🟦 Business After 60 Conversation
Welcome to the sixth and final instalment of our series on what truly makes a great B2B salesperson.
Over the past five weeks, we’ve taken a sledgehammer to a few persistent sales myths. In week one, we debunked the myth of the “gift of the gab.”
Last week, we dismantled the idea that closing isn’t the lone titan it’s made out to be.
Which brings us to the ultimate commercial question for any business leader:
How do you actually spot and hire these people?
The Commercial Reality of a Sales Hire
Let’s strip away the corporate speak. Recruiting a B2B salesperson isn’t just filling a vacancy; it’s a significant commercial investment.
When you hire a salesperson, you aren’t just committing to a base salary.
You’re committing to employer costs, vehicles, laptops, software licenses, travel expenses, management time, and—most importantly—the precious client relationships you place in their hands.
I’ve watched companies spend a small fortune making a salesperson “roadworthy” before realising they hired the wrong person in the first place:
- The laptop arrives.
- The phone gets connected.
- The crm seat is paid for.
- The product and sales training courses are booked.
- The expense claims start rolling in.
And because the business has invested all this capital, management feels trapped into trying to “make it work.” The biggest saving you can make in sales development is getting the recruitment decision right in the first place.
That’s not an HR exercise—that’s pure commercial risk management.
Ditch the “Pen” Exercise—Get onto the Factory Floor
I could never bring myself to ask a candidate to “sell me this pen.” If you do that, you aren’t testing B2B capability, you’re testing theatrical performance.
High-volume, transactional consumer sales might rely on instant pitch tricks, but B2B operates on a completely different frequency.
It’s about complex ecosystems, multi-layered trust, and technical problem-solving.
Sales technique can be taught. Product features can be learned. crm discipline can be enforced. What you cannot easily teach someone is how to be genuinely interested in other people.
Instead of sitting in a sterile boardroom across a glass table, get them out of the office.
Walk them through the design room, take them onto the factory floor, or walk the warehouse together.
Then, stop evaluating their sales skills and start observing their human baseline:
- Are they naturally curious? Do they notice their surroundings and ask interesting, unprompted questions about how things work?
- How do they treat people? How do they interact with the shop-floor staff, the engineers, or the receptionist?
- Are they active listeners? Are they genuinely processing what you say, or are they just waiting for their turn to speak?
- Are they comfortable in their own skin? Can they hold a intelligent conversation without trying to dominate it?
Can they become an Extension of Your Brand
I often tell business owners that their sales staff are an extension of their product or service.
Your website is an extension of your business. Your brochure is an extension of your business. So is the person who walks through your customer’s door. In fact, the human being is considerably more critical:
- A website can’t misunderstand a customer.
- A brochure can’t talk over a client.
- An advert can’t make a customer feel like their operational headache is unimportant.
A salesperson can do all three in twenty minutes. A technically brilliant salesperson who makes clients feel uncomfortable will actively damage your brand.
Conversely, someone who is knowledgeable, curious, listens properly, and is easy to deal with adds massive value to an otherwise standard product.
Case Study: From 12 Salespeople to 4 High Performers
I saw this play out first-hand with a technical manufacturer. They had twelve salespeople operating nationally, supported by sales managers and a sales director.
Despite all that resource and overhead, the business wasn’t making a decent profit.
The instinct in businesses like this is often to ask whether they need a different sales strategy, more training, or even more reps.
We looked at the human raw material instead.
Out of those twelve, we identified four people who had what mattered: curiosity, listening skills, genuine empathy, and the potential to become exceptional technical problem-solvers.
So, we shifted strategy. Rather than continuing to carry the cost of a large sales operation, we concentrated on those four.
Was it instant or painless? No. It took two years.
There were severance packages to deal with and tough decisions to execute.
But we paid those four what they were worth, supported them properly, and armed them with the technical and sales frameworks they needed.
The result? Sales are now booming and profitability has improved dramatically.
And here is the ultimate proof point: the business is now looking to recruit two more specialist sales engineers.
Not twelve. Not because someone decided that twelve salespeople sounded like the right-sized sales team, but because the business finally understood what it actually needed.
That is the difference between blindly buying salespeople and building a high-performing sales team.
Spot the Material, Then Arm Them
In my years managing technical sales teams, finding the balance always came down to one truth: if you don’t have the right raw material, you can’t mould the salesperson.
Your job isn’t to hire a pre-packaged corporate mouthpiece who knows all the buzzwords.
Your job is to find someone who is naturally likeable, inherently curious, and possesses the humility to listen—and then arm them.
Give them the technical foundation. Provide the market context. Back them up with solid operational systems.
Give them the sales frameworks. But above all, give them the room to apply their authentic personality to the role.
When you hire for raw character and train for technique, interviewing stops being a test of rehearsed answers—and starts becoming a genuine, enjoyable business conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I evaluate technical aptitude if I’m hiring someone for “raw material” rather than past industry experience?
A: Don’t quiz them on technical specs they haven’t been taught yet. Instead, present them with a simplified, real-world customer problem during the interview and ask how they would break it down. You aren’t looking for the correct technical solution; you’re observing their logical reasoning, their willingness to ask clarifying questions, and how comfortably they admit what they don’t yet know.
Q: Isn’t taking candidates onto the factory floor or warehouse a bit informal for a executive sales role?
A: That’s precisely why it works. Boardroom interviews breed rehearsed, scripted answers. Moving a candidate through an operational environment strips away the polish and reveals their actual personality. How they engage with staff, whether they pay attention to the machinery or product flow, and how curious they are in an unfamiliar setting tells you far more about their emotional intelligence than a résumé ever will.
Q: How long should it take to “arm” a raw candidate before expecting a return on investment?
A: In complex B2B sales, expect a 3 to 6-month ramp-up period before they operate fully independently. However, you should see clear indicators of progress within the first 30 days—specifically around product literacy, active listening during shadow calls, and the quality of questions they ask internal technical teams.
Q: What is the single biggest warning sign during an interview that a candidate lacks the right raw material?
A: The biggest warning sign isn’t confidence or even a poor answer. It’s a lack of curiosity combined with an inability to listen, accept challenge or take responsibility.
