The Sales Mastery Podcast · Episode 16

The Interview Paradox

With James Denny · Sales Geek

Four hours of conversation, then two years living with the consequences. How to hire a salesperson by testing the things an interview was never built to show you.

A bad sales hire costs somewhere between one and four times what you agreed to pay them. Not just the salary you write off. The recruitment fee, twelve months of a territory nobody properly worked, your own time spent managing a problem instead of building a business, and then the gap while you go back to the start and do the whole thing again.

You have interviewed four people, and one of them walked in and lit the place up. Great energy, quick on their feet, a story for everything, and they even asked sharp questions about the growth plan. You came out of that room and said to somebody, they’re the one. Eleven months later you are sitting in a different meeting room working out how to exit them.

Think about the trade we make when we hire a salesperson. Three or four hours of conversation spread over a couple of weeks, and on the back of that we decide who carries a territory into the next financial year. Four hours to choose, two years to live with it.

So it is worth asking why we keep getting it wrong, and I do not believe it is because sales leaders are poor judges of people. Quite the opposite. I think we are using a test that measures the wrong thing.

We see this pattern over and over in small and medium businesses, and it is a global one. The UK, the US, India, everywhere we work. Ask a leader why they hired somebody and you get answers about presence. Great communicator. Really personable. Sold themselves well in the room. Ask that same leader twelve months later why it did not work out, and the answers come from somewhere else entirely. They would not take feedback. They did not do the admin. They went quiet after a couple of knockbacks. They never really qualified anything.

Sit with that for a moment. Two lists. The reasons we give for hiring somebody and the reasons we give for letting them go, and not one item on the second list was ever tested for during the hire. We hire on charm, we fire on wiring, and then we stand around calling it a talent problem when it was a process problem all along.

There is a reason this bites harder with salespeople than with anyone else you will ever recruit. Interview an accountant and being good at interviews is a mildly useful skill that has very little to do with the work itself. Interview a salesperson and being good at interviews is a professional competence. You walk into a room with a stranger, build rapport quickly, handle a few objections and close for the next step. That is an interview described in a sentence. It is also a sales call described in a sentence.

So when a candidate is brilliant across the table, give them the credit. They are genuinely demonstrating a real sales skill and you should mark them up for it. The mistake, and it is the whole mistake, is treating that one skill as proof of all the others. The person who dazzles you might be a superb salesperson. They might equally be somebody who has spent fifteen years dazzling people across tables and has never once built a pipeline that survived scrutiny. From where you are sitting for that hour, the two are indistinguishable.

A few episodes ago I talked about the forecasting lie, and how teams end up presenting numbers that were never real. This sits upstream of all of it. The single most expensive error in any forecast is a territory in the plan with a name against it, and that person was never going to produce. You signed that error off months earlier, in an interview room, because they were good company for an hour.

We hire on charm and we fire on wiring, then call it a talent problem.

Once you have seen this you cannot unsee it, and I apologise in advance for ruining your next few interviews. The behaviours that win an interview are, in several important ways, the reverse of the behaviours that win deals. Which means a very strong interview performance can be a warning rather than a signal.

What wins in an interview? Talking well. Filling the silences confidently. Having a slick answer ready for every question. All good things, in that room.

What wins a deal is close to the opposite. Asking well rather than talking well. Sitting comfortably in a silence until the buyer fills it. Being willing to say, I don’t know, let me go and find out, which sounds like weakness across an interview table and builds more trust in front of a customer than almost any answer could.

It goes further than that. In an interview you are trying to make the other person like you. In a deal, a good salesperson is prepared to be disliked for a few forthright minutes while they ask the awkward questions about budget and timing and who really decides. In an interview you show enthusiasm for the opportunity in front of you. In a deal, the mark of a strong seller is a willingness to walk away from the opportunity in front of them when it is not real. In an interview you present yourself as the finished article. In the job you want somebody coachable, and coachable means admitting that you are not the finished article at all.

And the one that matters most to me. An interview is one good performance on one good day. The job is turning up on the ninth bad day in a row, when nothing is closing and the phone feels heavy, and doing the work anyway. Almost everything that makes somebody good at this over two years is about what they do on a bad day, and an interview is by definition somebody’s best one. Prepared, rehearsed, best suit, an hour of reading about you the night before.

So where in your process do you test any of the second set of behaviours? The asking, the qualifying, the walking away, the coachability, the resilience. For most businesses the truthful answer is nowhere. Or we ask people to describe how they would qualify a deal, which is itself a talking exercise. They can talk a great game about listening.

I am not telling you to scrap your interview, or even to change your style much. You still need to know whether you can spend two years sitting in a car with this person, or having them at the next desk, and the interview answers that question well. The trouble is that we have asked one conversation to answer six different questions when it can only really answer one.

An interview is a talking contest. The job is a listening one.

The answer to what the interview cannot tell you is embarrassingly simple. Stop asking people how they sell and get them to do it in the room while you watch. Not sell me this pen. A proper scenario, with a brief sent the day before, because you are not trying to ambush anybody or catch anyone out. You want to see the best version of them doing the job. If their best version is not good enough, there is your answer.

It adds about ninety minutes to your process and it will tell you more than four rounds of questions. Three exercises. These are examples, so play with them however suits your business.

What to watch in the role play

Keep a tally on your notepad. Questions they asked against statements they made. It sounds fussy, and it strips an enormous amount of your own bias out of the room, because charm is very hard to resist in the moment and a tally is not. Mark one more thing while you are at it: how often they open a line of questioning and abandon it halfway through to chase something shinier.

What to watch in the email

Two things fall straight out of it. First, did they listen. The problem you described in the role play should come back to you in your own words, not buried in a wall of generic sales patter. Second, will they do the unglamorous part of this job at all. Plenty of people can hold a lovely conversation. Far fewer will sit down and write a sharp, well constructed email at half past five on a Friday. That email tells you which of the two you are looking at.

What to watch in those ninety seconds

Give them something specific. You are pitching before you understand my problem, ask me about budget before you go any further. Then restart, because only three things can happen and only one of them is any good. They can take the note and visibly change what they are doing, which is what you want. They can start explaining why they were doing it that way, which is defending, and that is a worry. Or, the hardest one to spot and the worst of the three, they can smile, tell you that is really helpful, and carry on exactly as before.

Do they adjust or do they defend? Nearly everything else you might want in a salesperson can be taught. Coachability is the thing that decides whether you ever get the chance to teach them.

The third tool is where you put all of this on paper, so that you are comparing candidates on the same terms rather than on how each of them made you feel. It helps to split what you are assessing into three layers.

Knowledge you can teach in a few weeks. Skills take longer, a few months, but they are absolutely teachable. Wiring is the layer you cannot teach. You can guide it and you can develop it, and you cannot install it. It decides everything, and it is the layer we spend the least time looking at.

There are four things in that wiring layer. Score every candidate out of five on each one, based on what you saw them do in the audition rather than on how you felt about them in the room.

One hard rule: nobody goes forward with a low score on coachability. It does not matter what the other three look like. If they cannot take a note in a role play, none of your onboarding and none of your coaching will ever land, and everything else you liked about them stays theoretical.

However good the audition was, there are five I always stop for.

1. They blame a previous employer, or a named individual. We go hard on the problem and never on the person, and somebody who does the reverse in an interview will do it in your team meeting.
2. They are vague about their own numbers, or the numbers move. Ask early, ask again near the end, and see whether the second answer mirrors the first.
3. They cannot name a single thing they have ever got wrong.
4. They talk about their customers with contempt.
5. They ask you nothing about the job. Only the package, the patch and the promotion. It tells you where the effort went.

I have never once seen a red flag turn out to be nothing. What I have seen plenty of times is a leader talk themselves past one because the role had been open for four months and they were tired of covering it. That is a completely different reason for hiring somebody. Sometimes you have to go with it. Just say so out loud, so you know exactly what you have signed up to manage.

Most reference calls are worthless, and it is an easy fix. They are worthless because we ask questions that can only be answered kindly. Were they any good? Would you have them back? Almost nobody says no to those, and at best you get something vague. So ask questions that force a real answer instead.

What did they need the most help with? What did you do for them that made the biggest difference? How many people are in your sales team, and if I asked you right now, off the top of your head, to rank this person one to five, where would you slot them? And the best question in the whole of recruitment, the one hardly anybody asks: if you were managing them again, what would you tell me to do differently? People are surprisingly forthcoming when you ask them that.

Then the decision itself gets easier, because you are weighing up things you watched rather than impressions you formed. And if two candidates are genuinely neck and neck, take the more coachable one every single time. The one who can be taught will have overtaken the other by month nine.

1. We hire on charm and fire on wiring. Look back at your own hiring history and write the two lists. If they do not match, the process needs adapting, not the people.
2. Being good at interviews is itself a sales skill. Which is exactly why it tells you so little. Credit it as one thing, then stop treating it as proof of five others.
3. An interview is a talking contest and the job is a listening one. It also happens on somebody’s best prepared day, when what matters most is what they do on a bad one.
4. Stop asking people how they sell and watch them sell. Ninety minutes, a role play or two, a written follow-up and a coachability test.
5. The written follow-up is the exercise everyone skips. It tells you whether they listened and whether they will do the part of the job nobody enjoys.
6. Hire on wiring and train the rest. Knowledge takes weeks, skills take months, and coachability, curiosity, discipline and resilience cannot be installed after the fact.
7. Never go forward on a low coachability score. If they cannot take a note in a role play, nothing you teach them afterwards is likely to stick.