Decoding the DNA of a Salesperson: Who are the right folks to sell Technology SaaS?

There is often a common stereotype about how salespeople should be. Aggressive, pushy, and persuasive may be the adjectives that immediately come to mind.

However, we found out that for our prospects and customers, the reality couldn’t be farther from this.

Each product and market needs a different type of Salesperson (or persona) to win. For SaaS Sales, there are two factors one could generally look at-

A. Demand Generation

The Salesperson should be able to generate interest in the prospect about a product or category that is not widely popular. When HubSpot built their Sales team back in 2007 — the Marketing automation category was fairly new. They needed folks who could convince prospects of the need and generate demand.

B. Demand Fulfillment

This is a new category that has emerged. Here, there is often enough awareness around the need for the product. The kind of salesperson that would suit depends on some more subfactors.

1. Who is the buyer persona — is the customer technical or non-technical
2. What does the buying cycle look like — would it be short buying cycles with lesser nuances or longer buying cycles that involve multiple stakeholders and more nuances?
3. What stage does the Salesperson get involved in — would it be an inbound lead that is fairly warm, or would it be outbound where a salesperson is expected to open doors?

The characteristics of which kind of individual suits your Sales organization depends on not one, but a combination of the above factors.

While building your early sales team, you need to find people who have a strong overlap with what your business needs. This early team is going to be crucial in helping you build your sales playbook. Over a period of time, we have mastered the technique of spotting the right sales talent at Hevo.

For example, Hevo operates in the data integration space. Our target customers are fairly aware of the problem statement and understand the need for a platform like Hevo. Additionally — the buyers are engineers.

With this as a premise, like most problems we have solved at Hevo, we took a data-driven approach to identify the right salesperson for our product and our market. This framework has gone through many rounds of iteration with more data and time.

The Initial Framework:

At Hevo, we sell to Engineers. We identified the traits that allowed our initial team to succeed at selling to them, and narrowed them down to the following:

Virtue 1: Extraordinary Communication — This was an obvious must for anyone who joined the Global Sales team, as each salesperson had to interact with customers from different geographies.

Virtue 2: Curiosity to Learn New Technology — Hevo is a deeply technical product. For a salesperson to succeed, they need to have the ability to get into the shoes of the customer and talk to the buyer in their language. We realized that this is only possible when the person has a natural passion for technology. Additionally, we also noticed that folks who have this trait are able to take better advantage of the tools and systems built to enable the Sales team.

Virtue 3: Street Smartness — Every customer is different, every use case is different. A salesperson should be able to think on his/her feet, understand the thought process of the customer, and navigate through any (technical and non-technical) objections.

Iteration 1:

While these 3 emerged as strong must-haves, with more time and increasing customer interactions, we had more data that brought to light some of the other traits that are important to win at Hevo.

Virtue 4: Rapport Building — We started noticing that folks who built good relationships with customers were able to sell much better. Personal rapport and the ability to make the prospect feel like the salesperson truly understands their problems helped many customers make the buying decision favoring Hevo. This might seem quite obvious, but there are not many of us who make the customers feel that we genuinely care, and can have conversations beyond basic etiquette.

Virtue 5: Alignment to General Ethos — In many aspects, Hevo has re-imagined what Sales should look like. (Link to blog). The culture here challenges the traditional approach to Sales — demanding each one of us to let go of assumptions and reinvent ourselves from time to time. Folks who have strong alignment with this ethos are destined to win at Hevo.

Iteration 2:

With even more folks joining the team, we were able to streamline our hiring process further and evaluate the common traits of the members who were doing well. The following 2 virtues emerged-

Virtue 6: Confidence — Given Hevo sells to engineers, the ability to confidently converse about technology and hold the ground when things don’t go as expected was crucial for the Salesperson to succeed.

Virtue 7: Coachability — With time, we started to see a very strong correlation between folks who succeed and their ability to unlearn and relearn things. Folks with a strong ability to absorb and apply feedback have come out winners in the test of time.

And, this is how over a period of time we have significantly refined our hiring process to accurately spot the right fit for our company.

Quick Recap on DNA of Sales folks at Hevo:

1. Extraordinary oral and written communication
2. Confidence
3. General Smartness
4. Ability to Build Rapport
5. Alignment to our Sales Ethos
6. Curiosity to Learn New Technologies
7. Coachability

Building a great team takes hard work, determination, and a shared passion.

If you are someone who embodies our qualities and would like to be a part of our journey, please do check Hevo’s careers page or write to us at: sales.talent@hevodata.com

Happy to chat more :)