Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a company to hire a new sales rep. The hiring and interviewing process is always a pleasure for me, especially when working with high-level candidates from Pursuit Sales Solutions. Once we selected and hired the right candidate, I stepped away from my involvement in the process. But not long after, the sales leader reached out, feeling frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of success with the new rep—which was strange given the thorough hiring and vetting process we had used. Between Pursuit Sales, PI assessments, and scorecard grading in the interviews, this should have been a slam dunk.
As I sat down with the sales leaders, I quickly discovered that they had executed step 1 of the Vendi motto perfectly—they had fantastic visibility into the rep’s daily actions. But even with that visibility, they were struggling with step 2: accountability. After some back-and-forth discussion, the issue became clear. While they had captured the rep’s activities, they had not set clear goals or made it crystal clear what success would look like in the role. Both the rep and the leadership team believed the job was being performed at a high level, but their expectations were drastically different.
One of the key lessons I took from this experience is that even with a fantastic and diligent hiring process, our job is far from over when bringing new talent on board. We need to establish clear goals and outline exactly what is expected in the role. We need to paint a picture of why those goals and activities are important, and how we as leaders can help the rep achieve them. It’s not enough to just set goals and hold reps accountable—we must coach, guide, and mentor them through their onboarding process (and really, we should never stop doing this—but that’s a topic for another blog).
Ultimately, a new hire’s performance is more often a reflection of us as managers than of their own abilities.
Jeb Blount once shared a story about how he helped a company reduce the time it took for new sales hires to make their first cold prospecting call from nine months to two weeks. The difference? The bad manager said, “Follow these steps, and in nine months you’ll be able to make cold calls.” The great manager said, “Let’s pick up the phone together and make calls back-to-back.” They guided and mentored the reps to success, realizing that nine months of making calls with little training was far less effective than hands-on coaching from the start.
In most cases, hiring a great candidate is actually the easy part. Onboarding, guiding, and mentoring them to success is where the real work of being a manager begins.
Cheers,
Kyle Jager
