Alex Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross

Hiring a Sales Closer

A strong sales team accelerates market adoption and distances your company from competitors. Building a great sales team is hard but it starts will hiring a sales closer who can set the right sales culture.

What are the Personality Traits of a Sales Closer?

Winner: hustler, competitive, qualifier, can rally the team, self-starter, flexible (inbound, outbound, customer success), knows when and how to push and when step spending energy on a prospect, wants account control, understands the difference between running a sales process versus making friends, very picky about who can access and talk to the customers in order to maximize the value of the customer’s time

Professional: responsive, detail oriented, cares about the quality of grammar and math, focuses on building trust by demonstrating their attention to detail

Quick Learner: inquisitive about your product, customers, sales tools and willing to create what they need to close a deal, willing to learn as much as is needed about technology, products and the customer’s current solution

Team Player: deflects credit for their work (except during a performance review — see competitive above), positive support for other team members including sales engineers & support teams, ready to take action items to demonstrate their own willingness to help

Interview Questions to Ask:

1. What are the most common deal sizes you have closed?
2. What is the average length of the deals you have closed?
3. What is your quota and how have you performed against it?
4. How many people are on the sales team are at your current company? How do you rank?
5. What have you done in the past if you are not getting enough leads from the marketing team?
6. Who is your favorite customer that you have closed? Why?
7. What is the most technical product you have sold? Who was the buyer?
8. Can you pitch the technology in your product without a sales or support engineer?
9. Have you worked with some of the same sales team members at more than one company?

Interview Homework to Assign:

1. Go to our website and send me an email <150 words assuming I am a potential customer
2. What would you do in your first 90 days in the following categories (learning the product, outbound lead generation, deal qualification, closing existing leads and improving the sales playbook)

Create A Process:

Create and build a repeatable hiring process. Additionally, do not be afraid to have the candidate sell to you and your team. Salesforce recently posted a blog post on their thoughts after hiring over 1000 sales team members.

Thoughts on Compensation:

OTE: On target earnings is a combination of the base and bonus that the salesperson and the company want the team member to achieve. This can ranges from $80k for inside sales roles to over $500k for proven major accounts executives. Usually, the base and bonus are split 50/50 but you will see a range where ISRs (inside sales representatives) will be 75/25 and major accounts executives will be 40/60.

Draw: The draw is a commitment from the company to guarantee the first X number of months of OTE for a sales representative. The draw can range from 0–6 months. A larger draw is usually linked to new products and companies that are still working on finding a repeatable sales process. Team’s with proven product and market fit can transition to removing the draw for new team members.

Equity: Most equity programs will target the sales team members to receive a fraction of the equity that their peers in other departments will receive. The simple logic is that the sales team has higher OTE upside and therefore they should not additionally have the equity upside. I believe that the best way to address equity is to do additionally option grants for the top performers in your sales team. It is critical that you retain all of your key employees and this also applies to your sales team.

Upside: Most sales plans will bonus the team members as a portion of the deals that they close. This can range from 5–20% of the first year of a deal. Additionally, it can include 3–20% of the follow-on years if the customer agrees to prepay the entire contract up front. The bonus payments are frequently linked to receiving a portion of the cash from the customer. It is critical that there be clear rules for the upside associated with a customer’s early payment on a multi-year deal. If you are questioning the logic for such a high upside you need to read this blog post from A16Z.

Cap: Some organizations will put a cap on the maximum bonus that can be received in a year. The most important part of designing a sales compensation plan is to align it to your goals and to be prepared to reward your best team members based on the cash that they are able to bring into the company. Most sales closers will resist a cap because they have the confidence that they can beat it.

Quota: In the early days, you will frequently see alternative quota targets like the number of customer logos. As a company grows, it will transition to dollar based quotas that are linked to the compensation of the sales team members. Clearly, depending on the size of the deals it may require a higher velocity marketing and sales teams in order for team members to hit their quotas. As a general statement, most ISRs have a annual quota under $500k and major account executives will have quotas into the millions.

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