When Is It Safe to Hire?

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Mohan thought the person he hired, though inexperienced, had great potential. But soon after she came to work, Mohan realized he'd screwed up. As the personality tests had suggested, the candidate's natural exuberance did not make up for a lack of aggressiveness and experience. "Some of the weaknesses we identified in the screening process turned out to be the problem," Mohan admits. After several unhappy months, the salesperson left.

Last year, Sage allowed a repentant Mohan to try again--so long as he was willing to give greater weight to the personality scores. The second hire was productive after only three months on the job, and by his fifth month, he had brought in three customers the company wouldn't have gotten otherwise for sales totaling about $90,000. Despite the happy ending, Mohan's fear of sales hiring persists. "Any time you hire a salesperson," he says, "there's a lot of risk. Until they start selling, you don't know what you're going to get out of it."

Sage, meanwhile, continues to try to get better at predicting who will succeed in the ultracompetitive software industry. The company is quick to point out that the turnover rate for salespeople sponsored by the 100/100 program has been very good. After one year, 78 percent of the salespeople hired as part of the first class were still employed with the resellers who hired them; the two-year figure was 65 percent. For typical sales hires, the software maker estimates, Sage's resellers retain only 32 percent after one year and 15 percent after two.

Despite these enviable statistics, Sage has spent a lot of energy looking at the small group of salespeople who didn't last. Low test scores are common. Feuding between the new salesperson and the owner of the business is another recurring theme. To figure out the root causes of these clashes, Sage put some of the software entrepreneurs through the same personality test as the sales candidates.

The findings revealed that, as a group, the business owners were more introverted and patient than the top salespeople. The best salespeople, meanwhile, were impatient and aggressive, and needed a lot of affirmation and encouragement. Business owners didn't see the need to celebrate every small step on the way to making a sale, which is exactly what the salespeople craved.

As a result of that discovery, Sage has begun to offer training to business owners on how they can become fair and supportive sales managers. The company also has beefed up training for the new recruits. Soon after they are hired, rookie salespeople are whisked away to an intense, weeklong boot camp. The sessions combine various selling exercises, including question-and-answer forums with real customers and what Macdonald calls "the dreaded role-playing," wherein recruits are videotaped making sales pitches and then critiqued (read: roasted) by their classmates and instructors.

Back at home, new salespeople are shadowed for up to a year by coaches who engage them in regular conference calls and Web seminars, providing them with encouragement, helpful feedback, and an outlet to vent whatever frustrations they may have with their new job or their new boss. The support provided in the early months, some resellers say, can be more valuable than the $10,000 subsidy.

That was Stan Kania's experience. In a twist Sage may not have anticipated, Kania used his $10,000 to poach a young salesperson named Dan Gimbert from Sage's nearby software support center. The 27-year-old rep was new to field sales but he had valuable experience at inside sales. "It took him 90 days to understand the process, and he was somewhat discouraged he hadn't made a sale yet," Kania recalls.

With the help of his coach and with Kania's feedback, Gimbert landed his first sale in his fourth month of employment. "Then it was one after another," Kania says. With average sales of $30,000 per account, Gimbert contributed heavily to Software Link's sales growth that year, which increased the company's top line by $1 million. Not bad for the very first salesperson Kania ever hired.

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