Almost every business says it wants top performers in its sales team. Far fewer manage to hire them consistently. The usual explanation is the market: good salespeople are scarce, the competition for them is fierce, and the right person simply did not apply.

The market does play a part. But in most of the sales hires we see go wrong, the process had more to do with the outcome than the candidate pool did, and the process is the part a business can actually change.

It starts with a recycled specification

A new sales vacancy often begins with last time’s job description, lightly edited and sent to HR. If the previous hire did not work out, the same specification is well placed to produce the same result.

A strong specification starts from what the person will be expected to deliver. New logos or account growth? A territory to build or one to hold? A short transactional sale or a long consultative one? Once that is clear, it becomes possible to define the habits, skills and experience that will make success likely, and to separate the essentials from the things a good salesperson can learn.

The advert speaks to people who are not reading it

The salespeople most businesses want to hire are usually busy, well paid and well looked after. They are not scrolling job boards, and a standard advert listing requirements is unlikely to move them if they do see it.

An advert, or an approach, that engages a strong performer explains why the role is worth their time: what the business is building, how success will be measured and rewarded, what the culture is like, and where the role could lead. It also means going to find them. Top performers tend to move when a compelling opportunity is put in front of them directly, rather than when they happen to be looking.

The interview that feels thorough

Salespeople are unusually good at interviews, because presenting themselves persuasively is part of what they do for a living. A conversational interview built around past successes tends to reward that skill, and it can leave an interviewer confident about a candidate without having tested much at all.

The research on this is consistent. A major re-analysis of selection methods by Sackett and colleagues, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022, found structured interviews to be among the strongest predictors of job performance, with an estimated validity of .42. Unstructured interviews came out at .19. In practical terms, asking every candidate the same well-designed questions, and scoring the answers against agreed criteria, predicts performance more than twice as well as a free-flowing conversation.

For sales roles, good questions push past the headline achievement to the detail behind it. What was the target and how was it set? Where did the opportunity come from? What did the candidate personally do, and what would have happened without them? Strong candidates welcome that scrutiny, because it gives them the chance to show real substance.

A scorecard beats a gut feeling

Without an agreed scorecard, hiring decisions drift towards instinct, and instinct tends to favour candidates who remind the interviewer of themselves. A simple scorecard built from the specification, covering the sales, personal and interpersonal competencies the role needs, keeps each interviewer assessing the same things and makes the final decision far easier to reach and to defend.

References that tell you something

Many reference checks confirm dates of employment and little else. For a sales hire that matters to the business, it is worth going further: a conversation with a former line manager, someone who worked alongside the candidate, and where appropriate a customer. The aim is to understand how they actually sold and what conditions helped them succeed, so you can judge whether those conditions exist in your business.

Worth the effort

Getting this right takes more time at the start. It takes considerably less than managing an underperformer for a year, parting company, and running the whole process again. More importantly, it is how businesses build sales teams that consistently hit their numbers, and a team of genuine performers tends to attract more of them.

Soft reference checks and hiring whoever is available are two of the ten traps in our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes, each with what to test instead.

Kingman Lennox works with ambitious businesses to find and assess sales performers in exactly this way, approaching the people who are not on the market and testing what they have genuinely achieved. You can read more about how we work and about our 12-month replacement guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to discuss a role you are looking to fill.

A sales CV lands on your desk with a short stint in the middle of it. Eleven months at a respected firm, then a move. Or a strong run of years followed by one flat one after the business was acquired. The instinctive reaction is to mark the candidate down and move on to someone with a cleaner record.

Sometimes that instinct is right. Often it is not, and the best sales candidates are scarce enough that rejecting one for the wrong reason is an expensive habit. Very few people have a perfect career record in sales, including the very best. The more useful question is why a good salesperson struggled, because the answer frequently sits in the environment around them rather than in their ability.

The system usually wins

Geary Rummler and Alan Brache, whose work on organisational performance shaped a generation of management thinking, put it in one line in their laws of organisational systems: “If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”

Sales is a clear illustration. A capable salesperson placed in a business with no lead generation, an unclear proposition, a territory carved up badly or a target set without reference to the market will often underperform. Management then tries to fix the person, when the thing that needed fixing was the structure they were asked to sell within. Individual effort can compensate for a flawed process for a while, but rarely for long.

The role that was oversold

One of the most common reasons strong salespeople leave early is that the job they joined was described more generously than it deserved. An attractive on-target earnings figure built on an unrealistic target. A market position that sounded stronger in the interview than it proved to be. A product presented as more differentiated than customers found it.

It is fair to say a good salesperson should qualify an employer as carefully as they qualify a prospect. Most do. But hiring pitches are persuasive, and when the reality turns out to be different, the strongest performers are exactly the people with enough options to move on quickly. The short stint on their CV can reflect good judgement rather than poor performance.

The manager matters more than most hiring plans allow

Gallup has studied engagement across millions of employees over two decades, and estimates that managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That figure describes the difference between teams rather than the level of engagement in any one of them, but the implication for sales is plain enough. Put the same salesperson under two different managers and you should expect two different results.

The best salespeople tend to respond well to strong leadership, and they welcome coaching that helps them win more. What they tolerate poorly is weak leadership, micro-management that gets in the way of selling, and effort that goes unrecognised. A difficult year under a poor sales manager tells you more about the manager than about the salesperson.

When the company changes around them

Acquisitions, restructures and changes of strategy can alter what a salesperson sells, who they sell to and how they are expected to sell, sometimes overnight. A change of culture can matter just as much. Someone who was over-achieving before the change can find their performance dips, or that they no longer believe in what they are selling, and belief carries a great deal of weight in a sales conversation.

A dip in results that coincides with a change of ownership is worth exploring properly before it is held against a candidate.

What this means when you are hiring

There are two practical consequences, and both work in your favour.

The first is in how you read candidates. When a sales record has a gap, a short tenure or a weak year, ask what surrounded the result. What was the target and how was it set? Who was their manager? What changed in the business? Where did the pipeline come from? Strong candidates can usually explain the context behind their numbers with some precision, and the explanation often reveals more about their judgement than an unbroken record would. You may find that a candidate others have passed over is precisely the person you want.

The second is in how you set up your own hire to succeed. Describe the role honestly, including the parts that are hard. Set a target that reflects the market. Make sure the person managing them can lead a salesperson as well as sell. Give them the support the role genuinely requires. The best candidates will test all of this during the process, and a business that can answer those questions well is far more likely to attract them and keep them.

Failing to be honest about how a role is really done is one of the ten traps in our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes.

Kingman Lennox assesses sales candidates on the conditions behind their results as well as the results themselves, and briefs them honestly on the role they are being asked to take on. You can read more about how we work and about our twelve-month guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to talk through a sales appointment you are planning.

When a sales leadership seat opens in an owner-managed business, the top biller is usually the first name on the list. They have the numbers, the team already respects them, and an internal move costs nothing in fees.

The largest study of the question found close to the opposite of what that logic predicts. Promotions and the Peter Principle, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, examined 53,035 salespeople across 214 firms and followed the 1,531 of them who were promoted into management. Strong sales performance made promotion far more likely. It also predicted worse results once the promotion had happened. Doubling a manager’s pre-promotion sales corresponded to a 7.5 per cent decline in the sales performance of each person reporting to them.

The same study found that experience of collaborative selling was a reliable predictor of managerial performance, and that it had almost no bearing on who actually got promoted. Businesses were measuring one thing and hoping for another.

A top performer can certainly lead. What the evidence questions is whether sales figures are of any use in deciding who will.

Two jobs that share a name

A front-line sales role is about finding opportunities, qualifying them, understanding what the customer is actually trying to solve, and building the relationships that carry a deal through to a decision. Sales management is about planning, forecasting, reporting, coaching and creating the conditions in which other people do those things well. A good deal of it is administrative, and almost none of it produces a number the manager can point to as their own.

Succeeding at the first does not equip anyone for the second. It rarely even exposes them to it.

The attributes that make the seller can undo the manager

Drive, a single-minded focus, competitiveness and a sense of urgency are what you would expect to find in a top performer. They are also difficult attributes to manage other people through.

A new sales manager who has all four will often expect the team to mirror them. When the team does not, the result is frustration, and frustration tends to come out as pressure rather than as coaching. Telling a team what to do and helping a team get there are different skills, and the second calls for patience, flexibility and a tolerance that the first never required.

The self-reliance trap

Top salespeople hold themselves accountable. They are used to rising and falling on their own effort, and they generally prefer it that way.

In most sales teams, half or more of the team will be behind target at any given point. An inexperienced manager whose only ever solution to that problem has been to sell harder themselves will frequently do exactly that, stepping back into the front line to close the deals personally. The month improves. Nothing about the team’s effectiveness changes, and the manager now holds two jobs, one of which is not being done.

What it costs

The obvious cost is a sales team performing below where it was.

The less obvious one is the person. A top performer moved into a role they did not especially want, are not suited to and are not supported in will often leave within the year. The business is then carrying a management vacancy and a revenue hole, having created both with a single decision intended as a reward.

A better way to approach it

A good sales manager does need to have sold. They need enough credibility to be taken seriously by people carrying a number, and enough understanding of the sale itself to coach it. They do not need to have been the best.

What matters more is whether they have ever succeeded through other people. Useful questions include:

• Have they brought a new starter through to competence?
• Have they run a bid that meant pulling together colleagues they had no authority over?
• Have they taken responsibility for a result they did not personally close?

Those questions separate a future manager from a strong individual contributor, and they rarely surface in a promotion conversation that opens with last year’s figures.

Where a top performer is the right answer, treat the appointment as a hire rather than as a reward. Define the role, be explicit about what changes, and put training, coaching and support behind them. The assumption that someone who could sell will naturally be able to lead is the assumption that does the damage.

When to look outside

Some businesses conclude that nobody internally fits, or that promoting the obvious candidate would cost more in front-line revenue than the leadership gain is worth. That is a legitimate commercial conclusion rather than an admission of failure.

Promoting the wrong person is only one way a sales appointment goes wrong. Our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes, sets out the traps we see most often and what to test instead.

Kingman Lennox works with ambitious SMEs to appoint sales leaders on exactly that basis, assessing what candidates have built through other people rather than what they have personally sold. You can read more about how we work and about our 12-month replacement guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to talk through an appointment you are considering.

The brief is a familiar one. The business sells something genuinely technical, the customers are engineers or clinicians or specifiers, and so the salesperson must have a technical background. Often the requirement is narrower still, naming a particular application within a particular sector.

Apply those filters honestly and the candidate pool can come down to single figures nationally. Of those, several will not be looking, one or two will not be any good, and the rest will be working for competitors who intend to keep them. The search takes months and tends to end either in a compromise hire or in the role being left open.

The question worth settling before starting that search is what the technical requirement is actually protecting against.

What buyers now do without you

Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers in late 2024 and found that 61 per cent would prefer to complete a purchase without a sales representative at all. Buyers research independently, and they are largely content doing so, because the specification, the datasheet and the comparison are all available without having to ask anyone.

The same survey identified where buyers do still want a person involved. It is in working out whether a product or service genuinely fits their own situation. That is a judgement, and it draws on understanding the customer’s business rather than on reciting the product.

A salesperson hired principally for product knowledge has been selected for the part of the job that buyers increasingly handle without them.

The expertise is usually already in the building

Businesses in this position almost always have deep technical capability. Engineers, applications specialists, clinical staff and product managers are already on the payroll. What tends to be missing is depth of commercial capability, and a technical hiring filter makes certain that it stays missing.

There is a more productive division of labour available. The salesperson finds and qualifies the opportunity, understands the customer’s commercial position, controls the process and holds the relationship. The technical specialist comes in where real depth is needed, and comes out again afterwards. Businesses working this way generally get better coverage from fewer people, and they are not restricted to hiring from a pool of eight.

It also protects the technical team. Where engineers are expected to generate business themselves, they often end up providing free consultancy to customers who were never going to buy, because qualifying an opportunity is a distinct skill and it is not the one they were hired for.

What the technical requirement should usually be

Few technical sales roles genuinely need someone who could design the product. Most need someone who can hold a credible conversation, recognise when a question has gone beyond them, and bring in the person who can answer it without losing authority in the room.

That is a far larger pool, and it can be tested properly. Put a candidate in front of a technical proposition they have never encountered and watch how they handle it:

• Do they ask sensible questions?
• Do they work out who the decision makers are and what the commercial driver is?
• Or do they retreat into features they only half understand?

Technical knowledge can usually be taught to a capable salesperson within months. Commercial instinct is considerably harder to install in a capable engineer, and the attempt tends to take years.

Where the filter is genuinely justified

This is not an argument for ignoring the technical dimension. Some sales do require it. Where the salesperson has to configure or specify during the conversation, where regulatory knowledge carries real liability, or where the buying community is small enough that standing within it is the entire proposition, the requirement earns its place.

The test is whether it reflects what the role genuinely demands, or a preference formed because the last person in the seat happened to have that background. The two are easy to confuse, and they produce very different searches.

The practical consequence

A business that insists on a technical background for every commercial hire is choosing a smaller, slower and more expensive market, in exchange for a reassurance that buyer behaviour has already eroded.

Prioritising industry experience over sales ability is one of the ten traps covered in our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes, along with what to test instead.

Kingman Lennox works with technically led businesses to establish what a sales role genuinely requires before a search begins, and to test commercial capability properly once it does. You can read more about how we work and about our twelve-month guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to discuss a role you are trying to fill.