Why Sales Leaders Keep Making Bad Hires (And How to Stop)

Tom Boston: Every bad sales hire steals time, trust, and energy, and most leaders feel it long before they admit it. Because hiring isn't just filling a seat, it's morale, it's momentum, it's whether you're spending your time coaching your best people or quietly trying to fix the wrong hire. In this episode, we get real about what hiring looks like right now. Bryan Mulry is joined by Elaine Tyler, founder of Venetrix, and Tim Ogle, sales coach and transformation specialist.

They're going to break down why modern hiring feels chaotic, how gut feel gets leaders into trouble, and what strong sales leaders do differently, from building talent pools before they need them to running selection processes that actually reduce risk. This is a practical, honest conversation about making fewer bad hires and setting the right people up to win once they're in. I'm your host, Tom Boston. And welcome back to the Surviving Sales leadership sessions from MySalesCoach, let's get into it.

P.S. Did you know we've just created the Modern Revenue Leaders Sales Coaching Manual? It's 48 pages full of insights on how you can successfully coach your sales team, whether you've got high performers, low performers, new sellers, or old sellers.

We've got the frameworks to coach them all. Grab your free copy of the manual today. Bryan Mulry: The agenda for today is going to be pretty layered towards how we would run a hiring process, but before we get into that, let's get into who's on this call today. So, I've got myself the in-house coach here in MySalesCoach.

For those of you who haven't met me, I'm Brian, but I am mostly the host of today's session, because I am not the expert on hiring and onboarding. Thankfully, we have brought in actual experts on hiring, hiring, and onboarding today. The first one is Elaine Tyler. So, Elaine is the CEO and founder of Venetrix.

Rather than me rocking through what Venetrix is and getting it slightly wrong, Elaine, would you like to introduce yourself? Elaine Tyler: Absolutely, my name is Elaine Tyler. I run a business called Venetrix, and we are a specialist organisation that places SDRs, account executives, customer success managers, and sales leaders into fast-growth SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech businesses in London and also in the USA. Bryan Mulry: Speaking of coaches, however, Tim is a sales coach with MySalesCoach, but also he's a sort of a sales transformation specialist, a leader, and again, rather than me butchering your intro, Tim, would you like to introduce yourself to the group?

Tim Ogle: Yeah, hi Brian. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not a recruiter, but I do help a lot of companies with recruitment, but it's more about making the right choices, getting the right people, and then doing the right things once we're on board. And it's all to be fair, part of like getting sales transformation right, you get the right people in place or adapt the ones you've already got, and then that flows into sales success, that generally what happens, but yeah, it generally involves a lot of hiring and getting that right, and it's amazing how many companies don't get it right, or they rely on things like gut feel, which I'm sure we'll explore more about.

Bryan Mulry: Exactly, well, look, okay, we have got a one-off session about hiring, ramping, onboarding, and making the best decisions. There's a couple of reasons why we picked this as our first key topic. The key reason here being there is a significant cost to miss hiring. We've seen some key trends over the last 18 months, but rather than me explaining to you what I think is happening, I Elaine Tyler: think the way I'd probably describe it is pretty chaotic, and there seems to be lots of job adverts out there and 1000s of people trying to apply for them.

I heard a stat that actually 10,000 applications are made per minute on LinkedIn, and it just kind of makes me feel like, how can those applicants be relevant to those jobs? It creates challenges for candidates, it creates challenges for hiring managers as well, and overall everybody just seems to be lost in this wealth of information that's flying in, but with no real clear way of actually using technology to maybe really help cut through the noise and find the right people to join their business, and for people to find the right opportunities that are going to give them the career they're looking for.

Bryan Mulry: Yeah, that sounds pretty chaotic. I'm saying that as somebody who I'd most would see it on the candidate side. Tim, have you seen that done on the leadership side over the last little while, Tim Ogle: I see a lot of leadership going, "How the hell do we pick the right person? And it's largely because there's just so many applicants and so many candidates, and how do you just get the right sort of people you want?

And the second thing, how do you attract the right people? It's so easy to apply for jobs now. LinkedIn have almost dumbed it down to a clicker button. Here you go, and no thought went to the into that process, and as a result of that, you just get spammed, and it's not good from either side.

From the candidate's perspective, you often don't hear anything back ever. And from the leadership side, they're sat there going, How can I possibly review 300 applications? Like, you just can't. It's impossible.

And in the times Elaine Tyler: that take that, it would take somebody to do that. Sometimes jobs could even have changed, because elements of technology have changed what companies are really looking for. Every sales leader is battling like a very unstable, unpredictable economy, so they're also set with the challenge of like, do we really need this person or is this the person that we need in three to six months. Bryan Mulry: Yeah, and then as you're hiring for that person, let's say you need it in three to six months, as you're hiring for that, you decide we need this, we don't need this.

We're going to go down the AI route. Things have changed. This one is key. Actually, one that I've seen quite a bit recently is people go starting to go down the process of hiring SDRs, and then questioning the value of SDRs when they see things like clay, or they see a fun video on LinkedIn that tells you that you can automate the whole process for a 10 or a week.

I'd love to know a little bit more about sort of how people are changing their minds or what's happening here, and where the uncertainty is currently coming from. Elaine Tyler: I think that people are just unsure about the impact of technology and what that means for roles in general, because let's face it, hiring people is in itself laced with problems, challenges, expense. So naturally, when faced with all these tools that people feel that they could take advantage of it seems like an easier route, but then on reflection, for businesses to think, well, you know, am I growing talent from the grassroots level that's going to furnish my more senior sales team in the future?

Will people actually buy into conversations with AI if they're trying to make expensive purchases? And ultimately, all of these are just unknowns right now, so that kind of creates this stop-start motion around. Should we do it? Shouldn't we do it?

Is it the right thing to do? And ultimately, because of the ever-changing nature, people are worried and scared about making decisions right now. Bryan Mulry: There's a lot of risk in this. Actually, moving on to that, I mean, look, let's just look at the cost of..

I mean, this is the high stakes job. This is a high stakes decision. Just looking at a couple of stats from typically our sort of software industry, in that you know, a mis-hire in sales can wipe out about 30% of that rep's first year value on day one. Most firms admit to hiring at least one wrong salesperson, and gut feeling, as you mentioned there, Tim, only really predicts like top performers 20% of the time.

The other 80% of the time it's a bad indicator of top performance. Almost half of sales managers admit that they don't know how to recruit effectively, and Elaine, I don't put words in your mouth. I bet the other 57% just wouldn't admit it. And then it can replacing a failed sales person cost one and a half times, or almost two times, the annual compensation of that rep.

There is a lot of fear in this, and that's why people turn to, I mean, even giving you guys a bit of big peek behind the curtain here. Inside of MySalesCoach, a lot of people are coming to us asking, are there assessments I can run? Is there a way that we can interview people or be prepared better for individualised interviews earlier on in the in the interview cycle or the selection cycle? We'll come back to that later, but before I even move on here, sort of, how Elaine, Tim, you guys see this on a daily, daily basis, do these stats, do they sort of do they do they align with what you're seeing on a, on a daily basis.

Tim Ogle: Yes, and more extreme is, I think, my short answer on that. The longer answer, miss higher sales, it's way more costly than 30% of a salary's first year rep, and the costs go way beyond that, because there's, they're so involved, you know, cost of client damage, reputational damage, missed opportunity, it just goes on. So, you can, you can quickly end up with hundreds of 1000s of pounds or dollars. Second thing, 92% of firms admit hiring at least one wrong salesperson.

I think they're being coy, because if you go and speak to most sales managers, how successful, and you look anecdotal, I know, but off a sample size of probably 20 sales leaders in the last 12 months, how successful you're hiring 50% best, like it's literally a 5050 so 50 good, 50 not good. That's fairly honest, because I asked for that in a very private forum. Elaine Tyler: It's also, I think, very damaging for team morale. So, you know, when you're a hiring manager and you bring somebody on board and it turns out that person was the wrong hire, not negative, potentially about their own opportunity.

And I think that, you know, one of the reasons why this happened so much is, you know, as we know, great sales people don't necessarily always make great managers, and no way is that a bad thing. Some people are cut out to be the person on the front line, interacting with the customers every day, and that's their specialist skill. And some sales people are supposed to be managers, and they turn out to grow to grow those, those that skill set. But either, if you're a salesperson or a manager, it doesn't mean that you're a great interviewer or a great hirer, because that's a whole different skill set.

And the question is, like, how are people really taught that, and I know that there are businesses out there that do put time and effort into making sure that this is seen as a core part of a sales leader's activity, but for, you know, many businesses out there that are small and strapped for resources, your first experience of learning how to interview an SDR is becoming a senior SDR, and then being invited last minute into the interview, of like, you jump on this, and you know, tell me what you think of this person.

And no benchmarks have really been set. They don't really have, like, an idea in their mind of, like, what they're actually supposed to be looking for in an interview. And, obviously, interviews themselves are flawed, because they're an invitation for somebody to come and present their best selves, aren't they? So, at that moment, you're meeting hopefully the highest version of that person, their capability, so you know, is the person able to sustain that level of performance into the job, and if you're inexperienced and you haven't done a lot of times and no one's really told you how to do it, and you have a benchmark, I can, I think that's a really difficult task to be asking sales people and sales leaders to do.

Bryan Mulry: Yeah, it's almost like people are winging it, and what ends up happening with this, without this set process, without a set way of looking at it, if you are hiring people, you spend so much time coaching the wrong person rather than enabling your best people, because if you've got someone on your team that's struggling, what are you going to do? Only help that person, invest time and resources into the person that's struggling, rather than taking someone from 80% to 100% you're taking.

Someone from 20% to 50% and it's not just the waste of money and resource, it is also the waste of coaching energy and management time and business effort into someone who was never going to be a good fit in the first place. Tim Ogle: If you are starting, I mean, there's probably leaders on here thinking about hiring, or they've got the team of people and going, well, how are they all from a transformational perspective? I would always recommend that you've got the team, you've got like there'll be a real mix of capabilities in there.

The thing I always find is there are people who always surprise you, so start with your template of who you've got there and work on them and coach them. So you may not have the perfect person in your team right now, but you could adapt them and make them amazing. However, do not hire non-amating people, take the best fit you can, like it's a different benchmark you're working to at this point, when you're hiring, take the best you can, and that sort of feeds into your statement.

Bryan Mulry: Here's what we're going to do: we're going to run through each different stage of the candidate selection process, and make sure that we are following best practices as we go through that. Starting off, the way people hire has changed. So, in the old time, it used to be you post a job, you get a CV, you'd shortlist the candidates based on CVS, do a couple of interviews, you'd make a decision on those, and then you'd onboard them. Nowadays, nobody knows what headcount they have, so one day they're told to hire, the next day they're told that it's frozen.

TVs are AI-generated, so they're all using the same words with the same people in the same realm. Because of that, you find it very difficult to read candidate fit, because everyone is using the same systems to say the same things, just sometimes the numbers are different. You then end up having to spread the decision across multiple people, because you've got multiple interviews with different teams, all of which need to come to a consensus. And as a result, when the candidate asks, How am I doing in this process, you go, Well, look, I've, you know, I'll have to ask John about what he thought Steven said about you, and there's no coherent process to it.

And as a result, it gets incredibly muddied, and towards the end of it, someone high up in the business just goes, "Look, we're fine, let's just put this off another quarter, and we got to restart again. So, our job today is to make sure that this changes. There has to be a better way. Let's start with the talent pool.

Elaine Tyler: So, I think that you know, over time, we've heard about the death of various things within the sales industry, perhaps you know the SDR function that was widely discussed at one point, much to my dismay, but I think the death of the job advert is like definitely something that you know I've really seen and experienced, because I think that what's happening right now is that not only have we've got AI-generated CVs, but we've got AI-generated applications and AI-generated CVs that have generated against the job advert that's been posted, and employers are just receiving hundreds of these, so it's literally completely impossible for them to differentiate between them.

So, I think that looking at non-traditional ways of creating talent pools is key to actually uncovering candidates that would actually be relevant for the role that you're hiring for. So, one of the things that we are very keen on at Venetrix, hopefully for those of you connected with, I'm sure you know what I'm about to say, is LinkedIn content, and the team at MySalesCoach are also absolute stars at that as well. I think that when you encourage people within your company, particularly in the sales function, if that's where you're looking to hire, to help build the company brand by agreeing, what is the message, or what do we stand for as a business, and how are we going to portray that on the tool that is LinkedIn?

If you ask people to build their own personal brands that people could buy into again, get that sense of personality. You might find you get like direct messages from people where it's a bit easier to maybe digest who they are because of the way that they're writing that personal message about the opportunity that you are potentially talking about on those channels. It's very different and less faceless than a 250 word, very similar to the next job advert that's been posted on LinkedIn jobs that even the candidate can't differentiate between, so I think personal brands and company brands, Venice Ricks, we've got 11 team members and over 100,000 followers across the people who we are connected with, and obviously a curated pool of SaaS sales people within London and the US.

I also think that a strong referral scheme can give organisations a head start, so everybody you employ probably knows a handful of strong people from businesses that they've worked with before, communities that are in friendship groups, whatever it may be, university alumni from way back when, and have you asked them to dig down into right, what, what, who do you know now in your professional network, who could be somebody who joins this business, and you could incentivize people around that financially.

Again, going to cut through that noise, and you're immediately directly talking, potentially, to a better quality candidate. Events and meetups, so I've seen companies run recruitment events on site, where they, you know, in the evening, invite people in. You probably need to have that brand in the first place, and that channel to be able to promote it, but again, you're like getting face to face in front of people, it could be like somebody else's event, where you know there could be a catchment of the type of candidates that you'd like to be talking to, so job adverts create noise.

The question is, How can you more directly get to the quality candidates that you want to have a conversation with, that you want to be able to differentiate your opportunity in front of live and direct, Bryan Mulry: Tim, what comes to your mind? We'll talk about talent pools. Tim Ogle: Couple of things, I mean, everything Elaine said, I completely agree with. I saw a job advert from an organisation, not technical at all, completely left field.

You go, what on earth is Tim looking at here? It's a business I know locally, they're a charity, to be fair, they look after horses, they're called Happer. So, if you're interested in horse and you won't go and check it out, they're called Half of Horses, H A P P A. They put out the most amazing job advert a week or so ago, and I liked it so much because it wasn't a job advert, it was basically an insight into their charity, what they do, what they believe in, what they value, and in doing that, they're attracting the right sort of people into that conversation.

Go and have a look. Honestly, you're completely left field. It's also a nice organisation to do some great work for horses, but that aside, it was just a really good example of a very different way of advertising a job. So, like, it second thing I was going to add to what Elaine said: networking.

Yes, definitely. I'm not a sales leader now. I don't currently recruit any sales people, although I do help in a lot of recruitment exercises for clients that I work with. The one thing I always say to every sales leader is always be recruiting, like you never know when you need to hire somebody, like it may - you may have no application, no requirement today, but you don't know when the next person is going to fall sick, resign, go leave, you suffer, you sack, you know, whatever happens, that is unknown.

So always be hiring, always be on the lookout for talent, and that means having conversations and coffees with people, meet them in networking events, meet them online, you know, take that time when it's not a recruitment exercise to get to know them a bit, they'll warm to you, you'll warm to them if they're the right fit, and it means that when you need to hire, you often have a short list of people ready to go, you already know the top 10 people you're going to go, oh, this job come out, de fancy it, and that speeds up the job so much, but it does take a bit of effort, it's an attitude thing from a leadership style, so just being open to conversations with all the people out there who might potentially, in the future, be people, and I found one of my best sales leaders in a previous life.

I'd known him for 12 months, I was introduced to him by a referral that said you two would get on. It wasn't until 12 months later I actually had a requirement for that person, and I only interviewed one person, and they got the job, and they were brilliant. Elaine Tyler: I also think another style that of people presenting their roles, I think, works really well, and you know, when I've read it, I've enjoyed seeing it. I also think helps with some of the problems of hiring the wrong person, struggling to onboard people, and eventually losing them.

It's really highlighting the challenges about the job, instead of the nice, the niceties, and the benefits. So, you know, almost the kind of aligned message internally of this job is not for you if you know you don't enjoy these things, basically, which are going to be really tough, and I think of some of the most successful businesses that I have hired for, they have told me in the interview process, look, you know, we're not going to put the candidates off per se, but we're going to be really, really candid about how hard this job is, because news flash sales is hard and people need to be prepared for that coming in, because otherwise, if it's shock as a part, the onboarding process, or a few months down the line, you know, the targets come as a shock, you're going to find yourself in a sticky situation.

Bryan Mulry: Okay, so we spent a good bit of time now here on talent pools. Once you've got your talent pool, you've got a job, we now to go through sales process, and look, most sales leaders we talk to is like hiring is a distraction. I have to do my hiring work before I can get through my actual work, and my actual work is my one on ones with my coaches, or, sorry, one on ones with my reps. And then, after that, I've got to coach them.

And a lot of interviews just look like this. It's like just blocks of time: interview, 123456, Yeah, fine. I like number two. Kick it on to a next process.

Next stage, what's the next stage? Don't worry about it. HR will deal with that, so when we look at the selection process, like what does a repeatable high-quality selection process actually look like? And really key here, what assumptions are people making that is costing them time and effort?

Tim, I start here with you on this one before and move over to Elaine. Tim Ogle: First thing, I really please, we changed the title of the slide, because I know we debated in the last 48 hours, because it started with repeatable interview process. So, I'm glad we turned into selection, because it's wider than just interview. I think we've got to be more creative than ever in like what we put into this.

You've got to get people off balance a bit, because it's so easy to come up, like they do with the CV. Here's my formulated, like Chat GPT tuned CV in interviews, the same, like they can come up with a standard answer. So, we've got to put things in here, which are going to put them off kilter, and that could be things like it could be role play, it could be examples, it could be case studies, it could be it could be assessments. I, me, and like myself, coach, we both use OMG here, but yeah, there's others out there, but you know it's really good to see some sort of candidate assessments going on, because it just helps filter in what's going on here.

I also think in the selection process, make some of the application difficult. It can be too easy to apply for jobs, and if you put in a couple of steps, which are going to take an extra half hour of thought and effort to make it work, you'll rip out 90% of the applicants, but you'll get to the ones who actually want the job. So, make it a bit more difficult, even though things like easy apply happen in LinkedIn. Go look, you get loads of applications, I think it's a crazy thing to do.

I'll stop there, because I'm sure Elaine's got loads of good ideas here, and loads of thoughts. Elaine Tyler: So, I think you know, going back to one of the points we highlighted earlier in the, in the slides, is trying to avoid the decision paralysis at the end is a key part of designing the selection process. So, ultimately, what are we hiring this person to do, and why needs to be a key understanding that all the stakeholders are aligned on, and then from there you can create a scorecard again that everybody has agreed on around what therefore needs to be demonstrated in the process, and how you're going to test that through the different mediums, some of which that Tim has just mentioned.

Then everybody needs to agree on how we're grading that on an A, B, C. Know what does excellent look look like, what's good, what's, you know, not acceptable. And then that needs to be heavily discussed, and it is time consuming. It really is inconvenient when you showed me that diary before, Brian.

You know, it sent shivers up my spine, and I know how that feels, and I know how that feels for the people that we partner with as well. But ultimately, investing that time and getting stakeholders aligned properly will save you time in the long run of the miss hire and the cost of that and the pain of that. I also think that as part of the selection process there needs to be clear understanding of who is selling the job in what way when, because a big danger can be that companies design a process where they know somebody needs to move perhaps the SDR is an SDR, SDR manager first, then the sales leader, and then you know, if it's dependent on the size of the company, then there's maybe there's a sign off with the CEO, and each of those people end up discussing the same things when they're selling the job about the growth plans, or they all, they all mention the top SDR in the team and what makes them so good, but for the candidate, that's actually not a process that adds value because they're hearing the same kind of case study in these examples again and again, so actually making sure that the process is properly curated through not only what it is that you're looking for, but also the information you're intending to share to get the candidate buy-in.

So, once the selection has been done, you're then successful in getting that person across the line, and just one final point as well, on like selection process and making decisions about people, and obviously you've mentioned earlier in the presentation about gut feel, and it might be a little bit controversial here, but I do put some store by gut feel, particularly when it's bad, because I feel like quite, I feel like quite often companies, they know there's a niggling doubt, and they can feel that red flag, and somehow or another, it isn't coming up in the selection process that they've defined on the scorecard, but because of a lack of other applicants and a lack of choice, they end up hiring that person anyway.

And then they kick themselves three months down the line, because they thought, well, you know what, I knew that, but I didn't trust gut feel. So, although I don't believe in processes completely unreliant on gut feel for somebody like me, who's been interviewing people for 20 years, every single day, non stop. It's like a footballer kicking a ball, isn't it? Like, understand which angle to kick it at in order to score the goal, you know?

Just maybe I think being tuned into that sometimes, particularly if it's a red flag, you know, you need to explore that and not just hop over it because you're in a rush, you need to make the high, you're under pressure. All Tim Ogle: right, if I can jump in there, like I think that's a really good point, Elaine, the last one you just made the gut feel, because I agree it has a place, but I agree it's also it's more relevant in the negative sense, like if something's niggling, you don't do it, or put a new step in, put an extra step, which I knew you haven't planned, and go and test whatever your niggle is, go find a way of testing that thing.

I can remember somebody I hired, I won't name them, I won't name the company that might be listening, but they were a bad hire, but on paper they were a good hire, and all the people around me were going, they're a good hire, they're a good hire, and like, and it was a pool, a panel people, and we were using like a strong competency framework to score everybody, and they'd scored highly, something just niggled me, and when I hired them, I wish I hadn't. Anyway, I've never done it again, it was like the first time, and last time, Bryan Mulry: yeah, Tim Ogle: yeah, listen to you got feel specially negative, and put in an extra tip to test it, and it comes back to the competency side, how do you get the process right?

I think you've got to look beyond, and I'm sure Elaine coaches, you'll coach your clients on this. You've got to look beyond the sort of feature-led of, like, can they sell, and how many conversations are they having? Some of the obvious stuff that you might be asking for in a requirement, but we've got to get to behavioural things here. We've got to get down to their values and behaviours of who they are as people, because that's the stuff that is really difficult to change, if we've got to get competency scoring around things that are important to me, like you know, curiosity, like how good are they at getting deep into client understanding, drive and commitment.

One, I like personally like bravery, are they going to push themselves to the edge, and are they going to put themselves in like an ambiguous, scary place? That's ever more relevant now, because companies are moving so fast, like you can't just sell the same thing like next week you did last week, because the products are changing, the speed of evolution is changing, so we're going to be looking for different things in what we're looking for here, and we've got to build the competencies around it, and look for evidence in those competencies to make sure we're scoring them well.

Bryan Mulry: Well, it seems like part of that process, part of that interview process should be instead of asking, you know, do you have any doubts about this person, and have it be a tick box, have it be a debrief. What doubts do you have about X person? And really add it into the process of, look, let's surface these immediately, because a lot of miners will sort of go through the flow here. They'll go right, I got to do these interviews.

Do they tick all the boxes? Yeah, sure, they're not. It's not that they're not thinking about it, it's that it's only taken up 10% of their brain space, but the biggest decision that they could make for the success of the team, or the next little while. So, how do we future proof that?

Almost like, as though somebody is at their, is at their lowest, and running on fumes. Elaine Tyler: And a red flag for one company can be a green flag for another. You mean, like, we're not unilaterally saying somebody is going to be good or bad at sales. It's whether they're going to be right for this, this company, in the way you intend to engage with customers, at the pace of your sales process, and how collaborative you are, and how many times you get together in the office, and all of those factors, which make an environment one where someone can thrive.

Bryan Mulry: Needing a playbook is wonderful if you want to work at Salesforce, and really bad if you want to work in a startup. How do you judge that or not? Once we have this process, people need to do something that is incredibly scary in 2025 They need to make a decision. Decision, so how do we actually make this hiring decision, and how do we avoid decision paralysis?

Who wants to go first there? Elaine Tyler: Well, okay, I think I think certainly, like referring to the scorecard that I mentioned is part of it, isn't it? So, like, first of all, is it the right candidate? And then I think that the best kind of benchmark that I can give to companies right now is because things are changing so rapidly, it's trying not to make a decision on what has happened to your business that day, and it is very difficult, you know.

If you are, as I am, a founder of a small company, sometimes a day can feel like a really long time, and the day could feel like a massive success, and also a massive disaster. And it's very difficult to remove the veil of that when you're trying to make decisions that are as important as this one. So, I think really kind of focusing back on the reason why you decided to interview for the role in the first place, based upon three months of data from your business that shows potentially where the gap is in your pipeline, your sales process, or what it is that you're trying to achieve, and then understanding this is why we decided to do this.

Are we in the position that this is going to solve this problem? Bryan Mulry: Yeah, that's a really key point here, is like we feel like we have to make reactive decisions all day, every day, but this can't be one of them. We can't decide that we're going to hire this SDR because we're low on pipeline now, because it'll take them six months to fill the pipeline. So, what needs to happen?

Yeah, actually actively making the decision. Tim, you were going to say something there, Tim Ogle: just backing what Elaine says. The timeline of these decisions were not six, they're not six month calls, these are 12 month plus, you know, you're hiring somebody for the next two, three years, in all likelihood that their likely lifespan in the role you're hiring, should they be successful, is going to be two years minimum, and then they may move on, progress, promotion, whatever, you know, there's there's things in there that could happen, or they stay in the role and just keep performing, but either way, it's a two year call, if you've got the business appetite and the stability to sort of see at least like 12 months into the future, then yeah, you should be hiring.

And how do we avoid decision paralysis? I think it's it's making sure that you've got buy-in at the most senior levels of the organisation, that yeah, we have this, this is the business case, this is this is the role, this is what they're going to do, these are the expectations of the role, and really build that business case well as to why the hell we're hiring this person. And when you hire them, we'll talk about this in a bit, but make them a success, like, set them up to win, but we'll cover that shortly.

I think if you get that senior level buy-in before you get to the point of, oh, should we, should, shouldn't we make a decision, then it's easy to make the decision. The second thing about the decision paralysis is, like, are they the right person, could we find somebody better, and I think this comes back to what we were discussing before about the sort of the things we're actually trying to select based what we're looking for, and a lot of companies just go, "Oh, I want to say SDR, I want a salesperson who's worked in my industry, they've sold this many things, and they've been successful, and they've got five years experience, and they possibly got a degree.

It's a really vanilla, boring list of things that doesn't tell you whether the person you're talking to is any good or not. So, I think it gets back to being really clear as a sales leader what you actually want in the person, what's the behaviours and traits and values you want this person to have? Because if you can get that right and you get a good match with what you're trying to achieve as an organisation, it becomes really clear when you found the right person in front of you that the more that sales leaders can understand actually what they want in the people, and by that I mean things like drive, commitment, curiosity, bravery, inquisitiveness, list the words you want to see, but get clear on what you want to see and what examples you want to see, or whether demonstrated curiosity or they've demonstrated that ability to uncover the unknown in a client, and get past the nice to have, and just get to the real meaty problems that the client is trying to fix.

Get to that evidence point, and it becomes so easy to make a decision if you're really woolly on what you're looking for, and you haven't thought through those behavioural competencies, decision making is tricky, because you're basically throwing guards at a board with a blindfold and hoping to hit 20, but you're not sure. Elaine Tyler: I think also important in hiring sales people who the go-to market function, so when you're hiring this person and planning for the future, if you're hiring an SDR, are you going to have the account executive in place and ramped up, and you know, in the right place to be able to close the leads that that person's bringing in, have you got the customer success to manage those clients that are eventually one, not necessarily just about this one person, it's about considering the wider tapestry of what it is trying to build in your vision of your go-to market function.

Bryan Mulry: Yeah, hire to make sure you admire when you make sure you have the capacity that if they're successful, you're able to actually support the capacity that I guess caused all the problems when the, in the age of, you know, growth at all costs, which is kind of gone now, but I should be intrigued from an offering perspective. What mishaps have you guys seen from people submitting offers? Because a lot of people almost like overlook that part of the process. Oh yeah, we'll just, you know, send an email and it'll, and it'll go through, and they'll just say yes or no.

What are people overlooking when it comes to that section of the process, and why is it trickier than what you may think, Elaine Tyler: having an agent, gotta say it, but basically, obviously, recruitment agents can add massive value throughout this process, can't they? Because they could be giving you a constant view that a candidate will may, may not want to share with you about how they actually feel about the opportunity, repetitive processes that they are in, what their timelines are for decision making, the things that they like, the things that they don't, the questions that they haven't asked, the points that maybe they're unsure about, that people like me can advise hiring managers along the way list, and they're not quite seeing the progression examples that they're looking for in the company they want to join, they haven't quite seen how somebody's earned that commission, so I think that having an agent is a massive advantage in the offer process because.

Because we could candidly understand where they're at with other opportunities, understand what those look like from a from a compensation package, and we can also be that extra voice that says listen from an objective perspective, this is what I understand about this company within the wider industry, this is what you would be joining if you were to join this company, and quite often at that moment I do think that people can feel, if they've not had very many jobs before, not been through the process very many times, overwhelmed, under qualified to make a decision about what is a good company to join, because every company has been selling them, selling them to the candidate in the process.

Tim Ogle: I'm just going to play devil's advocate for a second in this category. I know you, I know your company know what you do, you do well, but there are recruitment agents out there who are literally just trying to force fit both sides of this game, you know, they're literally trying to force fit candidate to company, company to candidate, with not always the best interest of both parts in place, that you know, and the result of that will be short term deal, short term relationship with that client, and I know for what you have long term relationships with the clients, but I have seen it, and I've seen it done to clients who I work with, and I've seen it, people try to do it to me when I have been hiring in previous lives, Elaine Tyler: totally, Tim Ogle: so I think it's like be pick a good agent, I think is probably the better idea.

If you are going to use an agency, pick a good one, Elaine Tyler: bet your agent, meet them in person. I try and meet every client that we've never engaged with before in person, and try and join the dots of like who they might know that I've worked with, so that they get a third party reference and understand did they make a hire from from with our aid that was good. But yeah, bet your agent. Absolutely.

Tim Ogle: I think the other thing to add, Brian, is the offer doesn't start with the offer. It's a bit like sales. You've been testing the candidate all the way through. You probably had a conversation early on in the exercise about what are you looking for, what you're hoping to get.

See, and the more you probe and explore that, the more you can understand about what they're trying to achieve as a person. So, when it comes down to the offer point, you know exactly what to pitch and how to pitch it, and I know I wouldn't send an email. I mean, I would, but that's not the first step. The first step is to ring them up or book in a call, either way, but communicate verbally or in face to face, but verbally is probably more practical because of the speed you've got to work at, and talk it through, and go, look, this is what you're looking for, this is what we're able to offer, this is a situation.

What do you think? Get instant feedback, because probably what you're offering is not necessarily dead and buried there, there's probably some room for manoeuvre, and there might be some other things in there which you can't always second guess, and it's not just about salary, Bryan Mulry: yeah, it's getting deep into personalising the offers as well, as you know, knowing what levers you can and can't pull on that side, gosh, there's a lot in that, but let's say everything's gone well, okay, so let's say we've got a talent pool, we've met people in the wild, we like them, and a job has come up, and we've interviewed a bunch of people, and we find that we've had a process where we knew what we were looking for, we knew the competencies that we wanted, we knew, I guess, not only what we wanted, but what we didn't want, and we're able to match that with a candidate, we second guessed ourselves internally to make sure we found our own biases, we made the conscious decision to make a decision.

Sorry, that's a key piece in the sort of want to highlight. In order to hire and make a hiring decision, you also have to decide that you're going to make a decision. Now, that almost needs to be very explicit here. It's a question that comes earlier in the process of, are we willing to make a decision on this, or are we just fishing?

Then, once you make the offer, we then need to get into the next piece. Now, before I get into the next piece, Tim, Tim Ogle: it's an important point. Once you've decided to make an offer, move really fast. Candidates are not good, candidates aren't around for long, so go quick.

If your selection, the whole selection process is too long, you're going to lose candidates. You've got to be fast. Speed, speed of decision, speed of like how you do this, decisiveness, you know, go with it. But build the process while you'll get there.

Bryan Mulry: See, we've all been decisive. Someone that we maybe make an offer, someone accepts it. Now, what? How do we avoid just giving them a laptop on a notebook and going, "All right, you've got your job, you got your job's bec, give me a 3060, 90, and let's see what happens.

How do we make sure that the beginning of their time in the job is as thoughtful and impressive and authentic to the business, as we've just spent all of our time on the interview process. Elaine, you want to go first? To Elaine Tyler: yeah, I think one thing that Nelson McCurban, a fluencer, if you know her, I think one of the things that she said, I think it's particularly relevant, probably for more junior people in those in their early stages of their career, is I think she had had everybody sign like a like a kind of office code of conduct, really, just to set the benchmark of how everybody operated together as a team, and it was like these are a set of ways of working that we've all bought into that kind of show how we show up for each other every day in the office, and I think that, like, starting that really early in someone's mind is better than trying to course correct later on, where it feels like that candidate's not quite hitting the norms that you would like to promote to have a really effective workforce, so I think that's like a good starting point, like first week type activity.

Bryan Mulry: Yeah, like call to contact and expected expected behaviour, expected attitudes type thing. Elaine Tyler: I think welcome meetings with everybody in the team as well, so you know that the candidate gets like a holistic understanding of who everybody is in the business, what the different departments do, obviously depends on the size of the company, but you know, kind of demystifies, and it also opens up the channels of communication. I think, like, real clear timeline set out, so we use monday.

com and when we have a new starter, they have their own, you know, Monday board that's on there, that's just kind of showing what they're going to be doing, like week by week, and the outcomes. That are expected from a learning perspective over the first 12 weeks, so I think that's like a good start to get them going. Bryan Mulry: I like that idea of having a set of expected tasks by somebody to begin with, but I'm a to-do list guy, so that would actually be particularly intimidated to some other kinds of people.

Elaine Tyler: A buddy system as well, so that they've got that kind of go-to person within the business that can be their person, you know, when they want to ask the questions that might, that you need to know the answer to, like, where's the loops, but you know, you don't, you don't necessarily want to ask, you know, somebody who's maybe your boss, or whatever, so somebody for those type of questions, you know, you know what I mean, somebody who's like on a peer-to-peer level, who take, who can show you where to go for lunch on your first day, and that type of stuff, Bryan Mulry: someone you can ask the stupid questions Elaine Tyler: to, yeah, there's no stupid questions, though.

But yes, Bryan Mulry: Tim, what do you think on this? Tim Ogle: I build on where Elaine's gone with this, because there's some very practical steps out, and I agree completely with all of them. I think the place where we can build on that, though, is it's not like week one, week two, week three. I mean, obviously, make that amazing, like day one, do give them a laptop, give them a phone if that's required, and whatever else, you know, just make sure that stuff's ready to go, is housekeeping, but I think it's, how do we then take them from the first few weeks, when it's all very exciting on honeymoon, and like, oh, this is new, and this is that, and you know, it's all just reading, learning, exploring, is when the rubber hits the road, and you have to start actually doing the work, and that's where you come in as a boss, as a leader, and you've got to be good, you've got to first of all, you've got to set expectations, like, you've got to be really clear what you expect this role to be.

And then I think it's good to sort of look at the big picture, which might be like this is the next six months, but then break it down into smaller pieces, like, okay, so in the next week, what we're going to try and do, what's the achievement we're trying to get to, and break it down into smaller achievable moments, which don't feel quite so overwhelming, and then regular checking around those, those sort of weekly cadence type objectives, goals, micro goals, whatever you want to call them, and that regular check in will be very much around like, okay, how did it go, what worked, what didn't work, what did we learn from that, what do we need to change next week, and I think that last question, what do we need to change next week, what is a question of getting them to reflect on what happened, what did they learn from it, okay, therefore, how do I make that better next time I see it next week, and do it again, and if it is a role like an SDR role, where you are going to be probably hitting the phones relatively quickly, if that's what is required, or you're going to be doing email outreach, or a mixture of all of those things.

As a leader, you can't just sit there and delegate all of that. You can't just go, "Well, I told them their target is this many meetings a week, can we have to make this many calls, and all those sort of things, because if you do that, the person may be feeling completely overwhelmed. There may be like other underlying factors that are getting in the way, so that's where you got to take the time to go. Okay, how did it go?

What worked? What didn't work? What do we need to change? How could we adapt that?

And take once you've gone past the setting the ground rules of the job, is then moving into a coach and being a being a leader as a coach, and helping those people, helping your new recruit start to find their way and build confidence. If you don't take the coach approach, there's a risk you just become a superhero, as in the boss becomes a superhero in the team, and everybody looks at you, and everybody, they fix everything all the time, and therefore you never get this in peril team.

And I think the more that you can coach, you turn it into a coaching relationship with your new recruit, the better. The faster that happens, the better. Not surprising, we're all part of representing MySalesCoach here, you know. So that's kind of a lead for that.

So we do coach leaders to be coaches, so you know that's one of the things we do do here, but it's in terms of that ramp up period, that's that's critical. I think the other thing, as a leader, it comes back to the behavioural expectations and the competency expectations. You can't just manage on the outputs here, you've got to start tracking the inputs, and the inputs are things like attitude, commitment, desire, bravery the things that are going to be helping these people succeed?

And then to provide feedback, you can't just ignore like things if they're not working. If they are working well, provide feedback like praise, and that's brilliant. You've done a grazing job this week, but even if things aren't going well, provide feedback on that too. So be balanced and don't be frightened of providing that feedback early on, because that's where I see lots of people fail on bringing people up, is like you just, they're not committed enough to providing that early stage feedback, like my worried they might upset them, or they might person might leave, and it's like, yeah, but if you don't do it, they're never going to change, so therefore provide feedback, but with a degree of empathy and caution and gentleness, certainly to start with, Bryan Mulry: an element of this is that it's almost like adding authenticity and trust and brutal honesty throughout all stages of the of the cycle, breathing brutally honest with what you want, why you're doing it, that you're making a decision, and then at this point being brutally honest with here's what you need to know for the role, here's what we expect of you, and I need you to be honest with me as to what feedback you know, do we need to change this onboarding process, but also, hey, you're doing really well here, but not well here.

There's a lot in that, but I really like what you said there about there is a transition from managing someone in a process to becoming a coach. It's there's a transition from sort of onboarding them and teaching them the ropes to teaching them how to pull those ropes, and that is usually where people sort of either become coaches or deploy external coaches. We have covered a lot today. Okay, so looking at the whole process, there's an element of this where we need to make sure that it is, it is currently extremely costly for to miss hire a salesperson, so there's a lot of pressure on people to either get it right or and make sure they're doing it.

In a correct, thoughtful way, in 2025 to begin with, we need to build up a talent pool, and the ways to do that is be as authentic as you can, as meeting people in the wild, building up a social brand, like, like they do at Venetrix, making sure you've got clear referral methodologies in place, or clear referral paths in place, you're proactively going to events, you're proactively meeting with good people, and being authentic is who you need and why you need them. Once you have that, then you then lead into the sort of selection process stage, and at that, you need to be thoughtful.

You need to put the time, energy, and effort into what do what problem do we need to solve, and what core competencies, behaviours do we need to see from a candidate in order to tell us that they're the right person for that, then we also need to talk about who, what is the reason for this role, and who's going to support this role in this process. Make sure you are surfacing your red flags, make sure you are proactively surfacing your doubts, the good ones and the bad ones. And then it comes making a decision, and then in order to make a decision originally to proactively decide that you're going to make that decision in the first place, but also don't react to what's happened recently.

Make sure that you're making a long-term decision with a long-term lens, which is really, really difficult, rather than just reacting to what's happening in your business in the short term. And this idea of can we find someone better needs to come earlier in the process rather than later in the process, because you should know when you found someone who can do the job. Lastly, then you gotta, you gotta onboard them once you've made an incredible offer, you've made the decision, and everything has gone well.

You gotta demystify the role, be incredibly thoughtful as the first 3060 90 days of this person's life, but also give them clear expectations. Here's what I expect of you, here's what you can expect of me, and then give them a buddy in case they have any questions that they don't want to ask the CEO and CRO of this business. Tom Boston: Thanks for listening. There's more where that came from.

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