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Recruitment9 min read

Sales Recruitment: How to Spot a Good Salesperson

I have conducted more than 500 recruitment interviews with salespeople. And I learned one thing that had previously cost me quite a few wrong decisions: the candidate who interviews best and the salesperson who sells best are rarely the same person.

A job interview is a sales situation. The candidate is selling themselves. A good salesperson can do that - but so can someone who is simply charming, confident and a good talker, and who falls apart on a live pipeline within two weeks.

This post is a practical guide to how to recruit a salesperson: which interview questions to ask, how to run a sales simulation and how to tell that a candidate genuinely sells.

Your job as the recruiter is not to check whether someone can make a good impression. Your job is to check whether this person delivers results when nobody is watching. Those are two completely different things. Here is how to tell them apart.

1. Salesperson interview questions: ask about numbers, not stories

A weak salesperson will tell you a story: "I closed a big deal with a client from industry X, it was tough, but we got there." Sounds good. Means nothing.

A good salesperson lives by numbers, because that is their profession. Ask:

  • What was your target and what percentage did you achieve over the last four quarters?
  • How many meetings a week do you need, on average, to close one deal?
  • What is your conversion rate from first contact to meeting?

A candidate who has genuinely sold will answer without hesitation - because they tracked those numbers in order to improve. A candidate who has merely "been in sales" will start to squirm: "well, it varies, depends on the month, hard to say." That is not an answer. That is a red flag.

A note: the point is not for the numbers to be high. The point is for them to exist at all. A salesperson who does not know their metrics is a salesperson who does not know why they win or why they lose.

2. Check how they talk about lost deals

This is my favourite question: "Tell me about a deal you lost that you should have won."

The answer tells you everything.

A weak salesperson will blame everything around them: the client had no budget, the product was too expensive, marketing delivered poor leads, the competition cut their price. Never themselves.

A good salesperson will say: "I reached the decision-maker too late. I spent three weeks talking to someone who had no authority, and by the time I finally got to the CFO, the decision had already been made. Now I qualify decision-making authority on the first call."

See the difference? The second one takes responsibility and draws a conclusion. It is exactly the same mechanism that makes a salesperson grow instead of repeating the same mistakes for ten years.

3. The sales job interview: run a simulation, not an interrogation

You can spend an hour talking about experience and still not know whether someone can sell. That is why the most important part of the interview is not the conversation - it is the simulation.

Give the candidate a real situation: "I'm the CFO of a mid-sized manufacturing company. I don't know you. You're calling me. You have 30 seconds. Go."

And watch for three things:

  • Do they start with themselves or with me? A weak candidate will start with "I represent a company that offers...". A good one will start with my problem.
  • Do they listen, or wait for their turn to speak? A good salesperson leads the conversation with questions, as I wrote in whoever asks the questions leads. Throw in an objection. See whether they ask a question or go straight into defending.
  • Are they heading towards a specific goal? A good salesperson knows that the goal of a cold call is not to sell, but to book the next step (more on typical mistakes in these calls: cold calling mistakes). Check whether they are steering towards it.

A candidate who spent half an hour talking brilliantly about themselves and then falls apart in the simulation has just shown you the truth. Whereas someone who was a bit tense in the interview but came alive in the simulation and took control - that is your person.

4. Tell confidence apart from competence

This is the most common trap in sales recruitment. We confuse charisma with skill.

A charismatic candidate stirs good feelings in you. Subconsciously you want to hire them, because the conversation was pleasant. But a pleasant conversation is not a KPI. I know people who charm every room and cannot close a deal, because they never learned to ask for a decision.

So stick to the facts. After every interview, ask yourself one question: "What exactly did this person demonstrate, other than being easy to talk to?" If you have no answer backed by numbers, examples and the simulation, it means you were sold to, not that you found a salesperson.

5. Hire for attitude, train the rest

Techniques can be practised. A script can be learned. So can product knowledge. But there are two things you cannot train in a reasonable time: hunger for results and resilience to rejection.

Sales is a profession in which you hear "no" more often than "yes". A salesperson without inner resilience will burn out, however good they are technically. And a salesperson with hunger and resilience but raw technique will, with three months of good onboarding, leapfrog the "star" who has no fuel.

That is why in interviews I look for signals of attitude: does this person develop on their own, or wait for someone to teach them? Do they track their results on their own initiative? After a failure, do they make a correction, or look for an excuse? You cannot see these things in a CV - and they decide everything.

The profile of a good salesperson at a glance

If you are building a candidate profile, look for these traits, in this order:

  • knows their numbers (target, achievement, conversion) and can quote them from memory,
  • takes responsibility for lost deals and draws conclusions from them,
  • in the simulation, starts with the client, not with themselves,
  • develops on their own and tracks their own results,
  • after a rejection, makes a correction rather than looking for an excuse.

8 salesperson interview questions worth asking

  1. What was your target and what percentage did you achieve over the last four quarters?
  2. How many meetings a week do you need to close one deal?
  3. What is your conversion rate from first contact to meeting?
  4. Tell me about a deal you lost that you should have won.
  5. How do you qualify whether you are talking to a decision-maker?
  6. What do you do after a run of rejections?
  7. How do you prepare for a conversation with a client you don't know?
  8. What have you changed in the way you sell over the past year, and why?

The questions are only half of it. The other half is the simulation from point 3, because an answer to a question will not show you how the candidate behaves in a live conversation.

Summary: recruiting salespeople is selling too

The best salespeople I have hired were rarely the most dazzling candidates on paper. They were specific. They knew their numbers. They took responsibility for failures. And they had that kind of calm hunger that makes them make one more call when others have already given up.

If you recruit salespeople and feel that every second decision is a lottery, that is no accident. It is a sign that you are assessing the wrong things. Stop asking whether the candidate makes a good impression. Start checking whether they deliver results.

Sales recruitment: more posts

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, if you want to hire people who genuinely sell, book a free consultation using the button below.

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