Key Traits to Look for in Elite Sales Reps | Andrew Johnston

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1. 1:41

   solution around how to solve them. It creates a lot of direct alignment very quickly. Boom. What's number two? Number two is to give everyone on your executive team a quota. And by quota, I don't mean necessarily they're owning a number, but there should be some metric, something that you're holding your executive team accountable to such that everyone builds empathy for the sales organization. “That can be pipeline, number of intros into target companies.” That can be hopping on product eval, product feedback calls. It can be a number of things, but just really important that your executive team is in the trenches with you and with the organization to learn about the customers that we're building for.

   In Outbound goals and targets

2. 3:01

   an opening bios, then you ask questions as the hiring manager, and then maybe you've got two, three, four or five minutes for questions from the candidate. I reverse this, do the opening, do quick bios, and then I open it and have the candidate ask me questions. I'm basically treating this as a pseudo discovery call, and I evaluate them on that of them “doing a discovery call on me and the company, and then I use that as a green shoot point” to ask other questions about their experience. All right. We've done a lot of conversations around interviews, Andrew. First time somebody's talked about the reverse interview. Let's dig in a little bit. How do you start this interview? It's very different. They don't know it's coming. You get on the call, be like, hey, Mark, good to meet you. I'm Andrew. Here's my background. I've done sales.

   In Hiring SDRs

3. 10:32

   Let's zoom in on it. And this one's common. I think a lot of companies do this. We have them try to pitch our product. So in this case, it would be Superhuman. I feel like we've got to evaluate them on, we know Superhuman, I'm at this company today, or whatever company you're at. It also then shows, can they understand the product? Are they able to get to validation? “Can they ask good discovery questions?” They're not going to know the nuances of how we sell or the nuance of feature set, but they can get a good sense of what might be the value props that we're putting on our website, that we're putting in our sales materials, that we're talking about in our case studies. Because it's email, it's more ubiquitous across the board. When I sold at Twilio, that was harder, right?

   In Hiring SDRs

4. 33:02

   It's free in the show notes. Three, the mock pitch setup. Number one, you want to have them pitch your product because that shows you whether or not they can think and learn and adapt. And then number two, you want to make sure that you give them basic information to be successful. So don't completely stump them. “Give them the size of company, the personas that are in the room, who they're selling” to, the types of problems they have, and maybe even a quick primer of your product. And then lastly, number four, when you are grading these people, do not benchmark them against your best AEs. You want to lower your criteria by one notch because they don't know how to sell your product. Right?

   In Hiring SDRs