B2B Salesperson Profile: How to Build One Before You Recruit

Most companies start recruiting a salesperson with a job ad. That's too early. Before you write the first sentence of the ad, you need to know who exactly you're looking for. A B2B salesperson profile is a short document that describes the role, the competencies and the signals by which you'll recognise the right candidate. Without it, every interview ends with an impression, not a decision.

The profile is only the beginning of the process. I describe the whole process, from the ad to the first 90 days, in How to Recruit Salespeople.

Step 1: Define What Kind of Selling This Person Will Really Do

"Salesperson" is too general a word. Two people with the same title can do completely different jobs. Answer a few questions about the role:

• Will this person win new customers, or look after existing ones?
• How long is the typical sales cycle: days, weeks or months?
• Do they sell to one decision-maker, or to a buying committee?
• How many leads will they get from the company, and how many must they generate themselves?
• Do they sell a simple product, or a complex solution that requires educating the customer?

A salesperson who excels at short transactions often struggles in a long, complex cycle, and vice versa. Without these answers you're looking for someone "good in general", and no such person exists.

Step 2: Split the Requirements into Essential and Additional

The most common mistake in a profile is an impossible wish list: 10 years of experience, industry knowledge, languages, their own contact base. That candidate doesn't exist, and if they do, they'll pick someone else.

Split the requirements into two groups:

• Essential (3-5 points): without these, the candidate is out.
• Additional: a plus, but not a condition.

Remember that you can teach product knowledge, but you can't teach attitude. Industry knowledge is usually an additional trait. Resilience to rejection, independence and a hunger for results are essential ones.

Step 3: Describe Competencies in Terms of Behaviour

Instead of "good communicator" and "good at negotiating", describe what the candidate should do for you to consider them good:

• knows their numbers (target, achievement, conversion) and quotes them from memory,
• qualifies the customer with questions before presenting the offer,
• does their own prospecting and doesn't wait for leads,
• corrects course after a failure instead of making excuses,
• aims for a specific next step in every conversation.

You can check these behaviours in an interview and in a simulation. You can't check "communication skills".

Step 4: Describe the Anti-Profile

This is the step most companies skip, and it saves the most wrong decisions. The anti-profile describes the candidate you do not want, even though they may shine in the interview:

• a brilliant conversationalist who doesn't know their numbers,
• someone who explains every failure with external factors,
• a candidate focused on prestige and commission rather than on working with customers,
• a person who waits to be taught instead of learning on their own.

Charisma is not a competency. I write about this trap in more detail in How to Spot a Good Salesperson.

Step 5: Turn the Profile into Assessment Criteria

A profile is only useful once you turn it into a scorecard. For each essential trait, write down:

• which question will test it (you'll find ready-made examples in Salesperson Interview Questions),
• which task in the simulation will bring it out,
• which answer or behaviour is a 1 and which is a 5 on the scale.

That way, after the interview you're assessing facts, not impressions. Two people on your team can assess the same candidate and reach similar conclusions.

A Quick Cheat Sheet: The Profile on One Page

Before you write the ad, fill in:

1. Role: new customers or account management, sales cycle, type of decision-maker.
2. 3-5 essential traits.
3. Additional traits.
4. The anti-profile.
5. Questions and tasks that test each essential trait.

If you can't fill this in, it's not yet time for the ad.

Recruiting salespeople is one of the things I help companies with - from building the candidate profile, through selection, to simulations and onboarding. See the service: sales recruitment or book a free consultation using the button below.