Sales Management & Coaching
How to Hire B2B Sales Reps
Most sales interviews test how well someone sells themselves in an interview. That's a real skill. It's just not the one you're buying, and it's the reason confident hires so often fail quietly in month five.
By Shane McGrath · Published 24 August 2026
Scaling headcount exposes whatever was already true about your team. If good selling here is undefined, every hire becomes a bet on personality, and you find out which way it went two quarters later.
Define the job before you define the person
Not "a strong closer with SaaS experience." What will this person actually do in a week? Create their own pipeline or work inbound? Run three-stakeholder deals or single-signatory ones? Those are different people, and the job description usually describes neither.
Experience in your market is worth less than it costs
Domain knowledge is learnable. What's expensive to fix is someone who has never had to understand a buyer's problem because their last product sold itself in a growing market. Ask what they did when a deal was genuinely hard, and listen for whether they can describe the buyer's situation at all.
Make them do the job
- Run a live discovery conversation with them, playing a real buyer of yours. Watch what they do after the first answer.
- Give them a real account and thirty minutes to prepare an approach. Judge the thinking, not the polish.
- Ask them to teach you something about their last product. Clarity here predicts a lot.
- Coach them on something in the session, then see whether they apply it in the next exercise. That's the only real signal of coachability.
"Coachable" isn't a personality trait
Everyone says they're coachable in an interview. Agreement means nothing. The only useful test is whether they take feedback and visibly change something within the same hour, unprompted. Build that into the process rather than asking about it.
The hire is only half the decision
A good hire into an undefined onboarding still ramps slowly. Before you open the role, work out what week four looks like and who's coaching them, because onboarding design determines the outcome at least as much as the interview did.
FAQs
Common questions
- Should we hire experienced sellers or train junior ones?
- Depends on whether you know what good looks like here yet. If you do, junior hires can be trained into it fast. If you don't, experienced hires will each import a different version of it, and you'll end up with four ways of selling.
- What's the single most useful interview exercise?
- A live discovery conversation where you play one of your real buyers. It shows curiosity, listening, and whether they can stay on a topic after the first answer, which no CV can tell you.
- How do we know if a new hire is on track before quota tells us?
- Set behaviour milestones for the first eight weeks rather than waiting for pipeline. Whether they can run a first call to your standard in week four is knowable, and it's a better early signal than revenue.
Want this working inside your team?
Book a free sales review and we'll find the simplest change that moves your numbers.