Stop Hiring Great Salespeople. Start Hiring the Right Ones.

What actually makes someone good at selling? In this five-part series, I explore the characteristics, capabilities and behaviours behind strong sales performance — and why the traditional image of a successful salesperson deserves a closer look.

A company needs to accelerate growth. It recruits an experienced salesperson. Someone with an impressive track record, a strong network, excellent references and the confidence you would expect from a successful commercial professional.

Six months later, the expected results have not materialised. The obvious conclusion is that the company hired the wrong person. Perhaps. But I would start with a different question:

Did the company actually understand what kind of selling it needed someone to perform?

The myth of the great salesperson

We tend to discuss salespeople as though sales were one universal discipline. Someone is either good at selling or they are not. Yet consider the difference between opening a new market, winning a complex enterprise contract and developing an existing strategic customer. These are fundamentally different commercial tasks.

A salesperson who thrives on opening doors and generating new opportunities may not be the strongest person to develop an established Key Account. Someone who excels at building trust and navigating complex customer organisations may struggle with the uncertainty and rejection involved in new-business acquisition.

Neither is necessarily a better salesperson. They are bringing different strengths to different problems.

What does the research tell us?

Sales-performance research has questioned the importance of personality in isolation for decades. Churchill and colleagues' 1985 meta-analysis examined multiple determinants of salesperson performance, including skills, motivation, personal characteristics and organisational factors.

A later meta-analysis by Verbeke, Dietz and Verwaal (2011) identified five significant predictors of sales performance: selling-related knowledge, adaptability, low role ambiguity, cognitive aptitude and work engagement.

An important implication is that successful selling cannot be reduced to having the right personality. What people know, how they adapt and whether they understand their role also matter. That should influence how we recruit.

Start with the commercial task

When designing sales organisations, I find it useful to distinguish between four commercial behaviour profiles:

• The Hunter: Creates access, initiates conversations and develops new opportunities.
• The Challenger: Brings insight, reframes problems and helps customers reconsider existing assumptions.
• The Relationship Builder: Establishes trust, develops stakeholders and builds long-term customer relationships.
• The Process Seller: Brings structure, qualification and discipline to complex buying processes.

These are practical descriptions of commercial behaviours, not scientifically validated personality categories. Most complex selling roles require a combination. The question is which behaviours the commercial task demands most.

Before recruiting, I would want a leadership team to answer four questions:

1. Are we primarily trying to win new customers or develop existing ones?
2. What type of customer, buying process and sales cycle must this person navigate?
3. Which capabilities are essential, and which can realistically be developed?
4. What commercial support and organisational conditions will this person need to succeed?

If those questions cannot be answered clearly, I would be cautious about recruiting another salesperson.

A hiring problem may actually be a strategy problem

Sometimes the salesperson underperforms because the market is poorly defined, the proposition lacks differentiation, the sales process is unclear or the business expects one individual to compensate for unresolved commercial decisions. Replacing that individual may simply restart the same problem.

Good recruitment starts before the job advertisement. It starts with understanding what the company needs to achieve commercially and what kind of selling will get it there.

Don't recruit a good salesperson. Recruit the right salesperson for the specific commercial task. And make sure the organisation gives them a reasonable opportunity to succeed.

Continue the series: Having established why role fit matters, the next question is what enables a salesperson to keep developing and performing as customers, markets and buying processes change. Next: Article 2 — Commercial Curiosity: The Most Underrated Sales Capability?