Last year, my partner and I raised $3 million to scale Jump Crew, our social marketing and sales outsourcing business. Our first task: sharing our ideal hiring profile with the new recruitment team.
JumpCrew wasn’t our first venture. Over the past seven years, we have hired hundreds of salespeople for JumpCrew, LocalVox and other clients. And during this period, the composition of our teams and our ideal profile of a top performer have both materially changed.
What started as a surprising observation about top performers turned into a fascinating discovery, one which performance data ultimately supported and one which re-shaped our hiring strategy. Last October, that discovery helped us set our 12-month hiring goals and define our ideal team and individual profiles.
Subsequently, the majority of our first 100 hires had . . . little or no experience in either marketing or sales. — How’s that, again?
Identifying outperformers
Like most companies, we had started with the assumption that our top performers would be experienced salespeople who transitioned to digital marketing with sales savvy. But we were wrong.
In our fast-growth SaaS environment, we learned that recent grads often outperformed sales pros with 10 to 15 years’ experience. In hindsight, we were experiencing a transformative moment in the SaaS economy’s influence on productivity. The impact of new sales and marketing technologies had fundamentally altered what creates “success.”
In fact, time and again, our top performers were:
- very comfortable with social media (i.e., telling their own stories with technology)
- open to mastering new technologies (Salesforce, Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo)
- willing to follow the processes set up to optimize new technology.
In short, we found that more experienced employees brought more bias regarding how they thought they could be most effective. Less experienced employees, in contrast, brought less bias and enrolled in our processes more fully. Above all, our most successful salespeople were those who were team players and collaborated effectively.
We were also able to identify, as our outperformers, reps who took the “Challenger” approach. The Challenger approach describes employees with the insight and confidence to challenge assumptions they know are not true. This seems obvious, but in reality a lot of salespeople don’t work that way.
The correlation between those taking the Challenger approach and those who are outperformers was not surprising. A 2007 Harvard Business Review Study showed that fully 54 percent of the top performers looked at were challengers (as opposed to “relationship builders,” “hard workers,” “lone wolves” and “reactive problem-solvers.”)
The surprise for us was that even among those we considered challengers, the majority of top-tier performers had little or no experience. Instead, they shared these traits:
- Coachable — willing and open to learning (This hubspot article is a great primer for how to hire for coachability.)
- Team players — in whom collaboration and communication skills were key
- Focused — with the discipline to follow the process and complete daily activities
- Confident — showing a palpable level of mastery within the product (marketing and social media)
