Breaking the Doom Loop of Sales Hiring

By Doug Hutton

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Sales hiring decisions often lead to classic buyer’s remorse. Sales managers wonder whether a new hire can thrive in a unique selling environment, particularly if they weren’t involved in the interview process. Nagging doubts remain about whether the candidate had the right knowledge, skills, or abilities to succeed in role. We’ve written before about why members don’t always hire the right candidate, a single mistake that isn’t hyperbole to suggest could cost an organization $1M or more.

CEB Recruiting research points out why buyer’s remorse remains so prevalent in sales hiring decisions. The annual cost differential between organizations that select the right hires compared to those that do not is $28.5 million. That doesn’t even touch on the foregone revenue from hiring a poor seller—it’s simply the bottom line overhead associated with attempting to keep up with higher employee turnover and lower performance. Consider the following data:

Hiring managers who make the wrong hiring decision have new hires that perform up to 24% worse than their correctly selected peers.
New hires that are not confident that they made the right decision to join an organization are up to 22% less engaged, and 46% more likely to leave the company—buyer’s remorse happens to them, too.
These trends are exacerbated by today’s high complexity selling environments, in which high performers are nearly 3x more productive than average performers. Replacing an outgoing high performer with a core performer not only opens that productivity gap but then heightens the risk of turnover, beginning a spiral that is difficult to correct without more accurate candidate insight during the hiring process.

In response to this bad-news barrage, and the continuing member chorus to increase the number of Challengers in their organizations, CEB is launching a new service for our members. Challenger Selection and Assessment can help determine the specific Challenger competencies correlated to high performance for particular roles, and leverage this knowledge to enable the selection of the best candidates during the hiring process.

Too often, we see organizations only assessing for those competencies that will qualify or disqualify a candidate—a basic level of competency that will put an organization squarely in the core performing, higher turnover danger zone.

We designed Challenger Selection and Assessment to find those competencies that differentiate high performers from the rest – Challenger competencies – so that hiring decisions produce less buyer’s remorse and more immediate productivity. Given that the most significant driver of rep engagement is goal achievement, the right hiring decisions become self-reinforcing. Challenger Selection and Assessment provides the objective insight into a candidate’s Challenger potential, that when combined with powerful benchmark data, can yield significant improvement in the hires companies bring onboard.

For more information on this new offering and to begin adding more Challengers to your sales force, please click here to send us an e-mail; we will reply within 24 hours to schedule a subsequent conversation.

SEC Members, to learn more about Challenger Selling, visit the topic center and review the Challenger Rep Starter Kit. In addition, look at the Talent Acquisition topic center for best-in-class practices on attracting and hiring sales talent.