Tips for hiring a senior inside sales rep (Part 2)

Note:

This is part two in a series on tips for hiring inside sales reps. This article focuses on hiring senior reps.

View Part I: Hiring a Junior Inside Sales Reps.

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Senior B2B Sales Rep Expectations

Drive – Why are they interviewing?

Senior sales candidates often have a myriad of motivations when they are looking for an inside sales job. They may have family, financial, or other concerns. Often determining their true motivation can help you better understand the candidates goals and motives.

Another factor is energy and work-ethics. Is the sales rep. willing to constantly do outbound prospecting or are they waiting for leads from marketing or personal networking? By definition, an inside sales rep is doing the bulk of his selling on the telephone. This can be a challenging environment if they haven't done it before. Has the candidate previously worked in an inside sales team or is their experience primarily in channel sales or outside sales?

Skills - Relevant experience

• Do they have skills that can immediately be put to use in our industry?
• What types of b2b sales environments were they exposed to? Transactional? Enterprise?
• History of six figure earnings
• What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?
• Do you want to be king, or rich?
• Understanding of business sales cycles
• What size opportunities have they FOUND, MANAGED and CLOSED.
• Understanding of enterprise sales forecasting models
• Can they take you through a funnel using percentages to calculate activities?
• Have they performed in a metric-based environment

Coach-Ability / Humility – Are they able to take direction?

• Have them sell you something during the interview.
  
• Ask them what they thought they did well and what they could improve.
• Then ask them to do it again.
• Defensiveness tells you they can’t be coached.

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