So, You Want to Hire Your First Salesperson. Four Recommendations…

Published: Thu, 01/15/26

Updated: Thu, 01/15/26

So, You Want to Hire Your First Salesperson. Four Recommendations…

It’s going to be frustrating, time consuming, difficult, and emotionally draining with a minimal chance of success.

Years ago, I created one of my first seminars: How to Find, Interview, Select and Hire a Good Salesperson. I was responding to the experience of my clients who were universally terrible at hiring a salesperson. Over the years, I’ve taught that seminar to hundreds of entrepreneurs and sales managers. At the beginning of the seminar, I ask this question: How many of you had a good experience with the first salesperson you hired? No hands go up. Occasionally, someone will raise a tentative hand, but then explain. “Well sort of, but…..” and provide caveats to their tentative response.

Add that experience to my over 35 years of working with B2B salesforces, and I can unequivocally state that there is a 99% chance that you will have a miserable, time consuming, disappointing experience when you attempt to employ your first salesperson.

Your disillusionment may come during the hiring process as you find yourself being frustrated with your inability to find the right person. But, more likely, it will come a few months after you have made the hire, as you realize that the person you hired is not producing like you thought he/she would. And then your stomach begins to churn as you realize that you hired the wrong person.

There are lots of reasons for that miserable success rate. First, most first time hirer’s are blissfully naive. They have been a salesperson, or they have been around salespeople. “How difficult could it be?” they think. So, they blithely go forward with misplaced confidence, expecting that hiring a salesperson is just like hiring an administrative assistant or customer service rep. They don’t do a thorough job of hiring a salesperson because they have never done it before and have overly simple ideas of the process.

What’s the hardest thing for a B2B salesperson to do?

Answer: Make a live, in-person call on someone who doesn’t know you or your company.

That’s why a lot of B2B salespeople avoid it. And that’s because they don’t know how to do it well. Salespeople become disheartened and sales managers grow frustrated

I can fix that. On February 13, at 12:00 noon (Eastern) I’ll present a one-hour webinar on the best way to prepare and execute a first call on a prospect.

I’ll take you through the mindset you need to be successful, the one key objective for every first call, and how to overcome distorted expectations.

Then, I’ll identify the three key pieces of a well-executed first call and show you to prepare for each. You’ll be ready to go. Confident and prepared.

In this 60 – minute session, you’ll

Identify the key objective for a first call
See why a first call seems so overwhelming.
Gain an understanding of the three key components to a first call.
Become equipped to thoroughly prepare for each of the three keys components.

This may be the only opportunity in your life to gain mastery of something that causes most salespeople to stumble. Separate yourself from your competition. You’ll use the concepts and processes shared in this webinar for the rest of your career.

You owe it yourself to participate.

Click here to enroll. $47

While it would be nice if hiring a salesperson were just like any other hire, that is not the case. Salespeople are great at interviewing – after all, that’s pretty much what they do every day, and it is easy to form an overly positive impression of a candidate.

Additionally, the job itself warrants a different approach to hiring. In every other job description in your business the person pretty much knows what is expected of them, and what to do when they come into work. Salespeople, however, need to decide, every day and multiple times in the course of a day, where to go and what to do. That recurring decision puts them into a class of their own and requires a deeper dive into the hiring process.

One of the biggest reasons for the six-month down-the-road realizations is that expectations were never fully articulated. The employer expected this, and the salesperson expected that, and the expectations don’t match.

The other reason for the six-month wakeup call is that most employers have no effective sales management routines. They expected the salesperson to pretty much manage himself/herself, and discovered, too late, that what the salesperson thought was a good use of time turned out to be not at all what the employer expected.

So, if you are contemplating making your first sales hire, consider this:

1. At the moment, you are probably the company’s best salesperson. So, wait until you absolutely can’t go on without someone doing sales instead of you. Hire someone internally to take some of the administrative tasks off of you and thus allow you to continue to be the company’s best salesperson. Administrative people are far more plentiful and easier to hire than a salesperson, so cut off parts of you... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

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