers and asked myself the following questions:

While we designed this process with scale in mind, it can work for almost any company no matter its stage or size. Recently I met with two founders of a SaaS company based in the northeast United States who told me that they wanted to hire a new breed of salesperson. Their idea was to only hire a very specific profile: someone who had graduated from a Top 5 MBA program (Harvard, Columbia, etc.) and then went to work for a top-tier consulting firm (McKinsey, Bain, etc.). The idea was that a high business acumen and intelligence level would lead to higher sales efficiency. But while the early results were promising, they eventually struggled with this profile. The reps weren’t accustomed to 50% of their compensation being variable, they hadn’t developed the same tactics that seasoned reps do, etc. Fortunately they were tracking their hires with a model similar to the one we used at HubSpot and were able to pivot their hiring strategy quickly.

Given the fact that every company has its own unique sales context, it’s natural to be surprised by what characteristics work out the best. After the first year running our model, we came to some counterintuitive findings: the characteristics that are traditionally associated with salespeople, such as aggression and strong objection-handling ability, had the worst correlation with success.

Once we had a large-enough sample size, we were able to start running regression analyses against important metrics like “revenue booked by rep.” We took the score each rep received during their interviews and compared them to their quota attainment and bookings later. Then we fed that data back into the model, which enabled us to weight certain characteristics more strongly.

But we quickly learned that revenue and quota attainment weren’t the only metrics that mattered. Sales reps can potentially close deals by selling to the wrong customers or by using sales pressure tactics. However, those deals will usually churn fast. So an important metric for success was whether or not the customers had a long lifetime. LTV also takes into consideration the size of the monthly payment, which can indicate how well a rep prioritizes larger deals and manages their overall funnel to get the best revenue out of a given set of small and large opportunities.

Unfortunately, LTV wasn’t the perfect metric to measure either. One of the first things we realized was that it didn’t consider changes in rep behavior fast enough. For example, if a rep who was overselling deals—which leads to high churn—starts finding better customers, their LTV won’t start to go up until one or two years later. That’s a problem because the model will always lag reality.

This realization led us to develop leading indicators that could help predict LTV and future bookings by rep. Rather than look at a rep’s LTV, we began looking at things like the engagement of their customers within the product. We broke our product into 25 different features and then queried if the customer had used at least five of those features within the first 90 days. If they did, they were seeing the value of our product. If not, they were more likely to churn. This alone helped us get ahead of the problem by three or four quarters.

Once we had a model we were confident in, we learned that HubSpot’s best reps shared five characteristics:

Here’s how we interviewed for each of those.

Coachability

Coachability is the ability to absorb and apply coaching.

Coachability was the most significant influencer of my hiring decision. As I think back to most of the rock stars we hired, their coachability was the personality trait that really stood out in their interviews. Evaluating this characteristic consumed the majority of my interview. Here is the three-step process I employed to evaluate this characteristic.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the ability to understand a potential customer’s context through effective questioning and listening.

I have taught several classes on the subject of sales at MIT, Harvard, and other top universities across the United States. One of my favorite ways to start the class is to ask the students, “What makes a great salesperson great?” The most popular answers are consistent across venues and audiences: “aggressive,” “convincing,” “great presenter,” “money hungry.”

I don’t think anyone has ever given me the answer I am looking for. Great salespeople are naturally curious. They ask great questions, listen intently, and probe into points of interest.

Great salespeople ask questions of potential customers in a manner that does not feel interrogative. Instead, potential customers feel like great salespeople are genuinely interested. After all, if the salespeople are truly great, they genuinely take interest in the responses of their prospects.

Great salespeople educate potential customers through the questions they ask. Their questions are thought provoking and elicit introspection. “You know, nobody has ever asked me that before. Now that I think about it …”

Great salespeople quickly build trust in order to earn the right to ask personal questions and to receive honest answers in return.

Great salespeople seek to understand customer goals, aspirations, fears, and struggles—all through tactical questioning.

Students often ask me, “Mark, how can I prepare myself to be a top performer in sales?” I offer the following advice: the next time you are at a wedding reception, a school networking event, or a party on a Friday night, approach a stranger and ask them questions. See how long you can question that individual without mentioning anything about yourself. If the individual walks away from the conversation feeling interrogated, you need more practice. If the individual walks away thinking, “Wow, that was a really smart and interesting guy,” you are on your way to becoming a great salesperson.

So how do we test candidates for curiosity? There are many areas in the interview process, but I will highlight two especially important opportunities.

The first test of curiosity happens the moment I meet a candidate in the lobby. “Hello, Jess. My name is Mark Roberge. Thanks for coming in today.”

Does the candidate start with a question? Does the candidate ask me about my day? Did the candidate research my background and does she take the opportunity to reference an observation from her findings? Based on my responses, does the candidate follow up with smart, open-ended questions to learn more? If all of these things are happening, then this interview has started really well for me (and for her).

The second test of curiosity occurs during the role play. Let’s use the same role play that I set up in the previous section on coachability.

Let’s try that again. This time, Jess will be far more curious.

Does the candidate lead with great questions? Or does the candidate “show up and throw up,” as we say in the industry?

Does the candidate ask about the specific areas the prospect cares about? Or does the candidate bore the prospect with her company’s elevator pitch?

Curiosity is the ability to understand a potential customer’s context through effective questioning and listening.

Prior Success

Prior success is a history of top performance or remarkable achievement.

It is probably the easiest characteristic to evaluate, especially if the candidate is coming from a reasonably sized sales force. It is the most objectively measurable of the “big five” traits.

I am looking for top 10 percent. If the candidate falls outside of that range, the candidate really needs to rank extremely high on the other key characteristics in order to earn an offer letter from HubSpot.

Evaluating prior success becomes more challenging when the candidate does not come from a reasonably sized sales organization or does not come from sales at all. In these cases, I evaluate prior success through other activities in the candidate’s life. How did the candidate perform academically in school? What was her class rank? What were the candidate’s standardized test scores? Was the candidate a standout performer on a varsity sports team? Was she the captain of the team? Perhaps she contributed to a major championship? Was the candidate a member of student government or a leader of an extracurricular organization? If the candidate is transitioning from a nonsales background, how did the candidate differentiate herself from her peers in her current or former role? What made her special?

On the HubSpot team, we had an Olympic gold medalist. We had a cello player from the Portland Symphony. We had a former comedian who was featured on Comedy Central. These people pursued their life passions with exceptional vigor and performed at a top percentile level. These people are likely to bring that same passion and competitive drive to their role in sales.

Prior success is a history of top performance or remarkable achievement.

Intelligence

Intelligence is the ability to learn complex concepts quickly and communicate those concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.

Not every sales team needs intelligent salespeople. For example, in a commoditized buyer context, I would bet that work ethic, rather than intelligence, is the superior predictor of success. However, in the HubSpot buyer context, intelligence proved to be a strong predictor of sales success. In retrospect, I believe intelligence was a key trait because our industry was evolving so rapidly. For context, Twitter was a garage project when we first started selling HubSpot. Just seven years later, it is a $25 billion technology titan. That should give you a sense of how quickly the industry was transforming in the late 2000s. Our salespeople needed to keep pace as the industry around us took shape. They needed to understand new concepts and communicate to our target customers exactly how those concepts impacted optimal marketing strategies. Because most early-stage companies operate in rapidly evolving industries, I expect that intelligence would be a predictor of sales success in their buyer contexts as well.

I tested intelligence by effectively commencing HubSpot sales training during the interview process. I exposed candidates to new information early in the interview process and observed their ability to absorb the information and communicate it back to me at a later stage in the process. For example, at the end of my first phone screen with a candidate, I would send her training materials on the concepts of inbound marketing, SEO, blogging, and social media. I would ask her to learn the material before our next interview. Then, I would be sure to reference the materials in our next role-playing session.

Here’s an example of testing for intelligence and information retention:

Her response would offer me a first impression of her performance on this characteristic. To reinforce my earlier point, I am trying to understand two things here. First, how well did she understand the concepts to which I had I exposed her? Second, how well did she communicate those concepts back to me in a simple manner? I would always ask follow-up questions until I eventually stumped the candidate. The deeper I was able get on a topic before her responses suffered, the better it meant she was performing.

Intelligence is the ability to learn complex concepts quickly and communicate those concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.

Work Ethic

Work ethic is proactively pursuing the company mission with a high degree of energy and daily activity.

Work ethic is probably one of the most difficult characteristics to evaluate. These are the three techniques I use to gain insight into each candidate’s work ethic.

Work ethic is proactively pursuing the company mission with a high degree of energy and daily activity.

It’s worth pointing out one more time that these were the characteristics that made sales hires at HubSpot successful because they fit our sales context, not because we identified some law of sales hiring that applies to everyone. At a company of a different size, or one that sells pharmaceuticals, the criteria might vary widely. The point of all of this is to show the process and our methodology, and hopefully inspire a few sales teams to develop their own.

I was lucky enough to join a company like HubSpot that treated almost every aspect of business like a science experiment, and hiring was no exception. From the day I joined until the day we IPO’d, we followed the same process: we started with a hypothesis, we tested it, and then we iterated.