Lead Playbook Part 2: Mark and Armand on How to Structure Your Interviews to Hire Great Sales Talent

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1. 17:35

   everyone has a different style of selling, how do you sell? And I'll just see what they do with these really big, open-ended questions. Another good one is, walk me through your sales process, and then walk me through each step. And you'll get people who just ramble on about these steps in their sales process as if it's “and you'll get a sense of who actually understands what they're doing in” their sales cycle versus who doesn't. And then at the end, I'll usually have some sort of turnaround pitch, where if they've knocked the cover off the ball, I'll gas them up, I'll tell them this is why I think they'd be an awesome fit for the team, and I'll ask for permission to grill the living daylights out of them in the next interview.

   In SDR interview design

2. 18:19

   going super, super deep, and the key thing is I want them to map out every single step in their sales process, and then I'm going to throw curveballs at them between each step. So if they say my goal is to get to a problem in the first interview, I'll start throwing “questions at them, like, what do you do when someone's giving you no answers, or one-word” answers? What do you do when someone starts multitasking? What do you do when someone pulls in three different competitors? What do you do when someone blocks your access to power, if the next step is getting access to power? So constantly throwing these curveballs at them to see, what do you do when things go wrong? And this will go one of two ways.

   In SDR role-play assessments

3. 22:48

   Totally. Let's talk about, and let's round this thing out. Can you give me the quick one-two punch on when you're sourcing candidates, when you're filling your recruiting funnel, how do you go about doing that effectively and getting a constant lead flow of candidates? Mondo, I answer this question with a question. How do you find leads on LinkedIn? “You figure out your ICP, you find the traits of that lead, you go do a search, you create” a list, and then you go outbound on them, right? That's right. As a leader, you're still in sales. You're always selling your team on something, a new methodology. You're selling them on the fact that you're not the best product, but you're not so bad that people won't buy you. You're trying to sell them on something, on a new comp plan. That goes all the way back to the recruiting and hiring process.

   In SDR candidate sourcing

4. 23:27

   You're trying to sell them on something, on a new comp plan. That goes all the way back to the recruiting and hiring process. I hate to simplify it down to this, but what you tell your reps to do on prospecting days is what you do on your day you need to hire some people. I was literally going to say the exact same take on that one. “Take what you're telling your SDRs to do and go do it on candidates.” There are three sources of candidate flow for you as a hiring manager. Number one is outbound, number two is inbound, and number three is referrals. The number one that you can control is your outbound. So 25 a week, you figure out the companies that have similar sales cycles to you.

   In SDR candidate sourcing

5. 23:36

   is what you do on your day you need to hire some people. I was literally going to say the exact same take on that one. Take what you're telling your SDRs to do and go do it on candidates. There are three sources of candidate flow for you as a hiring manager. “Number one is outbound, number two is inbound, and number three is referrals.” The number one that you can control is your outbound. So 25 a week, you figure out the companies that have similar sales cycles to you. You pull every mid-market AE or S&B AE or enterprise AE into a spreadsheet, or there are tools like GEM that basically allow you to just sequence candidates.

   In SDR candidate sourcing

6. 23:40

   I was literally going to say the exact same take on that one. Take what you're telling your SDRs to do and go do it on candidates. There are three sources of candidate flow for you as a hiring manager. Number one is outbound, number two is inbound, and number three is referrals. “The number one that you can control is your outbound.” So 25 a week, you figure out the companies that have similar sales cycles to you. You pull every mid-market AE or S&B AE or enterprise AE into a spreadsheet, or there are tools like GEM that basically allow you to just sequence candidates. I've honestly run it out of outreach before in the past, dude, so you can do whatever

   In SDR candidate sourcing

7. 27:44

   And if it goes well, it's going to feel like the best 30 MPC interview you've ever heard. And then lastly, number four, I didn't touch on this a ton in my interview process, but it's similar to Mark's takeaway, where each step in the process should test for different dimension of sales. So the grill interview is testing for process. The mock discovery is testing for discovery. “And then the onsite, usually the peer will be testing for prospecting.” And so don't have people ask the same 10 damn questions. Tell me about a time when you did the blah, blah, blah, blah. Or tell me about why you're leaving your job. Have each person do something different. So you have a fully rounded assessment of the candidate. So folks, if you like this two part playbook right here, you might want to play some of this stuff back.

   In SDR role-play assessments

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