Interview Structure For Hiring Great Sales Reps (Lead Playbook)

0:05 good morning everybody and welcome to this part two episode of our first ever two-part leadership Playbook on how to hire president's Club caliber a my name is Arman fro and I'm here with my co-host Mark cow last week if you missed it we covered all the things that you should look for in an amazing rep the traits that they should have the competencies that you have to test for even the domain expertise that you might find helpful and now we need to talk

0:35 about how you actually test for those things AK the interview process Mark why should people listen lots of companies are starting to hire again and this is your chance to get high quality people in there when you have limited amount of ability to hire getting the right people in there becomes way more difficult and way more important and so this part where we talk about all right we now have somebody that we think has the characteristics now we need to really

1:04 drill in and confirm that and what are we going to do to make sure we make a hiring decision that's what we'll cover here that is a critical thing to do right now in a market where you might not have a lot of hires coming up and three two 1 Let's hire somebody we probably talked the audience to death on traits skills domain expertise and just so the audience knows what's coming there are going to be a series of

1:26 competencies that Mark is testing for the three skills that I'm testing for are prospecting Discovery and process but let's actually jump right to the interview process now that we've talked about the traits that we're looking for Mark I'd love to start with your AE hiring process talk about the competencies that you're screening for and then the different steps in your interview process first step of the process starts with I think the most important friend that you can have if

1:51 you're a sales leader which is a great recruiter first tip on the interview process is make sure you have a great recruiter don't just think because they're willing to bring you candidates they're good what makes them good is oh my gosh we only have time to interview three or four of these people and we got 10 people I'd like to talk to that's when you know you got a good recruiter the second thing is the screen you need

2:16 to set up a screen and for me the screen can either be with the recruiter or it can be with the hiring manager and I typically did most of the screens until we got up to a point where there were just too many hires and I didn't have enough time to do it anymore and all I'm looking for in the screen is would I be cool sitting down with this person and having dinner I don't need to know their

2:37 skills I don't need to grill them I just want to know can they carry a conversation with me for half an hour it's just is there a connection after that the hiring manager does an interview the purpose of that interview is to save the rest of the process if the person's bad so they need to find the deal killers and they need to be really sharp with what they're interviewing because letting people through to the next round with a loop

3:01 we're now wasting half a dozen people's time three or four hours of productivity and if we're flying them in we're wasting a lot of money on somebody that the screener just was like yeah it's good enough you have to really Define what that screener is supposed to do after the screener I would have a loop of four to five people we had six or sevenish core competencies at Outreach depending on the stage of company each interviewer in the loop was responsible

3:28 for mastering two of those core competencies and that's what they always interviewed on and if I heard you ask the stupid question like why you leaving your job you don't get to interview anymore I need real strong questions where you've been thoughtful to think about my core competency is work ethic how do I assess work ethic in a half hour conversation when a person is trying to say things that make me want to think that they have work ethic how

3:51 do I actually get to the truth and I think we've talked about that exercise a few times but like that's a very very valuable exercise and it makes that Loop really and what happens is you end up people that can spot coachability a mile away cuz that's all they ever interview on is coachability and grit and they just get so good at it that you can really trust their opinion and typically what I'll do is try to make sure that

4:14 every competency is covered but have a couple overlaps so there's a couple people that touch for coachability so we get a little bit of extra Dimension there the next thing that we do is we have the final kind of on-site or video interview with the hiring manager where any other hesitations or concerns are addressed in there I do those sometimes and really that is about honesty at that point you should know whether you want to hire them or not and if there's a

4:39 couple things that you got to get ironed out that's just where you're like listen here's a deal I don't know if this is true or not but in general what we found out was it doesn't feel like you really want to be in sales we're concerned about that as a company it feels like sales is on a path to you whereas we're looking for sales professionals that want to be the dopest sales person that there is can you help me understand what

5:02 you think about sales and don't forget if you take this job and you don't really want it you'll hate it but if we need to just clear up a couple things and we found out that you really do want to do this then we think you could be a great fit once we iron these things out and so that interview is almost a precursor to a difficult conversation about coaching or managing that rep can you have that difficult conversation and

5:24 how do they respond do they blossom in it in which case it's an easy hire or do they shrink from it in which case you've now probably figured out that the things that you're nervous about are bad then after that final thing then we have a little round table where everybody that's interviewed the candidate gets around the table everybody real succinctly so we don't turn it into an two hour long meeting you get three or four minutes you talk about it and then

5:47 you give your opinion yes or no all right so I've got ton of questions to unpack this just to recap the process so the audience has the step-by-step version you have the screen which is often times run by a recruit recruiter then you have the hiring manager interview and that's really where you're getting the big chunky items out of the way like do you even know how to sell do you know how to run a discovery call you

6:07 know how to do process Etc then from there they go into the loop and that Loop is four or five people each testing for two core competencies this is the equivalent of what many people would call a super day for example and then the final step is a final video or on-site hiring manager oneon-one whatever is left at this point you should know and this should just be a final drisking and also you're bringing people a little bit closer to you I want

6:31 to zoom in on step two which is the recruit's already screened your candidate you're the hiring manager and now you need to drisk the big stuff because if you say yes this person is about to go meet four other people on your team what do you test for in this I imagine a 60-minute interview whether it's Discovery sales skills and how do you run that interview I'm a hiring manager this person is going to report to me and I need to make a good decision

7:01 and part of a manager's job is identifying recruiting interviewing and developing really great talent I never told someone to hire someone or to not hire someone because if a Frontline manager whose job it is to do those things with Talent can't do it on their own then they can't be a manager that's a core competency of being a manager don't let that hiring manager think that they have an out they have to be be so certain of what they want to do and so

7:31 good at it they don't have cow as a back stop to be like whoa what are we doing here right if you're going to make the mistake you're going to make the mistake and you're going to be accountable for it and figure it out if you make too many mistakes then we have to figure out what we're going to do about it but that hiring manager interview is one where I think that manager has to be super sharp

7:49 and they have to understand okay more than are they a hard worker or not I need to know the absolute deal breakers what are the things that we know don't work it's funny a lot of times what this would turn into was almost a I'd have to apologize I'm going to ask some rapid fire machine gun questions one is what's your average deal size what's your cycle time what was your win rate who's the people that you actually sold to and I

8:11 would just have a list I think I had like 10 or 11 questions that I would ask and these are just things like is this person in my universe of people that I should be considering or not so what are some of the example grill or interview questions you would ask in this stage so literally I say I'm going to apologize after a little bit of Rapport building can I machine gun ask you a bunch of

8:35 questions and you just give me the shortest tightest answer if I ask for a number just give me the number and people will be like okay all right what is your average deal size what was your win rate what was your average cycle time what kind of buyer did you buy into so those are like examples that's the idea man is you want to get as much information as you can in that interview and you just want to put it in the frame

8:59 or cont context of hey I'm about to do this to you is that okay so after the machine gun are you doing any skill building or competency testing for the rest of the interview or is that really just to do almost like the lay of the land like is this person the right profile for the organization and then you leave those more sales oriented questions do you know how to multi-thread type of questions you leave those ones to the loop is that right

9:21 yeah usually what I'll do is at the back half of this one that's when I'll say okay what kind of questions do you have for me and I'm starting to see do they actually asked the right kind of question so a great question is is like how many people hit quota last quarter that is a question of a rep that knows what they're doing how many open opportunities does somebody have at a single time here how much of my pipeline

9:42 am I supposed to source and how reliable is a part that I don't have to Source those are questions of somebody that's really trying to figure out like I know what I got I can win at doing whatever but you got what I need and that's what I'm looking for in those questions at some point when are they going interview me to find out what they need to know if they're going to make money here or not

10:03 so they go to the next step the loop four to five people two core competencies a pop could you give an example of what an interview Loop would look like in other words who would be on it and what would be the competencies that you're testing for with each of those people typically two peers we sometimes would do together and take them out to eat because when you're in that kind of breaking bread environment things really get real find out a lot in

10:30 those and then the two people together it's a little bit of a different Dynamic sometimes that's a separate stop on the train and so those two would be peers then we would have somebody ahead of them in the funnel so like an SDR or maybe a demand gen person and then somebody behind them in the funnel like an sc or a CSM and then we usually it would have a cultural person their only job is to figure out is this person

10:52 going to Vibe with us or not and the cultural person is risky from this standpoint is most people think about culture they're like this is our culture and does this person have the same kind of a culture that we have I think that's wrong that's how you build homogeneity and same thinking what I'm looking for is here's our culture how is this going person going to enrich our culture how they going to add something what's a

11:20 little bit of a different slant that they think about or how they react to things that creates an overall richer culture for our sales teams there it is amazing I want to ask you about one more thing you have this thing at the end which is the everything wrong with our company interview talk me through that the talk them out of it first of all there's the skill the trait and the domain expertise assessment right then

11:44 there's the hey we got to sell them on why they would be a good fit for us but then there's the they have to sell you on why they're good fit for you but when all that's done it's a Love Fest and we know every relationship isn't just built on a Love Fest there's a little bit of friction in there there's a little bit contention so I introduced that into the sales process and I will a lot of times

12:04 especially with leader and executive hires I will talk them out of the job at Catalyst everybody that followed me from Outreach to Catalyst I had a specific call where I told them why they should not take the job and so you know listen you know this is wrong this is wrong this sounds good but it's actually not good here's something that we really like about you but like is going to be a challenge for us and I just completely

12:29 try to talk people out of the job honestly I think it does the exact opposite the transparency and honesty causes people to like suck right up into you and just be like all right this is what I want to do it's like magnets and iron filings it's a call where you don't want to talk about things that are sensitive right but you want to talk about the reality of what makes the job hard what makes it challenging why you

12:51 might not like it why you're going have to power through that and then if they still agree it's really interesting is when they start to struggle you can always point back to that conversation and be like remember we talked about this the worst thing to do is a hire a salesperson that's best at selling themselves and not best at selling a product I want to see the selling of the product more than the selling of the

13:12 self after you're hired here's what my process looked like I have a lot of things that are very parallel and common to your interview process Mark the four steps are as follows there are three like golden principles up front that I believe to be true around hiring number one I believe that the best best reps need to be sold into interviewing like most reps you can't just take the first call and immediately start grilling them they will not opt into the process you

13:38 can't throw a mock disco at them right away they're going to be like too much work not worth it sure maybe if you're a big brand name you can do that stuff but I was selling early stage and most people didn't even know what the heck pave did principle number two is the best reps usually aren't looking at all so you got to go and find them and then principle number three is the best reps work for people who they think they can

13:59 learn from and that usually means there's someone who can get them to think about something that they don't know or they can get them to think on their feet and so a lot of hiring managers make the mistake of trying to bring people through a bunch of these early stage screens technical tests all this BS 17 recruiter screens and the hiring manager will jump in way too late in the process and the best reps are often times making their decision by the

14:27 second or third interview already and so I prefer to invert the funnel and spend more time as a hiring manager with the top tier candidates so that at the end I have the decision and so step number one is the first interview is a hiring manager sell valuation what I mean by that is I'm going to spend this call mostly selling the candidate in their eyes but in my eyes I'm still evaluating them so I'll set my agenda I'll

14:57 introduce myself and I'll usually give a 90c Spiel on who pave is why the company's awesome what we're doing on this team and why I specifically reached out to that rep especially if it was outbound from there I'll ask them why they took the call in the first place if you recognize this is really similar to how we also started a discovery call is if it's an outbound candidate or if you're an early stage you have to fill

15:18 your own funnel you have to understand why this person took the call in the first place because they will not take a million random screens a top rep always has the ability to get an interview so there's a reason they're sitting in front of you from there I'll usually do discovery on their career goals what they're trying to accomplish and then I begin the cell valuation questions and those are highle big picture questions similar to your machine gun questions

15:42 but really big picture that allow me to understand the type of sale they're in understand what their sales Acumen is and let me allow them to brag about their sales process when in reality I'm using that to see if they know how to structure information so I'll ask them really big questions like it seems like you've had a lot of success everyone has a different style of selling how do you sell and I'll just see what they do with

16:06 these really big open-ended questions another good one is walk me through your sales process and then walk me through each step and you'll get people who just ramble on about these steps in their sales processes if it's going nowhere and you'll get a sense of who actually understands what they're doing in their sales cycle versus who doesn't and then at the end I'll usually have some sort of turnaround pitch where if they've knocked the cover off the ball I'll gas

16:31 them up I'll tell them this is why I think they'd be an awesome fit for the team and I'll ask for permission to grill The Living Daylights out of them in the next interview once we get into interview number two I pick one topic usually sales process and I'm going super super deep and the key thing is I want them to map out every single step in their sales process and then I'm going to throw curve balls at them

16:56 between each step so if they say my goal is to get to a problem in the first interview I'll start throwing questions at them like what do you do when someone's giving you no answers or one-word answers what do you do when someone starts multitasking what do you do when someone pulls in three different competitors what do you do when someone blocks your access to power if the next step is getting access to power so constantly throwing these curveballs at

17:16 them to see what do you do when things go wrong and this will go one of two ways it's either going to get really uncomfortable and the rep is going to feel like shoot I'm getting Pinn into a corner or it's going to feel like the best 30 minutes to president's Club interview you've ever heard because they're Juiced up they're like this person gets that selling is not easy but I've got an answer for everything and

17:41 there's a really fun back and forth exchange of awesome sales advice step three is the mock Discovery call we run them through a mock Discovery with an AE and the hiring manager both together and then if they pass that and there are a lot of keys that's frankly the biggest place of drop off at that point they've now met me two times and they've also met one to two peers on the team and at this point we should know if we want to

18:04 hire this person and that's why we structure the on-site where we have a CEO involved usually or some sort of executive to help sell the company we'll have some other peer on the team and then we'll usually do one final hiring manager test which is really that final missing piece of the equation four rounds hiring manager cell hiring manager Grill the mock Discovery and then the on-site with three interviews in the super day love it how do you do

18:31 that first call where you're selling them like how do you balance out selling them and also evaluating them at the same time so there are a couple different places where people tend to screw this thing up number one I'm coming into a call with the assumption that the person knows very little about our team other than what's on our website and what's on our HR teams LinkedIn page or whatever which is garbage so I'll start with a mini pitch

18:54 up front and I had it down do a science it was why you should work for this company why you should work for this team and why I reached out to you that's step one from there I want to understand their career goals and get them talking this is still part of the sales process but it's also part of me understanding what's important to them as a candidate and testing for culture in that first piece are you just looking for money are

19:22 you looking for a team where you can contribute are you looking for a late stage thing where you're just going to come in and carry a bag and the moment quota goes up you're going to leave Etc once I get that that's the most selling that really is happening in the early part of the interview and then I transition to the cell valuate questions where I'm using the success that they've already shared with me right they've

19:43 probably told me that they've made club they're the number one number two number three rep whatever it is and I'm using that success to evaluate them right I'm testing for that conscious competence that we talked about earlier do you know how you sell do you know your sales style do you know how to run a Sal process and that is evaluation that is disguised as me giving you the opportunity to talk about why you're the best seller in the world why do you

20:08 start with the selling them I'm curious that's where you start why so the reason for this is especially true in early stage and with outbound candidates you'll get a lot of people who will jump on these calls and they'll just sit back and they'll be like all right not looking tell me what you got and they're not even in the mode to be evaluated yet now if I've got someone who's been screened by a recruiter they're Prime

20:33 they're actively looking yada yada yada great I'll go and Grill them but I find that usually with the top reps you have to constantly stay on top of these folks you need to constantly pull them out of roll because usually top reps get treated like gold and you usually have to sell them up front to get them to even be open to being evaluated in the first place yeah well I think the key there is context of an inbound person

20:59 that's already kind of sold maybe you don't go as heavy an outbound person that you're trying to sell on just hey you should go through my process that's a very different conversation my best hires have been ones that probably didn't come through a recruited totally let's talk about and let's round this thing out can you give me the quick one two punch on when you're sourcing candidates when you're filling your recruiting funnel how do you go about

21:22 doing that effectively and getting a constant lead flow of candidates Mondo answer this question with the question how do you find leads on LinkedIn you figure out your ICP you find the traits of that lead you go do a search you create a list and then you go outbound on them right that's right as a leader you're still in sales you're always selling your team on something a new methodology you're selling them on the fact that you're not the best product

21:47 but you're not so bad that people won't buy you you're trying to sell them on something on the new comp plan and so that goes all the way back to the recruiting and hiring process I hate to simplify it down to this but what you tell your reps to do on prospecting days that's what you do on your day you need to hire some people I was literally going to say the exact same take on that one take what

22:10 you're telling your sdrs to do and go do it on candidates there are three sources of candidate flow for you as a hiring manager number one is outbound number two is inbound and number three is referrals the number one that you can control is your outbound and so 25 a week you figure out the the companies that have similar sales Cycles to you you pull every midmarket AE or smba AE or Enterprise AE into a spreadsheet or

22:36 there are tools like gem that basically allow you to just sequence candidates I've honestly run it out of Outreach before in the past too so you can do whatever you want to sequence people and it's just a three-step LinkedIn drip where it's like you connect with them on the first step you use a 3X3 email where it's noticed you've had success at this company I'm not assuming you're looking to look here's what we're all about it

22:57 will help you calibrate and every once in a while you'll find one there but then the last most underestimated channel is every single quarter at the beginning of the quarter I'd be like awesome end of the quarter and the gift of growth is we get to bring your friends onto the team and so here's a spreadsheet with every single rep's name 10 times you do not get to leave this room until 10 friends are on this list

23:21 and DMD and we hired literally half of our candidates from outbound and half of them from referral and that's what you got to do especially if you want to hire the best in the game folks all righty mark it is the final 2 by two recap in our first ever two-part hiring Playbook what are your two two by two number one is make sure that in your Loop you designate specific people to do a specific thing so they can get really

23:49 good at it most people don't think about interviewing they show up they ask generic questions but when you assign someone say two core competencies to address and then have them prove to you how they're going to address and assess for those you get really people that are really good at interviewing and then number two is when you got them hooked when they really want to do it talk them out of it and the people that you can

24:14 talk out of even though you're excited about it they wouldn't have worked out anyway because they weren't up for the challenges and the rigor and the things that you have in your sales org so talk them out of it before you send them the offer letter I guarantee you your best Cates will love it and they will be more excited to work for you after you do that number three sell early Grill after the first way you get someone to opt

24:40 into the process is you understand their goals you sell them on the company you're building the team you're building but then the second way you get them to opt in is you gain their Respect by grilling the heck out of them and if it goes well it's going to feel like the best 30 MPC interview you've ever heard and then lastly number four I didn't touch on this a ton in my interview process but it's similar to Mark's

25:00 takeaway where each step in the process should test for a different dimension of sales so the grill interview is testing for process the mock Discovery is testing for Discovery and then the on-site usually the peer will be testing for prospecting and so don't have people ask the same 10 damn questions tell me about a time when you did the blah blah blah blah or tell me about why you're leaving your job have each person do something different so you have a fully

25:25 rounded assessment of the candidate so folks if you like this two-part Playbook right here you might want to play some of this stuff back and I wrote all this stuff up in our last most recent newsletter I actually wrote out the entire hiring process and you can get that in the show notes or go to 30 mc.com newsletter I think it's at two weeks ago as of the date of this recording all folks we will see you on the next one