Top Hiring and Interviewing Practices to Build a Strong Sales Team | Modern Strategy's Proven Methods

A successful B2B sales team begins with investing in a rigorous hiring process to ensure the right candidates are brought on board. It’s not just about filling roles but about finding individuals who can adapt, grow, and succeed within your organization. Here are some best practices that can transform your hiring process.

As a continuation of our previously published blog on Effective B2B Sales Processes, we’ve gathered expert insights from the Principals at @Modern Strategy. These growth champions and business builders share their proven strategies for standardising sales team performance and excelling in growth. Leading founders and investors here talk about how to achieve it consistently.

Jeffry, founder of SalesCandy—which he scaled to customers all over Southeast Asia, including

six Global Fortune 500 companies, and eventually sold—pointed out a few key elements, including but not limited to:

• Behavioral Interviews: Focus on past experiences and how candidates have handled specific situations. This can reveal their problem-solving abilities, resilience, and adaptability.

• Assessment Tools: Tools like personality assessments (e.g., 16Personalities, Predictive Index) are useful for gauging both cultural fit and sales aptitude.

• Role-Playing: Simulating real-world scenarios during the interview process allows you to see how candidates handle objections, navigate conversations, and close deals. In all of my interviews, I strongly advocate for role-playing to spot early red flags.

• Spotting Red Flags: Look for signs such as overconfidence, reluctance to learn, lack of curiosity, or a history of frequent job changes. Identifying these traits early can help you avoid hiring missteps.

• Competency-Based Interviews: Focus on specific skills and experiences critical for success in the role. Asking about how candidates have handled similar challenges in the past provides insight into their readiness for the job.

• Practical Assessments: Role-specific tasks or exercises that simulate real-world problems help assess both skill and cultural fit, giving you a sense of how the candidate would perform in the role.

• Behavioral Questions: Understanding the candidate’s values, work ethic, and alignment with company culture is crucial.

• Multiple Touchpoints: Including interviews with different team members can gauge the candidate’s fit from various perspectives. It’s also useful for assessing their adaptability, communication style, and team compatibility.

• Structured Scoring System: Use a standardized scoring rubric to evaluate candidates objectively based on predefined criteria.

Assessing Gaps and Personalized Training: Elevating the Sales Team

@Stuart, who has 25 years of experience running commercial teams for global MNCs and founding venture-backed startups, emphasizes that once the right team is in place, it’s important to assess the individual gaps within the team. Personalizing training greatly improves motivation, and not every salesperson has the same gaps. These gaps could be anything from market knowledge to product understanding to sales skills in executing the sales process.

Continuous Learning and Mentorship

As a commercial leader, you should be driving the thesis of learning accountability. You can also leverage more experienced team members to provide input and mentorship, which in turn can help train future leaders.

Hands-On Sales Techniques and Role-Playing

Effective sales strategies, objection handling, and closing techniques need to be regularly taught and practiced. Role-playing real-world sales scenarios provides hands-on experience and prepares the team to handle a variety of situations with confidence.

Constant Feedback: The Key to Improvement

Feedback is a commercial leader’s biggest weapon. Gone are the days of providing feedback once a year. Constant coaching, advice, and constructive feedback are important ingredients for capturing moments of personalized learning opportunity. Shadowing can also help new teammates observe experienced salespeople in action.

Measure and Evaluate: Data-Driven Insights

Data is crucial for informing performance. Tracking key metrics, performance against clear goals, monitoring sales performance, customer satisfaction, and training effectiveness are other important parts of the process. Through experience, I've always been a fan of data being used to inform but not to guide—there are always other factors to consider, both data-driven and human-related.

Structuring Your Team: Hunters vs. Farmers

In my opinion, when you look at a sales team, you need to define your hunters and farmers. Salespeople are rarely both or at least have a strength in either identifying and creating opportunities or managing and building existing customer relationships.

Hiring the Best People

Some of my best hires have come from outside the industry that I’ve been working in. I always focus on the person—their character, i.e., their ability to be resilient, confident, suitably motivated, hungry, their IQ and EQ, and their sales capabilities. Their knowledge is less relevant as we can teach this. In fact, I prefer hiring outside of the industry as they are not encumbered with prior negative experiences or ways of doing things that they struggle to unlearn. A network is handy, so hiring from adjacent industries could be best.

Conclusion: The Key to a Thriving Sales Team

By investing in robust hiring practices, personalised training, and continuous feedback, you set your B2B sales team up for success. Combining data-driven insights with a deep understanding of your team’s strengths and weaknesses helps create a high-performing, adaptable sales force. 

In our future editions, we’ll bring you behind the curtains of our approach in implementing our client's go-to-market strategy in the Philippines.

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