b2bsalespipeline

Many childhood stories end with the hero finding true love by kissing a frog that magically transforms into a prince or princess. Unfortunately, in the world of sales, it may take the proverbial kissing of a huge number of frogs to find a single keeper.

At Pardot, we’ve been fortunate to have a terrific success rate for new reps, but that’s because we are extremely selective on the front side.  Although we don’t require our reps to submit a video resume like the gentleman in the “Google Please Hire M.E.” video we do have a number of steps that help us find undervalued talent.

1. Multiple Interviews – We subject all applicants to a series of interviews, starting with HR, then with senior members of the sales team, and then with one of our founders.  Hiring is everyone’s responsibility, and helps us get the “right” candidate onto our team.   In my mind, one of the most important portions of the interview process is the HR interview, because it ensures that the candidate is a fit from an experience and pay perspective prior to people falling in love with them in later stages of the interview process.  It doesn’t matter if we all love them if they have too much experience, or want a huge compensation package to join our team.
2. Writing Exercises – If good sales people are good when they interact with prospects, I’m convinced that great sales people write like third graders.  To that point, we ask all candidates to submit a writing sample in the form of a research project.  We ask 5 questions that help us identify how well the candidate researches, synthesizes information, and commits that understanding to paper.  If the sales person is a killer on the phone, but follows up her conversation with incoherent thoughts via email and proposals, they will struggle to close business.
3. Technical Exercises – We ask all candidates to complete some simple tasks within the Pardot application.  To be clear – none of the items we ask are trick questions, but are rather things that can be easily accomplished using our knowledge base and in-application prompts.  If they cannot complete simple tasks with the application, it’s unlikely that they will be able to wield the application to their advantage during a product demonstration.

By having high standards for our sales professionals, we are able to avoid some of the false starts that are possible with new employees in any arm of an organization.

At Pardot, a large part of our success (fastest growing technology company in Atlanta, fastest growing privately funded marketing automation vendor) has been finding great talent for our sales team.  As this team has grown, we’ve found that our prototype of a successful sales professional is generally one who is relatively young in their careers, smart, and aggressive.  I think our desire to give new reps a chance actually comes from my personal experiences as a teen.  

When I was in high school, I wanted to work at the coolest place ever – the Gap (I realize that admitting this dates me).  After filling out my application, I had the world’s shortest interview, which went something like this:

Snooty Manager at the Gap – Do you have retail experience?
Me – I don’t
Snotty Manager at the Gap – Sorry, we can’t hire you without retail experience

The experience made me wonder – How can you get experience WITHOUT experience?

That’s the opportunity we are providing at Pardot – investing in people who have the desire for sales without the experience.  And it’s important to note this model works in SaaS more so than in enterprise sales.

Enterprise reps need to be “seasoned.”  A little grey hair on your rep as you sit around the large conference room table inspires confidence and provides a reassuring feeling that she has been around the block, and can deliver on her promises to you.

In SaaS, many sales cycles, including ours at Pardot, are completed almost entirely using Phone, Email, and Web Conferencing.  In this type of environment, the prospective customer rarely meets the rep in person so attributes like being professional, consultative, and reliable carry more weight.  These traits give inside reps the credibility that grey hair gives the enterprise, outside rep.

Pros

• Green reps don’t have the bad habits that seasoned reps have
• You can usually hire 2-3 inside reps for the price of one grey haired enterprise fellow

Cons

• Green reps don’t know a great deal about technology sales, so the company must be willing to foster an environment where the green rep will flourish, not struggle
• One other con I’ve noticed about reps who are recent college graduates is impatience – they seem to be genuinely confused as to why they don’t have the corner office already

In our high paced sales environment, we’ve found that it’s easy being green.