A great interview doesn’t always produce a great hire. A sales candidate can bring energy, confidence and an impressive track record, yet still struggle to land the cleaning contracts a company needs.
For building service contractors (BSCs), finding the right salesperson starts with understanding customers and how they buy. Jeff Carmon, manager of member services for Elite BSC, has spent years helping contractors build business development processes that hold up over the long haul. His view on sales hiring is direct: Define the job before going out to find someone to fill it.
Why a proven name may not fit
Hiring a veteran salesperson or even recruiting a top performer away from a competitor, can look like the safe move. Carmon isn’t convinced.
“If we were hiring football coaches, absolutely, that’s a great idea,” he said. “You go hire a big name or hire that person that beat you last year. But no, seriously, in our business, it really doesn’t work that way.”
Whether a candidate comes from a competitor or anywhere else, the question is the same: Are they a fit for what the company needs? Carmon pointed out that people who have done well at large companies sometimes struggle at smaller ones.
“You think about somebody that’s been in a large company; they had a defined territory, leads came from marketing, a process already exists,” he explained. “You may need somebody that has to build out those things.”
That leads to a harder question for the owner. Has the company built anything for this person to step into?
“I think a lot of times, we’ve handed a new salesperson kind of a lump of clay and said, make a pot with that or make a pitcher with that, when we’ve really kind of never shaped it ourselves,” Carmon said.
Ask candidates to walk through it
Polished answers in an interview can cover for thin selling experience. To tell the difference, Carmon leans on one request above the rest.
“In your last position, walk me through your process,” he said.
The details that follow are what matter. How did the candidate find prospective customers? What cadence did they use? What did their nurturing process look like?
“A person who actually did the work can answer that with great fluidity,” Carmon noted. “They have the sequence in their head because they did it. Someone who stepped into an existing system may not have all those answers, and that’s not a knock on them. That’s just a different job than the one they were hired for.”
The goal is to hear substance, not polish. “You’re really not listening for confidence,” he added. “You’re listening for whether there’s a repeatable process behind it.”
That test applies to the owner, too. “Here’s the uncomfortable part,” Carmon admitted. “If we can’t answer those same questions about our own company, we’re probably not equipped to evaluate that answer.”
Energy and pressure aren’t the same thing
Plenty of owners gravitate toward the high-energy closer or the hungry young rep who reaches for a handshake from across the room. Carmon separates two traits that tend to get blended together.
“That’s high energy and high pressure. They’re not the same things,” he said. “I want someone who has a good motor, so to speak. This work takes a lot of activity, and energy channeled correctly is really an asset. What I don’t want, though, is pressure. It’s someone who doesn’t take the time to understand the buyer and what actually motivates people to buy.”
Facility buyers usually aren’t in a hurry to switch providers. “Most buyers, as we know, aren’t looking to change, and no amount of pressure is going to overcome that,” Carmon said. “But patience and understanding sometimes does.”
He compares the right approach to a football team that relies on its running game, picking up five or six yards at a time instead of throwing deep for a touchdown on every play.
Don’t write off younger candidates
Age isn’t the issue in Carmon’s experience. “Some of the best people I’ve met have been young and patient,” explained. “The issue is typically circumstance.”
In this case, circumstance usually means the paycheck. Commercial cleaning contracts take a long time to land, and a rep who needs income right away may not have the runway. “If someone needs money now, a business with an 18-month to three-year sales cycle is a hard place to be,” Carmon added.
He sees a natural starting point for many younger hires in the sales development representative (SDR) role. An SDR works internally, handling prospect research and setting up opportunities for a salesperson or the owner to go out and close.
“A young person may be an ideal sales development rep, and that rewards energy and discipline more than it rewards gray hair or no hair in my case,” he joked.
What early progress looks like
With a sales cycle that long, owners need some way to tell whether a new hire is on track well before the signed contracts arrive. Carmon said the answer depends on the role.
If the company is handing a salesperson qualified opportunities, the measure is simple. Are they closing deals? Nobody wins every bid, but Carmon suggested something in the range of 30% to 40% of those opportunities is a reasonable expectation.
A hire who is running the entire effort gets judged differently. Early indicators include prospects identified, initial connections made and movement in the pipeline. “Those are green flags,” he said.
The warning signs look different. “A red flag isn’t slow results,” Carmon explained. “It’s more of scattered activity with no pipeline movement.”
Another concern is a rep bringing in opportunities that don’t match the kind of work the company wants. That usually means they’re chasing anything that moves instead of working toward the ideal customer profile.
Before writing the hire off, though, Carmon urges owners to look at their own side of the arrangement. “Before you decide the person is wrong, ask whether you hired the right level of person for the job that you’ve handed them,” he said.
Owners who already have a defined process have real options. They can hire a salesperson into that process, or they can bring on an SDR to feed opportunities while the owner keeps selling. Carmon is a believer in the second route for many companies. “I think the owners make the best sellers there are,” he said.
The picture in your head
Say the word salesperson and most people picture someone outgoing, persuasive and driven by commission. According to Carmon, that image leaves out most of what the role requires in this industry.
“Nobody really pictures somebody that’s at a desk doing some prospecting or staying with a contact for 18 months to three years,” he said. “That’s most of this job.”
The danger, he explained, is in hiring to that mental image. “The risk isn’t the word, really. It’s the picture. If you hire the picture before you define the job, you may get someone who can’t do what you actually need.”
His advice to owners comes down to sequence. “Hire the job, not the personality,” Carmon said. “But first, make sure that there’s a job there.”
Watch the complete interview and listen to the podcast
